The first one I ever had was second hand and the guy that sold it to me said it had never been used because he bought it for a milsim event and it didn't arrive in time...
Well when it did arrive, the internals were knackered, piston was stripped and it was only managing 250fps - It was fitted with all stock parts, but that's not to say he didn't just refit the stock parts to sell it to me 'cos it definitely had been used, a lot, for the piston to be that crapped up.
Off the back of that, I had a very bad view of them for quite a while, unsure whether to trust the guy that sold it to me, or not. So I avoided them.
However, I recently bought one brand new to start my L119 project and the out of the box performance was phenomenal! Upgrades were unnecessary. I stuck a red dot on it and it was inch perfect out to 45m, all with stock parts.
Being me though, I thought I'd rewire it to the stock, shim the gearbox and fit a new hop and barrel. Hop and barrel came first and it has to be said that it didn't react well to a 6.01 tightbore or a Madbull blue bucking, the blue bucking is too fat for you to dial it fully off, causing all manner of jamming issues and the barrel must've been slightly narrower than the inside edge of the hop unit or something, because I got the impression BBs were catching on something, shots would also veer off to one side very aggressively after about 30m and I know it's not the tight bore I had because I now use it with spectacular results in my L85.
In short, they're very good rifles out of the box, the best I've seen in fact. However, if you're thinking of touching the insides of them, be weary of them disliking barrels and hops as mine did.
The rest of the issues I had are easily fixable, I just don't have the patience to deal with them because, as everyone probably knows by now, I passionate detest version 2 gearboxes.
I'd give them my vote, I would buy another one, probably the SAM-R at some point over the next few years. But I won't be planning on making any internal modifications.
Probably a lot more info than you asked for, but I thought I'd outline my background as well as current experience with them, to avoid any accidental bias to one experience or the other.
