Review: Systema Energy Piston and Piston Head

[KaRcop]

Just a short review to give you my own experience with these two parts.

First off, the piston head. It is a nicely built piston head that promises a couple of interesting features. The first is the two different o-rings that come with it. The black o-ring is a standard kind of o-ring... nothing too special. This one is designed for normal usage at temperatures of 5-40 degrees Celsius. The white one is designed for use below 5 degrees C. The main thing that I will say here is that the white o-ring is very very soft and quite sticky. This means that it forms an incredibly tight seal between the piston head and the inside wall of the cylinder. This is all fine and well when firing because you get a good amount of pressure build up but it does mean that when the piston is being pulled back you are putting significantly more strain on the gears, unless the one-way venting on the piston head is working well to allow the piston to be pulled back with relative ease.

This leads me onto the second potentially interesting feature - the amount of air flow (according to Systema) through the piston head is changeable. The piston head is vented and by turning the end of the piston head you can supposedly change the amount of air flow through the piston head... Hmm... I changed it from the most open position to the most closed position and could not tell the difference! Either way there was such a tight air seal that I could neither pull the piston back nor push it forwards (this is with my finger over the air nozzle). I genuinely could not tell any difference at all between the two extremes when it came to adjusting the air flow!

Soo... the piston head seems to be quite nicely constructed but please only use the black o-ring and don't expect a huge amount of adjustability from it because it seems that, while there may be some adjustability, the difference between the two extremes is negligible if it even exists.

I'd give it a 6/10.


Now to the Systema Energy Polycarbonate Piston;

I was told by the nice man in the shop that he's had these in various guns for ten of thousands of rounds and they still look brand new so I thought "I'll buy it because it's obviously hard-wearing and of a good quality - after all, it is Systema!". How wrong I was... I have just chewed my way through my second piston. The first piston went after about 50 rounds. The surrounds holding the first metal tooth in broke off during a training day at MOTTT which caused the plate that the metal tooth is a part of to come loose and jam against the side of my cylinder - i.e. the whole gearbox was left in a compressed state with the strain on the side of my cylinder! Thankfully my cylinder isn't Systema... it's still fine! Just to mention that the first few teeth also had some nice chunks taken out of them.

So I, thinking it was just a bad cylinder, took it back to the shop where I got it from and the shopkeep - very surprised it had broken - promptly replaced it with a new one. Well I haven't even played a game with that one yet. Because I've been upgrading my tamiya connectors to XT60 connectors I've been firing a few test shots... I'm probably on about 100-150 by now. I got in this evening and decided to have a play... *crunch*. Oh no. The song "Oops I did it again" would be very appropriate here.

I took the gun apart and took out the piston. The first metal tooth is GONE. the plate is still there but the tooth itself has snapped off and disappeared... I can't even find it! The next four teeth have a rut big enough to make the Grand Canyon jealous through them. The piston has been completely ruined, in only a hundred or so shots!... again! I have now put my stock piston back in and it's firing like it should be. I shall be taking this piston back tomorrow and seeing what can be done in terms of a refund because it wouldn't even have lasted an evening of gaming - let alone days and days and days of rock-solid performing.

I'm afraid that this piston must go in the sin-bin.

1/10. - It'll be ok as a backup piston provided something reliable breaks but I really wouldn't bother!


Before writing this review I did a quick check to see if anybody else has had a similar experience and most of what I found was saying how surprisingly easy people had found it to remove teeth. Somebody here might have had a good experience with these (or at least not a bad one) but I'm afraid that to go through two pistons with the same problem in less than a hi-cap's worth of rounds is shocking!

I hope that you've found my review helpful and I'm more than happy to answer any questions you have. Just for reference I am using an ICS m4 with everything but the parts reviewed as stock and these tests were done using a 7.4V 1900mAh LiPo battery.

Cheers for reading!

[bert uk]

Re: Review: Systema Energy Piston and Piston Head

nice honest review mate.another kick up the arris for systema parts!:D