Aug 20

Written by:
8/20/2003 11:03 AM 

 

First Impressions

Well to start, I ordered the gun from Airsoft Atlanta for $89.99 and received it within one day with basic shipping. I must say that Airsoft Atlanta shipped my package in a very timely manner. The rifle arrived inside its packing box and that was inside a shipping box. I found the packing to be sufficient for its shipping and then some. The packing of the gun within the Styrofoam packing was tight and quite secure. Along with the packed parts came instructions, a warranty card, two paper targets, and a warning pamphlet. The instructions were easy to read, quite direct, and covered most all aspects of the assembly and operation. So in short, the initial impression was good to this point. Most all parts of the rifle had clean edges and smooth seams. I was particularly impressed that the mold seams had been sanded smooth on the stock. It was not a perfect job, but it was quite good enough to impress me at the cost.

 

 

Assembly

When I removed all the parts from the packing I was struck with how light all the parts were. It seemed that for its size, this gun was almost lighter than my KWA M11A1. Initially I found this to be disconcerting, although later it worked to my advantage during later modifications. Assembly began quite easily as I followed the instructions to the letter (a first for me in quite a while). During the assembly I found that the bottom of the bolt had a very rough edge which resulted in a cut on my thumb. After a few moments of filing, however, it was remedied. The first impression of this rifle during assembly was that it was quite tight tolerance. Most parts were very snug after being screwed in place by one or two screws. As the gun only had 3 screws arrive with it, I thought that they had not sent me enough. I was wrong in that assumption and found that I only needed those three to complete the assembly.

 

 

Appearance

I found the gun to have the same basic appearance as a Remington Model 700 or a Winchester Model 70. It appeared that both rifles had a clear influence on this guns style. The stocks finish was a semi-gloss black that was quite smooth. The stocks material was somewhat brittle, however, and marred easily when it was pushed on by a small pocket knife. It appeared to be a harder plastic than most Tokyo Marui products. The barrel was made up of an aluminum inner core surrounded by a thin outer tube. The barrels finish was also a semi-gloss black coating. The bolt had a shiny metal coating that seemed quite resistant to flaking. The log term results will be the judge of how resilient the finish really is. Most surfaces of the rifle were smooth and very nicely molded. The stock has a built in cheek rest that lines your eye up quite nicely to the peephole sight. The sight is adjustable to for wind-age and elevation and seemed to be quite accurate when sighted in properly. The only flaw in the whole affair was that the front sight is only pressed on and could be jarred out of place easily (nothing a little epoxy won't fix). The only other concern was directed at the trigger guard. The guard is only secured on the forward end and the back end is seemingly held in place by tension. It could clearly use some improvement as that is a likely candidate for breakage.

 

 

Loading

We started our test program with the most integral of operations: how well it feeds rounds. This version has two possible ways that it can get its ammo. The first is a 5 round magazine that snaps into the bottom of the gun similar to a Remington Model 700. It has separate casings that are loaded with one .2g round and then loaded into the magazine. When using this loading system it mimics a real rifle and feeds each casing into the breech, fires it, and ejects it in the normal manner of a bolt action rifle. The rifle came with 10 of these plastic rounds. The second method involved using a spring fed magazine that snapped onto the outside of the left side of the receiver. This magazine holds 25 rounds and feeds them directly into the breech into a loading unit called the Tube Magazine Fixer (figure 3). What it accomplishes is that you can use the rifle easier in a fire fight and not have to worry about finding your casings after they eject. We tested each method of loading many times. In all we fired nearly 100 rounds using each method in order to determine the pros and cons of each.

With the individual rounds we test fired a few shots and found that the gun shot fairly well. We noticed some problems with the loading while using the casings. On occasion the casing would fall back into the breech after trying to eject it. This caused several jams and subsequent swearing sessions while trying to remove a jammed casing. I was quite unimpressed with the ability of this rifle to function like the real steel weapon it was trying to imitate. The one thing I found was the biggest problem was that the rounds were so light that they had a tendency to jump out of the magazine while pushing the bolt forward. This also caused several jams and caused us to watch the bolt every time we fired a round using this loading method. That made it quite difficult during field tests later, because we had to watch the round feed instead of maintaining visual contact with our targets. We decided that this method of loading was somewhat flawed and was an unfavorable way of working the action compared to the Magazine loading method.

After installing the Tube Magazine Fixer and installing the magazine we were ready to test the second method of round feeding. Initially the method worked quite well and gave us no problems. It did cause several bad jams later on when the Tube Magazine Fixer was pushed out of place by the spring tension from the magazine pushing on the bb's. Once in a while the TMF (Tube Magazine Fixer) would move out of place slightly and cause a bb to become jammed halfway while loading. When pushing the bolt forward I could feel that it was pushing a bb out of the way of the center rod that kept other bb's from entering the chamber. As the TMF became dislodged it would fall into the breech followed by a torrent of 25 bb's that were supposed to be safely stocked away in the magazine. We later remedied the problem by putting a set screw into the receiver on the right side (figure 4), thus ending our wonderful bb pouring experiences. That was the first of my modifications. The only other problems we ran into later on were during out Sniping on Budget Series where we fixed a scope to this rifle. With a scope in place it made it quite difficult to install and remove the magazine efficiently and almost impossible to load the magazine while attached to the receiver. More detail on that project in our Budget Sniping article.

 

 

Firing Tests

We started out shooting tests on a beautiful sunny Florida day. I snugged the rifle into the shooting vise, loaded some 0.2 gram Excels into the casings, and set up a target 50' away. The first shots from the rifle were in an approximately 8" pattern. It is quite sufficient for a head shot. What I found disappointing was that it only fired 215 fps at the muzzle while using the casings, and 230 fps while using the TMF. When the rifle was moved up to 0.25 gram Tokyo Marui bb's the accuracy was improved to a 6" grouping, while the speed dropped to 200 with the casings and 215 with the TMF. It appeared that most websites that claimed this rifles speed at 300 fps clearly had not tested their product sufficiently. We put two other kinds of round through the same tests, the KSC .2 grams and the Airsoft Elite .2 grams, and found that the speeds and accuracy were consistent. The down side of the heavier rounds was that the bb's drop during flight became more pronounced. In all we found the rifle to be of sufficient accuracy to be a fair deal; however we did not feel that the speeds were enough to make it a good long range gun to belay its appearance as a rifle. We also found the safety to work flawlessly and had no problem with it.