Ok, so this is just a little spin off but I intend to make this a detailed review of this absolutely shitty gun.
Intro
So I saw some people on this site who owns a Double Eagle M901c, the shorter compact version of the M900A. So i thought I might as well do a review before someone else makes the mistake of buying this awful gun.
So you may be thinking, "Why did you buy this gun? Why not a G&G raider or an SRC?" Reason being is that I didn't know much about those brands at the time, plus the website I bought this from said it had a metal gearbox.... and I was lured right into the booby trap.
I asked my mum to buy it for me.
It normally would have costed £120 on those shitty websites like JBBG or BBguns4less but luckily the website I bought it from sold it for only £60 which was what lured me into it.
As this was my VERY first AEG, I did not know what to expect, so I kind of trusted the "metal gearbox" it claimed to have....
What's in the box man?
So, when the royal mail man knocked on the door with a box, I was so excited to see if it was my gun, and it was. But seconds later, my sister got a phone call that her friend died.... nasty coincidence... but nevertheless, I took the box upstairs and left it there on my bed and went to my sister's room along with my mum to comfort her.
But an hour and a half later, when my sister stopped crying, I came back to gun, excited to see what lies beneath the wrapper.
I tore the brown paper apart like a beast and I saw the gun box; There was a picture of their product on the box and a sentence at the top saying " AUTO . SEMI", "Automatic Electric Gun" and "Enhanced Hop Up System"... Yeh right. And some chinese which I could read. (obviously).
So, when I first opened the box, I saw the AK47 with my face just going, "Omg, wow, my first AEG is sitting right in front of me". And since it was my first AEG, I didn't really know what's good or bad but it looked just damn amazing despite the horrible two tone orange.
So in the box is a metal high cap magazine is of decent quality; it's still working as of now, an "alright" sling although i'd never use it, a shitty 1050 mAH nickel metal hydride battery, a shitty bag of BBs, a.... well, decent charger that i'm still using, and a decent manual which has some chinglish but tells you what you need to know with both versions.
Oh yeh! And I also forgot to mention some decent safety glasses you get with it!
Quality Of The Stuff
At first, it felt so good to be able to hold an AK47 in my hand since it is a 1 to 1 scale. It's not the heaviest gun at 3kg but it has some weight to it. The plastic on the gun is, well, a little shiny and you can clearly see the seams in the stock but the overall plastic doesn;t feel too cheap, I mean, it can withstand a little bit of force, but not a full force whack on a tree stump. But overall, it feel smooth in your hands but if you have sweat on your hands, it'll slip of the hand guard easily.
As you can see, it has so much orange that it makes everyone want to puke. That's right, it's a puke machine.
So this gun is just your standard AK, hop up is where the bolt is, Ak selector switch, trigger guard, AK mag etc.
There isn't that much metal on it... but nevertheless, the metal parts are: the dust cover, trigger, trigger guard, bolt, outer barrel, selector switch, magazine, and.... that's about it, not that much and the dust cover also feels like cheap pot metal which I could probably cut with scissors.
The Dreaded Gearbox
Oh god, this part of the review....
So, on every single feckin website, they claimed it to have a "metal gearbox", THAT'S RIGHT! A EFFIN METAL GEARBOX.
BUT when I opened the gun a bit, I saw this:
Seriously? What the fudging hell is that? IT'S A PLASTIC GEARBOX! PLASTIC I SAY!
So I was very disappointed after seeing this but at that time, I never knew Double Eagle was a shitty brand.
After many hours of tinkering and taking apart my very first AEG, I finally got to the gearbox. Took a while but i did it. I felt proud.
And it looked like this....
As you can see, it has a plastic shell but a metal motor cage and metal selector switches which I think is pretty decent.
When I took off the motor, I got to this stage.
So, with my newbie level of gearbox knowledge, I decided to go ahead and open the gearbox.
I had no idea what was in it or how it worked so I kinda just tore off the gearbox cover... and the inevitable happened...
The whole thing just blew up; the spring jumped out, the spring guide flew out my room and down the stairs, pieces went everywhere because of that. Washers, bushing, gears flew all over the place and the anti-reversal latch flying into my face.
I was just like, "What the fudge just happened...."
So I took my time to collect everything that fell out and piece it back together roughly like the photo above. I had no idea how the anti reversal latch went back on or the trigger assembly.
But during that time, I had a little look at the parts.
The gearbox has; plastic gears (obv), metal washers, plastic bushings, a shitty piston head, a shitty ported piston cylinder with has almost no air seal with the piston head, plastic string guide and an M100 spring but I believe the spring is stronger than that due to tests.
It took almost 5 hours for me to piece this piece of crap back together because of the stupid anti-reversal latch kept jumping out.
So after two days of firing and putting about maybe 1200 BBs through it, I couldn't hear the gears moving and I only heard the motor whirring away... so i opened the gun back up again and this is what I discovered:
A shitty motor with a METAL pinion gear, a strong spring and plastic gears, GUESS WHAT HAPPENED? YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, THE GEARS TORE THEMSELVES APART. Especially the bevel gear which was almost toothless like your average gramps who drinks tonnes of coke and smokes through 50 packets a day.
The shredded bevel gear
So i immediately bought a metal gear set from Airsoft-Club which arrived in 3-4 days I think, as I put those parts in... anti reversal latch didn't fit in partly because it was a set FOR AN M4.
SO, immediately bought an AK47 specific bevel gear from airsoft club which arrived in good condition, placed it in and viola! It finally worked! But then i realised, the M4 sector gear wasn't compatible with the AK tappet plate...... ARGGGHHHH!!! WHY ARE YOU MAKING MY LIFE SO DIFFICULT?!?!?!?!?
The gearbox with the M4 sector gear
Went back to the Airsoft club website and bought an AK47 sector gear, it arrived and bingo! It worked fine. JESUS, so much hard work!
So after some more buying of parts; spring guide, it finally worked but one thing. The trigger response was awfully slow, the sound of grinding metal was even more painful than white noise or your bully teacher scratching her vivid nails onto a dirty chalk board.
So yeh, I was guessing the spur was doing that. It honestly took almost a second for a full revolution of the sector gear. It was that horrible.
I lived with the pain and agony for about 4 months before I finally sacked it and for my birthday, I got a CYMA CM02 metal gearbox and a CYMA hop up chamber with a bucking from Airsoft club. The pain was finally gone, I could finally rest in peace with a decent gearbox in my gun... BUT NO. THE STUPID DOUBLE EAGLE AK47 BODY WAS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH THE CYMA GEARBOX.
The beautiful metal gearbox
When I discovered this, I was like "OMG! WTF HAVEN'T I SUFFERED ENOUGH????!!!!"
SO immediately, I got the feckin tools out, a drill, alot of sand paper and some scissors.
I wrapped the sand paper around the drill bit and held it together with a bit of blue tack, then kind of sanded the plastic of the Ak body down till the gearbox could finally fit in it. Took hours but it was worth it.
But that was not the end of my FECKIN TROUBLES.
The Hop Up, The Terrible Little Shit In this Gun
Right, I gave this part a bad title for one massive reason that pissed me off so much more than the fudging gearbox.
IT IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER HOP UNITS IN THIS GUN.
REALLY?! I MEAN REALLLYYYY????!!!!
WHY AM I SUFFERING????? IS THERE AN END TO THIS?
At that point, I seriously considered chucking the gun out my bedroom window because it was such a bad upgrade platform. But on my good will, I kept it safe in my arms.
When I got the gearbox for my birthday, I also got a CYMA hop up chamber with it.
The hop up chamber
The CYMA chamber would not fit in the gun due the to original being larger than this one. So the parts to screw down the chamber onto the front end was somewhere the CYMA hop up couldn't reach. (Don't think dirty)
Plus, to add to my problems, THE ORIGINAL HOP UP CHAMBER DOESN'T FIT IN THE CYMA GEARBOX
So I was back to sanding down the plastic on the hop up chamber until I could finally with the hop up could finally work with the gearbox in unison.
So yeh, I bought the hop up for nothing, there was nothing i could do with it, so I just left it there in my drawer for days to pass. Until recently where I took the bucking and put it into the shitty hop up chamber which improved performance.
OK, SO! This shitty hop up chamber isn't your regular AK style hop, It's considerably larger, so the barrel in this is unique, no way will you get a tightbore for this.
It is composed of entirely plastic, a cheap one and the bucking is a kind of shitty hard type, which is shitty. Basically the Hop up is horrendous and the worst you could ever get.
Also, about 5 months later, it stopped working in full auto for some reason. Full auto still fires but the BBs are not feeding into the shitty chamber.... I have tried many methods of fixing this but none have worked so far... so I'm stuck with semi for now.
Performance With The Shitty Stock Parts
So, with the stock 8.4v 1050 mAH battery, you can only achieve around 650-700 rpm but if you top off the battery and put it in the gun straight away, you can achieve 900 rpm, which is why the original gearbox failed.
The battery is wired to the top, but upon getting my new CYMA gearbox, I took it to my school's tech center and rewired to the stock and bought a 9.6v 1600 mAH intellect battery which it can now consistently achieve 900 rpm.
With the old gearbox and original hop up, the accuracy isn't too bad with .20s; you can get the job done. You can hit a man sized target at about 30m (I measured the distance), after that, it starts to stray right quite a bit until about 42 - 50m when it drops. Honestly, my cheap shotgun can shoot further than that.
But with the stock CYMA gearbox and CYMA bucking and plus cleaning the barrel (which I discovered that I should do), the effective accuracy increased to about 45m being accurate with .20g and there is little curving to the left or right, it drops about some where over 50m, maybe 60m but I don't know.
But with .25s the accuracy increases a lot and sometimes it can keep going straight with no curving whatsoever, in other words, pinpoint accuracy. This unique barrel in the gun works alright.
The Final Conclusion
DO NOT EVER GET THIS GUN, DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT.
IF YOU ARE BUYING THIS GUN, ALL YOU ARE BUYING IS A SHIT TONNE OF PAIN AND HARDWORK AND SUFFERING, something not anyone would want, unless you have no life.
CONS:
1. Internals are shit, all of it is shit
2. You will have no life if you buy this
3. Doesn't have a metal gearbox as it claimed to have
4. It's basically shit
5. YOU WILL SUFFER
6. Terrible upgrade platform
7. The internals are proprietary, although it will take A LOT of modding to fit other product brands.
PROS:
1. The unique barrel is actually alright
..... that's it.
My rating: -9999/10
But seriously, it's a bad gun overall.
What kind of a stupid dumbass would buy a shitty AK47 made by a shitty brand who claim it to have a metal gearbox? Seriously? Oh wait, that would be me.
EDIT: Also forgot to mention that when the spur gear made the horrible grinding noise in my plastic gearbox, I replaced it with the old plastic spur gear which was still intact surprisingly; it still had most of it's adult teeth, until I put it in the gearbox and ran a test....
You can probably guess what happened when 2 metal gears collide with a plastic one.... yerp, that's right, the plastic one died instantly on the pull of the trigger...
Also, from then on after I got the CYMA gearbox, I have upgraded it on the way quite a bit; I've changed the piston head, cylinder and the o-rings and now the air seal is so tight that if you put the nozzle in your nostril and pull the piston, IT WILL suck out all the bogies and shit your nose has been collecting for many years. Then you can push the piston through again to create a bogie blaster to annoy your siblings.
Other upgrades are; changed the stock bevel gear for a steel one from Airsoft-Club (as you can tell from now, i'm quite fond of that website) which has more surface area for the pinion gear to cling onto for a good turn. Gears have also been shimmed perfectly; the stock gears had so much wobble you could probably use them as maracas. Also got rid of the weird green lubricant that they used and replaced it with good quality silicon grease.
Also put a washer on the plastic spring guide and I guess I don't need to buy a metal spring guide since this one is still pretty intact.
Done some more stuff to it but can't remember from the top of my head....
So in the future, I am planning to either sell it or buy a G&P metal body and front end kit for it so that I can finally use my CYMA hop up chamber and gain full auto again. But i'm not sure that original DE mag will fit and feed....
SO! FOR ALL YOU KIDS OUT THERE, DON'T EVER BUY THIS GUN! IF YOU HAVE THIS GUN ALREADY, GET RID OF IT! THROW IT IN THE TRASH, INCINERATE IT, OR SELL IT TO SOMEONE BEFORE THE GEARS DESTROY THEMSELVES BECAUSE YOU WILL BE IN A WHOLE WORLD OF SHIT ONCE THE GEARBOX DECIDES TO GO KABOOOM. IT WILL RUIN YOUR LIVES! THE GRIM REAPER OF AIRSOFT GUNS WILL HAUNT YOU!
KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!!!!!