APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

[iratecabbie]

My review on the APS AK74 full metal and wood with blowback...



I purchased my ak74 via a hongkong trader about a month ago paying £149 for the gun plus shipping---and a further £28 for vat and customs inspection bringing the total cost upto £177..

So what did i get for my £177 Queen quids?

Well first impressions on opening the box was that this is not a chinese cheapsoft. far from it. Aps is a fairly respected and established trader who to my knowledge have made a couple of very fine sniper rifles in the past and also produce some very decent quality upgrade and spare parts.

The gun arrived in a large red box with the APS emblem on the front. and came with an orange hi cap and a cleaning rod. no batteries.


my first impressions of the gun itself were "Wow what nice wood!" the gun is full metal and wood with the wood being a lovely rich dark red/brown. the metal itself is also as impressive with it being so far as i can tell full steel with a nice textured finish to the receivers top cover. the gun itself has a good weight to it- not to heavy and not too light and is rock solid--as in no rattles wobbles or creaks.. fabulous!!!

the magazine is a dull orange which is actually the correct colour for ak74 mags and though a trifle garish it performs flawlessly with me being able to almost empty its 550 rounds on one full wind.. so all in all on external quality this gun scores a very impressive 10/10

Performance....
according to the write up on the website i purchased the gun from its optimised for use with 11.1v or 7.2v lipo batts. Having watched the vids on youtube of lipo fires /explosions etc i am not a fan of them however and so instead dropped in one of my 9.6 minis. One good thing i noticed while doing this was the butt plate. anyone who has owned a marui or ics ak will know how crap these are being extremely easy to lose due to thier easy on/off design. Not so the aps ak. its butt plate is firmly attached via two cross head screws. ok this means you need a screw driver to change a batt but thats got to be preferable to trawling the net looking for a replacement butt plate?

Shooting. (pre downgrade)
Having loaded the mag and batted up i took the ak out onto my range. Stock this guns a monster and WILL need a downgrade.
pre downgrade it was chronoing at 490 fps which is insane in a full auto aeg. I did however give it a fairly thorough run putting about 2k of rounds through it.. (hey i dont often get to rip it up with a gun this hot) interestingly the rof was still impressive inspite of the monster spring easily tapping the 850 rpm and i had a lot of fun tearing paint tins to bits with it.. whilst the blowback sounds and feels great. the one issue i noticed was that the hop was very poor. it was while tackling the hop that I managed to strip the piston!! (DOH!!!!!) to be fair shooting at almost 500 fps on a full auto gun is a sure fire recipe for this to happen though so i dont hold it against the gun.

anyway off the gun went to a very nice shop in hadleigh essex for a downgrade and new piston/piston head and spring guide.

On opening the gun it became very clear what a good looking bit of kit the internals of this gun are. the gearbox is APS and not a simple clone. it is stamped all over with the company name and is black metal with green plastic parts. the motor is the same being stamped aps and being finished i black and green. the wiring is all silver wire with the fuse being located to the left of the hop unit (it uses a car type fuse too) the body itself is a proverbial brick shithouse. with heavy rivets holding it together in places. id rate the metal body far far better than say classic army and possibly slightly superior to ics (i have a friends one on had to compare )

follwing the downgrade and repair
i set the gun up (fixing the hops weakness unit with a mad bull bucking and a carefull tightening of its screws---it worked wonders and the hop now became very good being very responsive but not given to wandering. downgraded to shoot at 320-330 it no longer being burdened by a massively over powered spring the rof has risen to about 900-950 rpm which is very adequate. whilst the blowback sounds even better with the slight increase in rof.

Skirmish test......
I took the Ak to AWA Herts for its first test. it was my intent to shoot it only for the morning before switching over to my m60 and ppsh for the afternoon. However once i got out on the field i couldnt put it down.

handy and light with a good rof and a decent size mag i had way too much fun with it. the accuracy is reasonable but not remarkable but ergonomically its excellent and i found myself running around like a mad thing with it...and getting some great kills too. it happily accepts mags from other maufacturers having been used with tm and jg hicaps as well as the 1 aps hi cap i had while for one game i the afternoon i strapped on a borrowed box mag (parentage unknown) and it worked fine with all of them the only misfeed being caused by a dodgy tm mag (sticky mainspring)

my one and only negative observation was the motors tendency to get hot fast and then to hold onto the heat for a long time. obviously this can be prevented by leaving it longer between short bursts ( i never fired more than a 1 second burst all day) but really a better solution would be a heat exchanger built into the grips.

ok so scores...

Build quality
10/10 quite simply superb and far far better than the price suggests.

Performance.
8/10 accuracy is only average ad i worry about the motor overheating

Value for money..
8/10 Very good value the only reason it didnt hit 10/10 is the inbuilt need to downgrade it.

Skirmish ability 9/10 excellent. handy and light with a decent rof/range and mag capacity its gun for noobs or pros. it wont break if you drop it and needs very little fussing. only real downer i can think of is the need to carry a screw driver to change a batt.

[gijohn2]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

Veryyy interesting i must say

[mrpugster]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

nice review, cheers

[Billyb]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

Great review
Thanks!

One question though- How solid really is it? I want the folding stock version of your rifle- but there are a few yanks slagging it off on youtube (It's sh*t it's pot metal) etc...

Oh, and how does it feel? Heavy or balanced or ...

Many Thanks,
Billy B

[iratecabbie]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

ok solidity---very very solid. I have an ics ak to compare it with and its as solid if not more so the stock has no wobble at all though the fore grip has a tiny bit of play. as for pot metal. I read that review myself and i spent some time carefully looking my one over whe it arrived and while i am no metallurgist i think its fairy safe to say its not pot metal. this is a solid and strong gun.

Weight and balance wise its got a good weight--enough to feel like a real gun not so much that its tiring to carry. and balance is great.
having used it now on two skirmishes its performed perfectly on both. its range is very very good, though be sure to tighten the hop up if you get one.

[Billyb]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

Sound like a solid buy then- thanks for the review and info, very helpful

Oh, and I will tighten the hop- any durability upgrades you think need doing instantly, or a tightbore? (apart from spring change).

Many, many Thanks,
Billy B

[iratecabbie]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

hmm i think a tightbore would be a real bonus to it--accuracy is average stock. hop rubber durability wise, cant say i put enough rounds through mine to tell yet---its on about 7k so far and still rocking. the biggest way to boost durability would have to be having the gun donwgraded to 330 fps.. lol stock its too hot to survive long.
thankyou for the good feedback on my review. if you get one of these guns plese feel free to add your own comments on here.

[Billyb]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

So a Tightbore it is then!
I will do a review in a few weeks when I get it, I have to finish sorting out a little debacle with ******* ***** first!

[dave-yzf]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

thanks for the review i can t find much about aps on internet but i quite like the look of there m4a1.

[iratecabbie]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

theres some very nice m4s with custom magpul stuff by aps on one of the chinese traders site.

[mikoyan]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

One question, please?

Will the Blowback Engine affect the internal and external parts in term of durability, simply said, will it damage the internal or external parts?

For Your Information, I was looking forward for the folding stock and railed handguard of this gun, and yes, I've heard someone complaining about it as well

looking forward to hear from you soon

[iratecabbie]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

hasnt done so on mine yet,

[Jamalen]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

Hello,

Just My 2p worth, I bought the APS AK74 with the folding stock a few months ago...

Mine fired 380fps out of the box rather then 400+, still far far too hot for most sites.. so downgrade required.. but I just snipped the spring to bring it down to 320...

The folding stock is fine, not great but usable, it did get loose after a skirmish where the plates meet at the catch, but I found that putting a couple of tiny squares of gaffa tape added padding into the stock and stopped the wobble and it was fine again..

As the OP mentioned, the gun is solid and he wood is nice, I did find that the wood is only varnished on the OUTSIDE, so I did some maintenence and used teak oil on the inside of the furniture to prevent the wood warping.

And also I found that after a days rainy skirmish the cheaper steel of the APS AK started to rust very quickly, but a good rubdown with silicon oil helped this..

[iratecabbie]

Re: APS AK74 full steel/wood with blowback

An update to my review,

since my last posts I have found a few more issues with the gun,

principle amongst these is the use of plastic bearings in the gearbox. These collapse quite quickly and render the gun unusable. When this happened in mine and I replaced the bearings with metal bushes. These bushes needed extensive shimming to work and the whole process was a fiddly pain in the bum.

Nozzle issues. The nozzle on mine snapped off during firing. I have never seen this happen before in an airsoft gun. Annoyingly you cannot just grab a stock TM nozzle either. The APS nozzle is a smaller diameter and designed to fit snugly inside the guns hop so fitting a stock marui nozzle means you also have to change the whole hop unit. To make matter worse, the aps nozzle is not available to buy.
Inversley, should you wish to swap the stock hop unit, your going to need to fit a larger nozzle as the airseal will be compromised with the smaller diameter aps unit.

gah! Im knocking my build quality score for this gun down a to 6/10
Externally beautiful, and witha nice looking gearbox. let down by annoyingly weak and somewhat unhelpful internals.