Atricle in this months AI mag.

[North West Outpost]

So there I was with a day off, wandering through town with the mrs wondering what she's going to spend money on next as I duck into a news agent. I was looking for someothing else but seeing as how AI was just staring at me I thought why not. But now I am not so sure I should have.

As now I feel compelled to comment on an article run in this month and for the next three. Well it says next four but I don't know if this is the first of four or it is actually 5 in total.

It is the upgrading of an MP5 PDW.

I am not mentioning the retailer as I have always found them top notch and they must have their reasons for setting out to do what they have.

Their article is based on a MP5 PDW, with the intention to have it running at 30 a sec with reasonable fps.

The upgrade list is emmence.

Including a Classic Army metal body and a full run of Systema internals and turbo motor.

Taking the total well over £600.00

There is a much cheaper way to achieve a very similar product.

I have run the Classic Army MP5 straight out of the box on small 11.1 stick LiPo's with no detrimantal effect on anything. Not the best way to do things admittedly but you can.

Buy yourself a Classic Army MP5 to start with.
11.1 LiPo stick.
basic fet, I just make my own.
New spring, poss SHS M110 or 20.
Hop rubber.
The rest is time consuming modification of the gear box internals.

So for half the cost you can have very, very similar results.

Afterall after transfereing all the new parts into the gun, there really is nothing apart from the Hop and a few gear box internals left of the origonal gun.

[The Keeper of Secrets]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

I read the same article. It was run by a british retailer. So of course it'll be aiming to squeeze cash out of people. Unfortunately it's common belief that the only way to get high speed (in your aims) or higher accuracy (in mine) is to throw upgrades at a gun. What can be acheived through careful modfication of stock internals is massively underappreciated.

[demoncase]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

Or, indeed, the point that one doesn't even need to upgrade at all to have a damn good time on the airsoft field.

You don't need 359.99fps
You don't need 50rps
You don't need that 6.00001mm unobtanium barrel
You don't need that 5000rpm motor
You don't need those £50-a-bag diamond polished uber BBs.
But there are a lot of people that want you to believe that you do.... And many of them are retailers

[Fluxeor]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

Oh sweet, I just got a CA MP5, time to throw the bank at it!!


*Sets aside a fiver to buy a new rubber at the weekender.*

[B.E.N.]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

It's good to hear people comment on the magazine! Jack, the author of the feature does use this forum, but I'll leave it down to him if he wants to retain his anonymity or make his own comments...

The feature isn't written by the retailer in question, or the work carried out by them, they do a good job of supplying the goods though. Contrary to popular belief, the goods are not supplied by the retailer in question for nothing, they are actually purchased (admittedly at a different price to that shown on the shelf), which is why Jack worked on the TM MP5K, it was a gun he had that he wanted to use as a project.

With hindsight, it probably would have been more cost effective to work on the a CA MP5K, but the beauty of the project being broken down into chunks is that you can pick and choose what you want to do. OK, so the metal body pushes you over budget, but it isn't essential to performance, so feel free to leave it out.

[crasstoe]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

As a retailer/reviewer it is in your interest to make the article as glamerous as possible. Imagine if they said to increase accuracy and prevent bbs rolling out the barrel of an AGM GBB M4, place PTFE tape on top of the hop rubber, and that's it!

Far more interesting read seeing what can be done, not necessarily the only way to achieve the end result though

[seansamurai1]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

I havent actually touched Ai for a long while actually but had heard its under a new editor or something, so Ill check it out again and hope the standard has gone up somewhat.

[North West Outpost]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

As a retailer/reviewer it is in your interest to make the article as glamerous as possible. Imagine if they said to increase accuracy and prevent bbs rolling out the barrel of an AGM GBB M4, place PTFE tape on top of the hop rubber, and that's it!

Far more interesting read seeing what can be done, not necessarily the only way to achieve the end result though

I am not sure you are quite grasping what the intention was.

If you can turn a fairly mundane mp5 into a decent hard bodied 30 rps, 340 fps little monster by just a little ptfe tape...You better come and show me how to do it. As clearly I'm missing something...lol.

@Ben. It must be very difficult to keep interest up in a mag where essentially you are trying to amuse the same audience evry month. That just can't be easy.

I wasn't having a poke at the retailer, although as their name is mentioned in several places on the first page it may be better to actually say that. I thought it was them doing the upgrade work not just supplying the parts. I have brought from them befor and it is one of those shops where you can usually turn to if you need something that isn't run of the mill. Nick has on a few occasions gone out of his way to be helpfull for me.

[demoncase]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

S'all a bit like Caeser's original dagger- yeah, it's had 3 new blades and 5 new handles but it's Caeser's original dagger alright. :D

[B.E.N.]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

Here guys... Word from Jack himself!

Hi there...

As Ben has pointed out, the Devil's in the Detail features in Ai are real upgrades – they're not a showcase for any retailer's parts. As a commercial proposition, Airsoft International has to make money, but our small team works had to offer the readers a variety of features and projects. The Devil features are sponsored by the retailer, so of course we list the parts that they supply (and I pay for!).

The feature in question – upgrading a Marui MP5K is MY gun, bought with my own wages, along with all the upgrade parts. Here, word for word, is the opening copy from the first instalment of the feature:

"Let's get this out of the way for a start – this is pretty much a money's no object upgrade. You might not want to do everything you see over the next four months, but hopefully it'll give you some ideas if you're looking to build something special. That's not to say that this is some pie-in-the sky project... I built this gun exactly as I wanted it, and I've been running it for a year, to make sure it's as reliable as I hoped before I put it in the magazine.
Of course, building a fast gun is always going to put more of a load on the parts, and I do expect this to fail earlier than if it was bog-standard, but that's the beauty of learning to modify your own gun – when it does go wrong, you know how to fix it. This could also be a lot faster – simply dropping in an 11.1V LiPo would up the rate of fire, or if I really wanted to push it, I'd use a dual sector gear from RiotSC.
I wanted a compact gun that fired at an intimidating speed, but didn't eat through mid-caps too quickly. To that end, the 29rps it currently does suits me fine, and the fact that it punches the BBs out at a whopping 340fps makes me very happy (the new Marui High Cycle MP5 achieves 25rps and 235fps). At the recent Ai Five Man Team game, one of the OpFor commented on the surprising range of the little Heckler & Koch, so let's show you how I turned a plastic bodied, standard Tokyo Marui MP5K, shooting at 255fps and 16rps, into this little bundle of anger..."

Hopefully it's pretty clear that this feature is meant to show you a lot of things you could do, if you wanted. I started this project before I accepted LiPos into my life, and as such this is the only one of my 15 guns that still uses NiMh power. The thing is, I don't intend to change it – an 11.1V LiPo in a stock gearbox isn't going to be a long-lasting relationship.

Yes – this is a ludicrously expensive project, but it's a real one, and I stand by the year-long performance of the gun. I really hope that, through the four months, readers will dip into various parts, seeing how they can build their own battery, or how to short-stroke a gearbox, or what the implications really are of fitting a CA metal body to a Marui weapon...

For many people, myself included, tinkering with their guns is half the fun. Sometimes, real-life commitments, children and other work mean we're not playing every weekend, so sneaking into the garage when the family's gone to bed is as much of a fix as getting out in the field. If one person tells me they picked one thing up from a feature, then it makes my day. Nobody is forcing anyone to spend money they don't have – it's all about enjoying yourself.

There are plenty of lower budget upgrade features too, from the basics of gun painting to building a hop unit for an AGM MP40 from scratch, I try to work up features that I'd find interesting, and that give a good variety for our passionate readers...

Jack Baxter

[1st commando]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

i can be and have been quite critical of airsoft publications over the years . However i will give credit where it is due and have to say the report on berget this month by matt furey-king was the best I have read. I do think this may be a sign that the new editor is shaking things up over at ai.

[seansamurai1]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

Cant see an issue there with that at all tbh, there are many people on this forum and many others that would quite happily spend a lot of money on upgrades to make a high rps gun. His choice ultimately, so why not help others along the way with how to do it properly?
Id say doing an article for semi auto DMRs and how to get a could well balanced setup, *hint hint * namely an SR25 long box.

[thekonassure]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

If I was building a high speed pdw mp5 rig and after £600 it shot at 30rps I`d feel like an idiot.

I mean a cyma mp5 with 13:1 gears and a clone motor can pull that on a 9.6v bat.

My vltor was well under the £600 mark and that was well over 30rps on a 7.4v

What a waste of money if you want a cheap mp5 just buy a cyma or even a galaxy if you want a fast rof buy a cyma and give midas around £100 and it will shoot better then that £600 gun hell spend £200 and it`ll shoot faster then an mp5 mag could ever feed.

The only reason to spend so much on a gun is for a body that no one else makes I mean lets be honest a £40 element gearbox better then what most company`s put in their guns regardless of price, but a gun with a nice body that feels right to you when using it is the thing thats going to help you enjoy playing the most.

[Minotaur]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

Just a comment - I have a fairly new Umarex HK MP5 SD6 full metal body, won it in the raffle at the AI500 no less!
It was chrono'd two weeks ago, put it thru 6 times across the day - each time its the average of 3 shots and it shot 332-328 every time.

Chris

[ThatblokewiththeScar.]

Re: Atricle in this months AI mag.

There have been a few threads on here recently in the technical and new players section and I have had a couple of PM's as well as a few guns sent to me all with a similar theme.

"I fitted upgrade parts to my gun and now it doesn't bloody work"

I have not purchased AI magazine for a number of years now and I have not read this article but it sounds very familiar. "If you put all this crap in your gun you are better than everyone else" This is not to knock the Magazine or it's staff, I have met a few of the guys even shot at one or two over the years and they are fine fellows. But this obsession with throwing money at your toys is getting a bit scary.

We all like to have nice toys and we all want that little edge over other players. But this upgrade fever is turning into a bad religion. Thou shalt only buy Systema! Thou shall covert thy neighbors Madbull Hop! etc etc etc.

Most of the guns I get sent to me come in for repairs rather than upgrades and in that scenario people normally want to spend as little as possible. But when they come in for upgrades I sometimes have trouble convincing people that the parts I would recommend fitting are better than the branded parts they believe you must have to upgrade their toy box.

Unfortunately articles that promote supposedly high end products do nothing to help the general everyday Airsofter who does not use forums and who's only source of information is that guy he bumps into on game days with the M4 wearing the entire Magpul catalog.

Obviously I am not saying don't upgrade your guns but do your own research and talk to the people who know a little about the subject matter. And before you spend your money you should ask yourself why you are changing bits on your gun. Because I will guarantee that most of the guns and the majority of posh parts used will give little or no improvement over stock. And if you don't believe me then try this. Come and find me on a game day and bring your Uber Systema powered, spent more on the gearbox than the gun cost shooting stick. And if it shoots proportionally further or more accurately or more consistently than my completely stock TM Type 89 I will buy you a nice new IP lipo and a cup of tea.:D