E-03 - ArniesAirsoft - Review Archive

Author

Mike_West

辣手神探

Registered: May 2006
Location: Middle Eastern Europe
Posts: 2,420

Review Date: 28/12/07

Would you recommend the product? No | Price you paid?: �85.00 | Rating: 5

Positive aspects of the product (pros):	It's a F2000. Decent rate of fire. Doesn't creak.
Cons:	Nonstandard gearbox. Selector on the side. Useless iron sights.

So, I got this thing and gave it quite a roll-down on a skirmish a couple weeks ago. What can I say? It's quite a fun gun, but it had the bad luck to begin in the R&D dept. of JLS, who aren't exactly known for great quality.

I got it with the battery charged well enough not to have it recharged before the skirmish - which, sadly, turned out not to be enough. The battery flopped miserably after several hours of spraying the BBs around, but, luckily, one guy had a spare 8,4 V Sanyo NiCD mini that gave comparable firepower (which isn't that good, as the stock battery is a 9,6 V one). But still - the charger has an insane output amperage (650 mA) that makes your battery fully loaded after just two and a half hour.

The plastics are pretty decent, although I noticed some nasty marks on the rubber stock cap (which, BTW, you have to remove to put the battery in). Also, the metal isn't that good and, what's worst, the flashhider has only half of the slots cut out. The other gripe is that it's a bitch to take it off the barrel extension (in my case, it came off after I got pissed off and whacked it with a wrench - might have loosened the paint) - as you can see on the photo, I ditched the extension entirely, as it's useless with the stock (M4 length) inner barrel.

Getting inside, well, that's the tricky bit. Taking off the upper receiver is simple - push the little button on the right side to unlock it, then pull it off forward and up. What you'll notice now is that the inner barrel is pretty much loose - it's just supported by two metal bits, one in the back and one in the front. The rest shines through holes in the body.
The rifling on the barrel end is... clockwise. Why - I have no bloody idea, as every silencer and flashhider out there is a counterclockwise one (well, G&P and CA make some CW ones, but compared to the hoards of standard CCW ones, it's not enough).
Ejector port is poorly molded in too. As soon as I figure out how to work it out to look better, I'll dremel it out. One thing is sure - I don't want to see the charging handle through the ejection tube and I'll patch it anyhow.
While we're at the charging handle - the spring is weak and the handle itself is plain fugly. It could use an additional spring around the hinge to hold it in place as well - now it just clatters back and forth like stupid.
Iron sights are a real pain to use - get a high-mounted red-dot as soon as you can. Yes, you can aim with the iron sights, but trying to line them up is absurdly uncomfortable. I guess that's why the real deal is fitted with a scope by default.
Then, we have to take off the foregrip. In mine, some schmuck broke it off, sparing me the need to knock the pin in the bottom of the triggerguard out - I just have to click it out and then push out the four tabs that hold it in the upper part of the body. By the way, the foregrip is weighted with a lump of metal to balance the gun out. Next time, make a decent outer barrel out of it, you blasted schmooks.
There was one mandatory pin to be pushed out - one that holds the maintenance cover (or, as called by the soldiers, "toilet seat") in place. It's pretty tight, which is actually good - it won't clatter or open in least desirable moment, letting dust and whatever inside the hop-up and hell knows where else.
Screws were apparently not enough to keep the two halves of the body together - I had to pry it apart in the lower back section, as someone stuck it with superglue. After that, I took a good look inside.

The gearbox is "hmm, I've never seen anything like this before" version. Trigger is a shockingly simple contraption with a metal lever and length of steel rod pulling a bit sticking out of the side of the gearbox. The selector... Well, that's the biggest piss-up in this replica. It's placed on the left side of the body, behind the magwell, and looks like someone ripped it off an Armalite and slapped where it fit. No way in hell I'm leaving that like it is - as you probably saw in the earlier entry, I'm gonna build an AUG-like trigger system instead. I'll mod the safety switch (which, in real-steel, is also the selector) to switch between routing the power to gearbox and a microswitch sending the current directly to the motor. A F2000 is a F2000.

After I took it apart, putting the bloody thing together proved, well, at least "a little" difficult, especially around the BB feed and safety switch. Some brute force had to be used. The good side of that is it doesn't creak. Solid. Even a little too solid. A "big comfy brick", as Mr Stealthbomber from Arnie's Airsoft said.

The feeding system is surprisingly reliable, although the amount of yellow snot (I can't call it grease) oozing out of the gearbox through every possible hole rendered the hop-up disabled (I'm not even sure if washing the hop-up rubber in warm water with soap helped). The hi-cap can chuck out a good hundred BBs on one full cranking, it's metal and looks pretty decent. Barrel is good quality brass. I didn't notice any misfeeds.
The wiring, though, is not so well. Believe it or not, soldering on one of the wires has mysteriously snapped off the motor contact, causing the gun to stop firing unless shaken a bit. I had to solve that by unsoldering the motor and using standard AEG connectors instead. Also, the selector got screwy lately, rendering the semi-auto setting useless.

To sum it all up - if you're looking for a F2000, it's your only choice. While not perfect, the E03 has some potential - you just need some ideas and elbow grease. If you're looking for a bullpup - there are some better guns in this price range (I grabbed the E03 for $175 shipped off a local auction website), like the ARMY R85A1 or JG AUG.

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