I have had the S&T pro apart now and had a good lock at all the guts. This gun is a pain in the backside to strip and rebuild, oh my god! To get to anything everything has to come apart, its not easy to get in there. I can't say if the internals for the trigger, magazine and safety will stand the test of time but the internals of the gearbox is moderately interesting for anyone wanting to potentially get this gun.
A few notable things:
- Spring guide is plastic, no bearing. A pretty bad part compared to a decent gun, but because its quick release a real pain to replace.
- Cylinder pretty basic non ported. Cylinder head is plastic and seals poorly.
- Piston is all plastic (nice yellow pretty weak spongy plastic) as is the piston head. The piston head is awful and air seal is terrible because of it.
- Nozzle is plastic, no o-ring.
- There is 2x 8mm bushing but the rest of the gears are sat on steel bearings.
- The gearbox is shimmed but it does not run well out of the box.
- The trigger box is definitely unique, very awkward spring on this thing.
- Tappet is standard black plastic, spring is quite strong.
- Gears are all metal, not great quality but not awful either.
- Its greesed reasonably well on the gears and such. Some greese missing however on the EBB connector.
- The EBB is connected directly to the piston, so as the piston pulls back so does the fake bolt (which is quite heavy and provides some recoil) and as the piston pushes forward there is a catch that smacks into the fake bolt and pulls it forward along with the air. This is why the EBB is so loud on this gun, its metal on metal hitting under the power of the spring. A G&G M4 in comparison with EBB does it using air to push it back and then recycles the air back resulting in a nice clean movement and a minimal loss of power and lower impact on the way the air is pushed out.
- Gearbox shell itself seems pretty strong.
Hop unit is all plastic, completely custom design. No idea how well it holds hop settings yet, my guess based on playing with it is probably not well but we shall see when I skirmish it.
Having taken it apart, tried the gearbox on its own with power and it not shooting, then getting it stripped, testing the motor on its own (worked) and then the rebuilt gearbox all is working again. Still mid build but looks lie I hadk a gearbox lock that the motor couldn't get past, was a lot of tension in the gearbox when it came apart despite the spring being removed. I'll hopefully get it together, test fire it and skirmish with it tomorrow and then see how it goes.
Overall impression is the guns externals =poor, internals = poor to average, air seal and other consistency items= poor. Its no G&G or TM that is for certain, too much rubbish in the gearbox and plastic parts, none of which can be replaced with aftermarket.
