Unfortunately however I soon started to feel differently. Before I get into that though, the metal body and stock feel excellent; really solid, rattle free, and a lot less flexible than I expected. The polymer handguards have a nice non-slip texture and feel hard enough to resist scratching easily but not brittle enough for chips to get knocked off the rails, even the tiny side rails feel a lot more solid than they look. Inside there is enough space for a battery to fit the full length of the handguards and battery tray, so you could even fit one of those G&P 2300mAh uber-sticks in there. The stock release button and the stock hinges are reassuringly stiff, as in "far too" but probably great once lubricated.
I put my slight reservations over the fire selector to one side and loaded the mag: it looks like a standard metal AK hicap but I wouldn't be surprised if it's uber. Sadly I can't put off the real whinging any longer, because next, obviously, I fitted the mag into the gun.
A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but I wish I could go back and take a pic that said them better than this one lol! My point is that the BB tube pokes out into space. There's absolutely nothing to stop rough mag handling from banging the hop unit and, let's have it right, when you're in the heat of the moment you don't want to be worrying about having to be careful with your mag change, eh? That's surely the whole point of the way AK mags work: you stuff the leading edge with the groove into the front of the magwell and rock the mag back until it clicks - if you don't get it quite right it doesn't matter, a jiggle will settle it. Now, for my money, if it was a CNC aluminium hop BOLTED onto a steel barrel base assembly, then I'd still have a nagging doubt but I could live with it. No, it's plastic and SCREWED into the alloy metal base assembly (so it would have to be drilled to convert to bolts), which would probably crack if thumped through the hop with a mag.
Feverishly my hindbrain (or summat lol) began cataloguing various bits of metal and plastic I have lurking, for fixing things, and considering various glue and bolt options for retro-fitting some extra bodywork in there, as I did my best to ignore a couple of other things that set alarm bells ringing and adjusted the hop to full off and fired out of my back window over the tops of my neighbours' roofs. For the first few shots I thought there was something wrong with it, so I turned around and fired a few into a cardboard box with paper targets taped to it. The power seemed ok, it was just that when I fired out of the window again I got the same result - really appalling range, maybe 25m before starting to drop. OK, I thought, maybe this design relies heavily on hop, because it's LCT, it can't just be sh*t ffs!
I'm sorry to have to report that that last statement is not true. It not only can be, it is. With hop about a third on I found the maximum it could take without the trajectory rising but the range was still not quite 35m horizontal. Now I can get that out of my £35 pistol! I'll confess to being a bit spoiled because my first AEG was a CYMA CM .028U AK which, despite only costing £125, fired exceptionally well, but for £219 I expect better than sub two thirds as good.
...not only has this cheapo-toy-feeling seam down it, but also isn't solidly fixed to the receiver (it rotates about 5mm each way about its vertical axis!), brings the longterm robustness of the build into question.
Last but not least, what, friends, do we imagine this bit of metal dropped off before it was hastily welded to an AEG and sprayed?
To be perfectly honest, if the rest of the gun had been good enough, I could have quite got into this rough back plate as a bit of character, even though it makes the top cover a real pain in the hole to get back on once removed, but as it is, it just confirms for me what I'd started considering when the range turned out to be so crap: this isn't really a designed AEG at all; it's an LCT body kit with the other necessaries slapped together willy-nilly.
Before I even got it I'd decided I wanted a cleaning rod to replace the one which is unaccountably missing from under the barrel of this AK, but what I then had to consider was how much it would cost on top just to make it skirmishable: a Tight Bore Barrel £40-ish, Aluminium Hop Unit £30, Hop Rubber £10 and then the unfathomable possibilities, Air Nozzle £10, Cylinder Head £15, but who knows why the Pistol Grip isn't solid? I'd want to replace it for its look and feel anyway, but it's not the same shape as those on TM AK's or clones, which means trying to find one from some company with their own design, and who knows whether that poxy plastic screw goes into a standard motor cage? I could see this ending up with me replacing everything except the body kit!
No. I sent it back.
CORRECTION: The G&P uber-stick batteries I referred to above are 2200mAh not 2300 - the individual cells are the same diameter as those in any mini battery pack, but they're longer, thus a whole 9.6V stick is humongous!
Mine arrived and was, as expected, absolutely babelicious! Pretty much every issue you've had wasn't present, or if it was, was an easy fix, for example, my pistol grip was held in with a metal screw, slightly loose on arrival but tightened up once and stayed that way since. The plastic finish for mine is also pretty lovely, no seam lines or anything.
With the hop unit/magwell, they do sell a magwell spacer on WGCshop for about a tenner that just clips into place and covers the hop unit, not sure why yours hasn't got it as standard cause if I remember right, mine has, does seem a little "apple", fixing a design flaw with an accessory, but meh.
The fire selector can be loosened by gripping the circular "nob" holding it in with some pliers and just being unscrewed slightly.
The only issue I had was that my inner barrel has some oxidation going on on the outside of it and is was filfthy internally. The barrel oxidation was down to improper long-term storage on the part of the retailer and the filfthy inner was exactly what happens with pretty much every airsoft gun out there. Its doing about 320fps and shoots perfectly fine, though I intend to give it a good going over anyway because it has been stored for a long time and probably needs some love to be kept in tip-top.
Have you tried any different mags for compatability? The only midcaps I have are CA and they're a bit of a squeeze.
Edit: And then I read that you'd sent it back! Oops!
I've got a whole slew of different types of AK mags, Finius, and yeah, while I was considering whether to take it apart and see what was going on with the pistol grip and motor cage, plus the hop rubber whilst I was at it, I tried a few. I didn't have any problems fitting any of the ones I tried - if I remember rightly that was a plastic CYMA hicap waffle mag, a plastic ICS AK74 midcap, a plastic MAG RPK midcap, and a couple of unknown metal hicaps, plus the one it came with.
...but they're out of stock. To be perfectly honest though, it doesn't look very promising to me. I mean what are those piddly little prongs about? And, since the bloody thing exists, why isn't it welded into the gun?
That was a rhetorical question, but this isn't - what model did you buy, Finius? I didn't even consider checking the inside of the barrel; maybe I should have, but frankly I don't expect to get a new product which needs a good clean before it works properly! It being new was what stopped me taking it apart. I was worried that, with some stuff being really tight, I might leave tool marks and then Fire Support wouldn't want to take it back, if I decided the innards was too big a job to persevere with the gun.
So, has yours got a standard motor cage, Finius? Maybe mine was a lemon, but there's a visible seam on a few of the pistol grips in the pics of LCT AK's I've looked at - this is the thing though, the body was lovely - if I had known for sure that I would be able to replace that pistol grip with an ICS one, for eg (they look the same shape so maybe they're compatible), I might have considered that paying a bit over a hundred quid more to have it ready to rock wasn't really so bad, considering that a lot of Fire Support's LCT AK's are £320.
Oh yeah, I meant to say don't worry about the advice, Finius. You weren't the only one and I'm perfectly willing to believe that other, more expensive, LCT AK's are the dog's bollox. It only ended up costing me the P&P both ways and I think that's sort of worth it to know first hand how nice their body kits will be.
I have wondered why they're not welded in, the prongs are literally just to hold it in with friction, mine has one, but still not welded in, I presume its something to do with ease of dis-assembly! I bought the G-04, you're right on the cleaning part, unfortunately, mine had come from hong kong and it was an issue with the retailer (several people had the same problem with the same model from the same place but nowhere else), I saved over £100 on it based on the UK price though so not an issue for me really.
As for the motor cage, I'm pretty sure its standard but will check for you later.
Something I had heard in the past was that some LCT and Inokatsu guns come to the UK in parts and are put together by the retailer, that could have been the case with yours perhaps, but either way it looks unfinished, even the box you got was pretty crap compared to mine - I got a nice glossy affair much closer to what you'd get from a modern ICS with manuals, free catologues etc.