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Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

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  • Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)


    So I received my V3 Fusion Engine yesterday and it's all installed and working. I'm writing a review of the initial experiences of setup and testing etc, then I will write another review once it has been field tested. According to the Murrican Retailer I purchased this from, I am the first owner of this type of Engine in the UK (hooray). I would like to take pictures, but unfortunately no camera at this time. They will come later so keep your eye on this thread.

    First Impressions - Unboxing

    I bought the engine, a line and regulator for the grand sum of £462.90 posted. Once it arrived in the UK I had to pay another £100 from HMRC and Parcelforce - overall not a cheat buy so be warned. I opened the box to see this beautiful little engine. It weighs next to nothing and has a nice anodised coating on the exterior. Installing it in my VFC AK-105 was painless. It fits in snugly and works superbly with the hopup. Included in the box was the FCU (fire control unit), users manual and a nice polar star sticker.




    Installation

    Installing it, as said earlier, was very easy thanks to VFC's AK-74 design. Some consideration must be taken for those using a TM style AK-47 as the tray ontop of the gearbox will need modification for the FCU to fit properly. After hooking it all up, the next thing to do was change the FCU to deans. A simple task and works fine on my 8.4v stick battery. The FCU is LiPo compatible and has a program that will alert you when it runs out of juice. Finally, to finish it all off, I drilled my SAW style grip to allow the air line out of the bottom of the grip.

    Setup

    Setting this up is very easy. I'll start with the FCU.

    It has a 5 position joy stick (up, down, left, right and push in). Pushing the joy stick turns it from SAFE to Fire. On SAFE mode, you can adjust the following:

    FA - Controls the "Auto" selector position. Value from 00 to 09 (FA00 is full auto and FA01 is semi auto on full auto) 02 to 09 is 2 to 9 rounds burst and so on
    dn - Nozzle dwell, controls the time that power is applied to the poppet solenoi
    dp - Poppet dwell, allows you to change how long the poppet valve is left to open to increase/decrease volume of air let through it
    dr - Return to Battery Delay, determins how long to wait for the nozzle to return forward while chambering the next round. Good if you have crappy magazines
    rF - ROF Delay, it basically allows you to select the cyclic rate from 0 upto 30 I believe (0 giving 1800RPM)
    db - Debounce Threshold, This adjusts the minimum time which must elapse after a trigger release is read before the next trigger pull will be processed, allows filtering of electrical noise from the trigger switch
    Cb - Closed bolt mode, when turned off the engine reverts to open bolt. I will explain more below
    AS - Switches the Auto and Single positions on your fire selector, so if you have a G36 it puts the semi first and single second.
    Lb - Lipo Monitor

    Once you have finished altering the settings, push the joy stick in again and it will change to fire mode. You can only shoot the gun on fire mode, not safe.

    Open and Closed bolt

    In this engine, these modes are very useful. The position of the nozzle is different in open and closed bolt. They both have their benefits:

    Closed Bolt
    When you select closed bolt, the nozzle's resting position is the rubber end of the hopup chamber. So when you pull the trigger, it fires the BB, pulls back (allowing a new round to be chambered) and pushes the round into your rubber waiting for the next trigger pull. This setting gives VERY quick trigger response, almost instantaneously. However, there are some downsides. If your hopup is off or not set strongly enough, the BB will roll out of your barrel. Another downside is that when you empty a magazine and put a new one in, due to the position of the nozzle (covering the barrel) the gun will have to be fired once to chamber a new round.

    Open Bolt
    This has a slower trigger response, but it works better if you have a crappy hop or magazines. All AEG's fire this way, the nozzle sits in the back position allowing a BB to be put into the hop chamber, but not pushed into the rubber. When it is fired, the BB is pushed forward and fire by the nozzle. There is a very small delay between pulling the trigger and the BB shooting. This feeds better for full auto firing.

    The FCU has a sleep mode too. If no activity is detected in two minutes (firing) then it shuts down. The dispaly is turned off and all functions are shut down. This saves power for your battery. It will wake up fast enough for you not to notice when you shoot.

    The FCU also has a GPIO port that allows you to hook up:
    Auto winding magazines
    Empty mag sensors
    Tracer hopup units

    Note, the FE will not work without FCU as the battery plugs in directly to the board.

    All in all, this board is a very nifty bit of kit. Ensure that your dog is not left alone with it, as mine almost ate it.

    Setup Continued
    Next thing to do is to get your air bottle and adjust it to the rig. Unfortunately, my regulator has a problem in that the adjusting allen key was a size I do not have (website said it was a 3/16, it wasn't that or the size below either but in the middle of the two) so I had to make do with packing a smaller key with tape until it fitted. The operating pressure is between 80-120. When adjusting your regulator DO NOT PLUG THE LINE INTO THE ENGINE. If you put more than 120 PSI into the engine then you can potentially damage it.

    To adjust FPS, the polar star has several options. Major FPS tuning is done via the nozzle (green, gold, blue, black, silver and red). The below values are with a 0.2g BB at 120 PSI (max operating pressure):

    275mm barrel:
    green - 315
    gold - 350
    blue - 380
    black - 425
    silver - 445
    red - 500

    380mm barrel:
    green - 325
    gold - 365
    blue - 405
    black - 455
    silver - 495
    red - 550

    509mm barrel:
    green - 365
    gold - 400
    blue - 435
    black - 475
    silver - 515
    red - 590

    I'm running at 80 PSI with a 314mm barrel. Cannot comment on the FPS but it is definitely below 350 FPS.

    Backyard Testing

    So I suited up, put the bottle in and set the FCU to fire. Using a CYMA polymer AK-47 style magazine it fed superbly. Trigger response on both open and closed bolt was delicious (closed bolt is quieter however). It fed fine at 30 rounds per second on this magazine (1800RPM) and looked like a constant white line.

    Initial Conclusions

    I have spent over £1000 on this setup (gun, engine, rig, air bottle, regulator, batteries, diving cylinder) but it was definitely worth it. There are only two moving parts; nozzle and solenoid. The only time you'll need to open the engine up is if you wish to change nozzles. It will never lock on you, it will never misfire. It will never break - and if it does then you've done something wrong. Here's the only disadvantages:

    Price - Not cheap to run this setup, but worth it.
    Practicality of HPA - You'll probably need several air bottles and possibly a diving cylinder with a bottle filling adapter which I have. You'll also need a backpack for the bottle and to be careful not to snag the remote line.
    Dangers of HPA - It's essentially a bomb. Do not fiddle with the bottle or the regulator when it is live. DO NOT APPLY ANY HYDROCARBON-BASED LUBRICANT TO AREAS WHICH HANDLE THE AIR. It will explode and you'll be in hospital.
    People taking the piss - You'll probably get the odd "sod off back to paintball" comment. But don't worry about it. They're probably jealous that their Jing Peng M4 keeps locking up and you've hammered them with your sexy fusion engine.

    Thanks for reading the first half of this review. If I've missed anything out I will post it below. Once field tested, I'll post the 2nd half along with some pictures.

    If you have any questions, feel free to ask here or PM me.

  • #2
    Brilliant review, thanks so much and cant wait for part 2
    "They've got us surrounded again the poor bastards"
    sigpic

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

      Glad you're a member of the Polar* club - these things rock, and i'm massively happy with my V2 Fusion Engines (one of which was the first Polar* Fusion engine to be sent to the UK ), however, your statement of "The only time you'll need to open the engine up is if you wish to change nozzles" is incorrect. You really do need to keep an eye on the O rings, and lube them as they should be lubed - this particularly applies if you're using industrial grade compressed air.

      What HPA rig are you running? I've currently got a Palmers components kit I bashed together (it's ok, does the job), one with an STS reg (definitely better than the palmers) and a DevGru 2.5 (awesome bit of kit!), but am considering swapping to an SLP rig in order to only have to run one regulator (SMC AR type) to reduce the "hassle factor"

      **edit**

      You should have a 200PSI solenoid in it - PolarStar started fitting them as standard a while back

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

        Originally posted by Heinz View Post
        Glad you're a member of the Polar* club - these things rock, and i'm massively happy with my V2 Fusion Engines (one of which was the first Polar* Fusion engine to be sent to the UK ), however, your statement of "The only time you'll need to open the engine up is if you wish to change nozzles" is incorrect. You really do need to keep an eye on the O rings, and lube them as they should be lubed - this particularly applies if you're using industrial grade compressed air.

        What HPA rig are you running? I've currently got a Palmers components kit I bashed together (it's ok, does the job), one with an STS reg (definitely better than the palmers) and a DevGru 2.5 (awesome bit of kit!), but am considering swapping to an SLP rig in order to only have to run one regulator (SMC AR type) to reduce the "hassle factor"

        **edit**

        You should have a 200PSI solenoid in it - PolarStar started fitting them as standard a while back
        I would be concerned about O rings if it were like paintball where the regulator only puts it down to ~400 PSI, but the regulator on my bottle puts the air into the fusion engine at 80 PSI (which isn't industrial grade pressures compared to my diving cylinder @ 3000). The rig setup doesn't allow me to overpressure the gun above 120 PSI, the solenoid won't see above 85 PSI though. I did open it up when it arrived to check nothing was broken, they come very well lubed. With that said, getting silicone spray inside it is not hard at all.

        My regulator setup is the standard Firebase as recommended by Polar Star

        Comment


        • #5
          Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

          A very nice review and i look forward to part two as i will be buying a V3 gearbox to fit into an RPK this year.
          https://www.youtube.com/user/AirsoftbyOliver - My Youtube channel.

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

            It's the nature of industrial grade comp air that I'm on about - it has a *lot* of crap in it compared to lab grade or medical grade air.

            Comment


            • #7
              Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

              Well I'm using air suitable for deep sea diving, which is filtered removing most of the moisture and any oils.

              Comment


              • #8
                Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                Redhawk would you mind going over the hpa setup (connectors, how the tanks are filled/decanted from scuba tank etc) I've got a 62/3000 guerrilla tank en route but would be good seeing how its done. Going to a scuba shop tommorrow to see about tank certification & filling from there and see what they say.

                Also has any one used the GPIO port? Looking at integrating it with the ascu hop unit cut off (and building a Hop up tracer unit at some point)
                . .

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by windywindmill View Post
                  Redhawk would you mind going over the hpa setup (connectors, how the tanks are filled/decanted from scuba tank etc) I've got a 62/3000 guerrilla tank en route but would be good seeing how its done. Going to a scuba shop tommorrow to see about tank certification & filling from there and see what they say.

                  Also has any one used the GPIO port? Looking at integrating it with the ascu hop unit cut off (and building a Hop up tracer unit at some point)
                  I'd avoid the ASCU hop at the moment, mind didn't fit a standard barrel and several reviewers have been having the same issue. The chamber seems too big for most barrels and the fit like a baton in the Albert Hall.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                    Ouch, took that long to release them and they're that bad. Hopefully they'll be a 2nd edition soon.
                    . .

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                      As promised, the 2nd part of the review.

                      Initial Problems
                      So I took it to Anzio on the 8th of June. I had to do some groveling to the manager to allow me to use the P* - this due to the FPS being relatively easy to change. So I put several cable ties on the tournament lock. Once I showed it to him he wanted it to be taped and have lines drawn over the tape to show it hadn't been tampered with. This was no problem for me as I've not changed the PSI from 85 since I first got the regulator. I was also happy to comply to their requirements to allow me to actually use it. At the end of the day I showed the untampered regulator, I also chrono'd my gun every chance I got when I saw a marshal standing around with one.

                      If you own one and go to a site that you are either unfamiliar with the staff at or are new to, please make sure you take your gear to the owner/manager to have it cleared for use. Do whatever you are asked to ensure the site owners are happy with your gear (within reason).

                      Player Reactions
                      This bit was the best. I did receive many interested looks at the gun, air line, air bottle and my diving tank. The best one I heard was "Is that a bottle of propane strapped to his back?". I didn't reply then but to answer your question, no it is not. The air cylinder in the car was also a diving tank, not a strange butt plug. People were interested too which is great. I did have a throat infection effecting my ability to talk (or wanting to talk, so appologies if you tried to spark a conversation and I just walked off).

                      Performance
                      Using .23's and 85 PSI I was getting about 300 FPS on closed bolt mode - the hop needed to be on to hold the BB in the chamber. In open bolt mode with .2's and no hop it did about 333 fps. Trigger response is great on both, though I am favouring closed bolt for CQB. The trigger response was good enough that I could double tap rounds into people before they even started aiming back at me.

                      Using full auto at around 1300 rounds per minute, the groupings at 40 meters were about a foot or so which I believe was due to the wind. It's become apparent that .3's are much better suited in it for woodland use. For that I'll probably adjust the PSI to around 90 to give me 345 FPS on .2's and then run .3's giving around 270-280 FPS. However for CQB, the .23's worked great. I had no problems with the engine throughout the day. My 1600mah 8.4v stick battery is still over 3/4 full charged. Using a 300 bar refill from my diving tank in the morning, I could've easily lasted all day off one fill (4000 PSI) no problem.

                      What else can I say? I had a great day using this thing and would recommend any one else with the money to invest in this. Despite running full pace and landing my foot in a pot hole and smashing my face into the ground rather hysterically, the gun survived and worked fine. Either a testament to VFC or to Polar Star I must say.

                      My next build will be a Noveske Diplomat for which I'll put some videos up on the performance of it.


                      If any one would like information regarding anything on this page then feel free to ask here or send a PM. I'll be happy to assist.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                        Sorry to necro post, but great review.

                        Ive been fallowing these since announcement, but haven't been lucky enough to pick one up. Hopefully at the start of next year i will be able to.

                        Also you do realise that these do suffer badly from muzzle creep, if you set it for 345 with a .2g bb the fps will go up not down when using a .3g bb. This is the issue alot of sites have with them in the US.
                        user name changed from b*tcht*ts

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                          Originally posted by pmac(BT) View Post
                          Also you do realise that these do suffer badly from muzzle creep, if you set it for 345 with a .2g bb the fps will go up not down when using a .3g bb. This is the issue alot of sites have with them in the US.
                          It all depends on the FCU settings as the issue you have is not just with the pressure of the HPA but also the volume of it thats released as well (both of which are obviously adjustable by the regulator for pressure and the FCU for volume). This is one reason why it's better to scrap the XXXfps system and go for a Y.YYJ limit instead and to chrono on the ammunition that will actually be used in the gun. I've done a lot of work on my P* Fusion Engines, and you can get some rather interesting results when messing around with the poppet valve dwell time.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                            You guys seen the new AK74-U that polar star have just released? looks very nice! soldid steel construction with real wood! There is a review on 'evikecom' youtube channel!
                            sigpic

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Re: Polar Star Fusion Engine V3 (P* FEV3)

                              Originally posted by Heinz View Post
                              It all depends on the FCU settings as the issue you have is not just with the pressure of the HPA but also the volume of it thats released as well (both of which are obviously adjustable by the regulator for pressure and the FCU for volume). This is one reason why it's better to scrap the XXXfps system and go for a Y.YYJ limit instead and to chrono on the ammunition that will actually be used in the gun. I've done a lot of work on my P* Fusion Engines, and you can get some rather interesting results when messing around with the poppet valve dwell time.
                              I know that the issue is to do with the gas expansion and amount released, all gas guns suffer from this and I do think that all guns should be checked this way but most sites either have no clue or don't give two sh*ts. If they are happy for me to use my tanaka at 500fps (on a .2g) then let me drop a .43g bb in.. who am I to argue.

                              Was just saying as others may know this and try and use it against p* users like they have been state side.

                              The full sized AK's will be out soon aswell all using LCT bodys so should be top notch.
                              user name changed from b*tcht*ts

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