Tokyo Marui MK23 socom NBB review.

[the_monkey]

so i picked one of these up from another retailer in the UK.

Initial impression

the gun comes exceptionally well packaged in a very thought out and reasonable way.

The gun is light, pretty well balanced with all a magazine on and the lam unit in place. the silencer makes it ever so slightly front heavy but entirely useable and exceptionally comfortable in the hand.

The Lam unit..well the little red led is annoying and looks ridiculous, however despite the claims online that the light on the lam unit is crap, ive found it to be perfectly fine and just as bright as an M3 derivative that i have. either way entirely fit for purpose. the light is well focused and seated in line with the barrel, meaning you can fire and the bb will land dead centre of the light projected onto your target.
However, the silencer does cast a small shadow over the top of the light splash meaning your circle of light has a slight dent on the top of it.

Shooting
well its a NBB so the trigger pull is quite long. but this can be shortened by cocking the slide back or pulling back the hammer. (my preference being racking the slide as it seems to work slightly better), i also find that for ranged shots you are better racking the slide and that the weight of the lam unit prevents the gun from being pulled off target by the weight of the BB, this can also be assisted by holding the LAM Unit itself with the offside hand. despite it being an NBB gun you can however peel off shots remarkably quickly and far easier and smoother than any previous NBB i have ever owned.

on a note of shooting, do not double cock the gun, it will jam and you will have to strip it to fix it.

accuracy and range are both extreme. My reaction on seeing the range was to chrono it a few times out of disbelief (296 295 296 296 on cybergun green gas and an ambient of 7 degrees C) , the gun tends to send 0.2g BBs straight up, 0.25g seemed to strike the balance of range and accuracy with the BBs curving upwards slightly at the end of their flight, however I am hoping this will change once the hop unit settles in. speaking of hop, remove the slide to access and it adjusts via a wheel, very very smooth very very easy to set and stays where you put it. appears at the moment to be one of the best hopup units ive ever laid hands on.

the mk23 out ranges my quite extensively upgraded TM p90 and every other gun i could lay my hands on that day. Not by a huge amount, i measured the difference to be approx ten meters, but enough that it is worthy of note.

noise wise, it topped the free decibel metre app on my phone at 67 decibles with the silencer on. I later tested this for comparable sounds around the house and found the closest level of noise was either the kettle just as it boils or a particularity explosive poo hitting the water.

maintenance

the gun itself strips with a single pin, pull this out rack the slide around and it will come off. To replace, reverse the process, the pin goes in 90% of the way, rack the slide back a bit and push it in the remaining 10%. maintenance consists of throwing lube at it every so often and cleaning the barrel with the provided barrel cleaner.

upgrades
Dont touch it, bugger about with the lam unit if you want a cool laser but internally i wouldn't change a thing. yes you could throw a firefly hop up rubber and a 6.01 barrel and all manner of gubbins at it, but you will spend loads on maybe gaining a few metres. to be honest, i don't see how you could extend the range in a meaningful way and still let the BB have enough force that your opponent would feel it at the other end. And since the gun makes practically no noise getting the BB to target faster isn't really an issue. I don't think i could justify upsetting the delicate fung shui of the internals by tinkering with them.

I may try putting ASG magazines in it as these are meant to be compatable with more exotic and high pressure gasses. then again, for 3 mags from one gas fill im not sure i need another mag.

Conclusion
It works, its simple, performs exceptionally in the cold. Mildly bothered about its tendency to pull off if you rush your shots, but that's a problem with me not the gun. the little red led annoys me deeply, but since the gun comes with a box, an excellent silencer and pretty damn good light I'm nit picking.