Ian_Gere
Retired Moderator
- Apr 1, 2012
- 6,417
- 2,050
Gun Name and maker: AKMS NV (New Version) by LCT (Li Cheng Technique)
Cost: £219.00 from Fire Support
FPS: 340-ish
Hop up: plastic unit / adjustable
Mag Capacity: cw/ 600rnds hicap
Battery: stick type 8.4V / 9.6V
Plastic/Metal/Both: almost all metal
My opinion and overall comments: I was pretty excited when I ordered this AEG. I had heard a little about LCT and I checked out a few opinions of other forum members who confirmed my belief that this would be a fantastic gun. It came in a plain box with a factory certificate, both of which seemed encouraging, no-nonsense, here's your gun get on with it stylee...
Unfortunately however I soon started to feel differently. Before I get into that though, the metal body and stock feel excellent; really solid, rattle free, and a lot less flexible than I expected. The polymer handguards have a nice non-slip texture and feel hard enough to resist scratching easily but not brittle enough for chips to get knocked off the rails, even the tiny side rails feel a lot more solid than they look. Inside there is enough space for a battery to fit the full length of the handguards and battery tray, so you could even fit one of those G&P 2300mAh uber-sticks in there. The stock release button and the stock hinges are reassuringly stiff, as in "far too" but probably great once lubricated.
The fire selector / safety lever is a different story however. It seems to be a perennial problem with AK's that they get loose and drop from safe to full-auto / full-auto to just above semi and then when you try to engage semi it doesn't work... bla bla bla - well not with this one. LCT have obviously decided that the answer to the problem is to discourage us from using the lever at all, so their's will never loosen, and made it so tight that a right-hander cannot operate it in any other way than reaching over the top cover with the left hand. I realise some of you do that anyway, but I mean really stiff, as in if you find it too difficult to operate an average AK lever with your right index finger, even if you reach your whole hand forward off the pistol grip, you will struggle with your left hand over the cover of this gun...
I put my slight reservations over the fire selector to one side and loaded the mag: it looks like a standard metal AK hicap but I wouldn't be surprised if it's uber. Sadly I can't put off the real whinging any longer, because next, obviously, I fitted the mag into the gun.
A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but I wish I could go back and take a pic that said them better than this one lol! My point is that the BB tube pokes out into space. There's absolutely nothing to stop rough mag handling from banging the hop unit and, let's have it right, when you're in the heat of the moment you don't want to be worrying about having to be careful with your mag change, eh? That's surely the whole point of the way AK mags work: you stuff the leading edge with the groove into the front of the magwell and rock the mag back until it clicks - if you don't get it quite right it doesn't matter, a jiggle will settle it. Now, for my money, if it was a CNC aluminium hop BOLTED onto a steel barrel base assembly, then I'd still have a nagging doubt but I could live with it. No, it's plastic and SCREWED into the alloy metal base assembly (so it would have to be drilled to convert to bolts), which would probably crack if thumped through the hop with a mag.
Feverishly my hindbrain (or summat lol) began cataloguing various bits of metal and plastic I have lurking, for fixing things, and considering various glue and bolt options for retro-fitting some extra bodywork in there, as I did my best to ignore a couple of other things that set alarm bells ringing and adjusted the hop to full off and fired out of my back window over the tops of my neighbours' roofs. For the first few shots I thought there was something wrong with it, so I turned around and fired a few into a cardboard box with paper targets taped to it. The power seemed ok, it was just that when I fired out of the window again I got the same result - really appalling range, maybe 25m before starting to drop. OK, I thought, maybe this design relies heavily on hop, because it's LCT, it can't just be sh*t ffs!
I'm sorry to have to report that that last statement is not true. It not only can be, it is. With hop about a third on I found the maximum it could take without the trajectory rising but the range was still not quite 35m horizontal. Now I can get that out of my £35 pistol! I'll confess to being a bit spoiled because my first AEG was a CYMA CM .028U AK which, despite only costing £125, fired exceptionally well, but for £219 I expect better than sub two thirds as good.
It doesn't affect the performance, but how ugly is that lack of bodywork around the trigger so you can see the gearbox? Like I say though, that's just cosmetic, whereas...
...this nasty looking plastic screw in the bottom of the pistol grip, which itself...
...not only has this cheapo-toy-feeling seam down it, but also isn't solidly fixed to the receiver (it rotates about 5mm each way about its vertical axis!), brings the longterm robustness of the build into question.
Last but not least, what, friends, do we imagine this bit of metal dropped off before it was hastily welded to an AEG and sprayed?
To be perfectly honest, if the rest of the gun had been good enough, I could have quite got into this rough back plate as a bit of character, even though it makes the top cover a real pain in the hole to get back on once removed, but as it is, it just confirms for me what I'd started considering when the range turned out to be so crap: this isn't really a designed AEG at all; it's an LCT body kit with the other necessaries slapped together willy-nilly.
Before I even got it I'd decided I wanted a cleaning rod to replace the one which is unaccountably missing from under the barrel of this AK, but what I then had to consider was how much it would cost on top just to make it skirmishable: a Tight Bore Barrel £40-ish, Aluminium Hop Unit £30, Hop Rubber £10 and then the unfathomable possibilities, Air Nozzle £10, Cylinder Head £15, but who knows why the Pistol Grip isn't solid? I'd want to replace it for its look and feel anyway, but it's not the same shape as those on TM AK's or clones, which means trying to find one from some company with their own design, and who knows whether that poxy plastic screw goes into a standard motor cage? I could see this ending up with me replacing everything except the body kit!
No. I sent it back.
Overall rating: Body Kit 8/10 ~ Whole AEG 4/10
Edit to add: All Images Uploaded with ImageShack.us
CORRECTION: The G&P uber-stick batteries I referred to above are 2200mAh not 2300 - the individual cells are the same diameter as those in any mini battery pack, but they're longer, thus a whole 9.6V stick is humongous!
Cost: £219.00 from Fire Support
FPS: 340-ish
Hop up: plastic unit / adjustable
Mag Capacity: cw/ 600rnds hicap
Battery: stick type 8.4V / 9.6V
Plastic/Metal/Both: almost all metal
My opinion and overall comments: I was pretty excited when I ordered this AEG. I had heard a little about LCT and I checked out a few opinions of other forum members who confirmed my belief that this would be a fantastic gun. It came in a plain box with a factory certificate, both of which seemed encouraging, no-nonsense, here's your gun get on with it stylee...
Unfortunately however I soon started to feel differently. Before I get into that though, the metal body and stock feel excellent; really solid, rattle free, and a lot less flexible than I expected. The polymer handguards have a nice non-slip texture and feel hard enough to resist scratching easily but not brittle enough for chips to get knocked off the rails, even the tiny side rails feel a lot more solid than they look. Inside there is enough space for a battery to fit the full length of the handguards and battery tray, so you could even fit one of those G&P 2300mAh uber-sticks in there. The stock release button and the stock hinges are reassuringly stiff, as in "far too" but probably great once lubricated.
The fire selector / safety lever is a different story however. It seems to be a perennial problem with AK's that they get loose and drop from safe to full-auto / full-auto to just above semi and then when you try to engage semi it doesn't work... bla bla bla - well not with this one. LCT have obviously decided that the answer to the problem is to discourage us from using the lever at all, so their's will never loosen, and made it so tight that a right-hander cannot operate it in any other way than reaching over the top cover with the left hand. I realise some of you do that anyway, but I mean really stiff, as in if you find it too difficult to operate an average AK lever with your right index finger, even if you reach your whole hand forward off the pistol grip, you will struggle with your left hand over the cover of this gun...
I put my slight reservations over the fire selector to one side and loaded the mag: it looks like a standard metal AK hicap but I wouldn't be surprised if it's uber. Sadly I can't put off the real whinging any longer, because next, obviously, I fitted the mag into the gun.
A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but I wish I could go back and take a pic that said them better than this one lol! My point is that the BB tube pokes out into space. There's absolutely nothing to stop rough mag handling from banging the hop unit and, let's have it right, when you're in the heat of the moment you don't want to be worrying about having to be careful with your mag change, eh? That's surely the whole point of the way AK mags work: you stuff the leading edge with the groove into the front of the magwell and rock the mag back until it clicks - if you don't get it quite right it doesn't matter, a jiggle will settle it. Now, for my money, if it was a CNC aluminium hop BOLTED onto a steel barrel base assembly, then I'd still have a nagging doubt but I could live with it. No, it's plastic and SCREWED into the alloy metal base assembly (so it would have to be drilled to convert to bolts), which would probably crack if thumped through the hop with a mag.
Feverishly my hindbrain (or summat lol) began cataloguing various bits of metal and plastic I have lurking, for fixing things, and considering various glue and bolt options for retro-fitting some extra bodywork in there, as I did my best to ignore a couple of other things that set alarm bells ringing and adjusted the hop to full off and fired out of my back window over the tops of my neighbours' roofs. For the first few shots I thought there was something wrong with it, so I turned around and fired a few into a cardboard box with paper targets taped to it. The power seemed ok, it was just that when I fired out of the window again I got the same result - really appalling range, maybe 25m before starting to drop. OK, I thought, maybe this design relies heavily on hop, because it's LCT, it can't just be sh*t ffs!
I'm sorry to have to report that that last statement is not true. It not only can be, it is. With hop about a third on I found the maximum it could take without the trajectory rising but the range was still not quite 35m horizontal. Now I can get that out of my £35 pistol! I'll confess to being a bit spoiled because my first AEG was a CYMA CM .028U AK which, despite only costing £125, fired exceptionally well, but for £219 I expect better than sub two thirds as good.
It doesn't affect the performance, but how ugly is that lack of bodywork around the trigger so you can see the gearbox? Like I say though, that's just cosmetic, whereas...
...this nasty looking plastic screw in the bottom of the pistol grip, which itself...
...not only has this cheapo-toy-feeling seam down it, but also isn't solidly fixed to the receiver (it rotates about 5mm each way about its vertical axis!), brings the longterm robustness of the build into question.
Last but not least, what, friends, do we imagine this bit of metal dropped off before it was hastily welded to an AEG and sprayed?
To be perfectly honest, if the rest of the gun had been good enough, I could have quite got into this rough back plate as a bit of character, even though it makes the top cover a real pain in the hole to get back on once removed, but as it is, it just confirms for me what I'd started considering when the range turned out to be so crap: this isn't really a designed AEG at all; it's an LCT body kit with the other necessaries slapped together willy-nilly.
Before I even got it I'd decided I wanted a cleaning rod to replace the one which is unaccountably missing from under the barrel of this AK, but what I then had to consider was how much it would cost on top just to make it skirmishable: a Tight Bore Barrel £40-ish, Aluminium Hop Unit £30, Hop Rubber £10 and then the unfathomable possibilities, Air Nozzle £10, Cylinder Head £15, but who knows why the Pistol Grip isn't solid? I'd want to replace it for its look and feel anyway, but it's not the same shape as those on TM AK's or clones, which means trying to find one from some company with their own design, and who knows whether that poxy plastic screw goes into a standard motor cage? I could see this ending up with me replacing everything except the body kit!
No. I sent it back.
Overall rating: Body Kit 8/10 ~ Whole AEG 4/10
Edit to add: All Images Uploaded with ImageShack.us
CORRECTION: The G&P uber-stick batteries I referred to above are 2200mAh not 2300 - the individual cells are the same diameter as those in any mini battery pack, but they're longer, thus a whole 9.6V stick is humongous!
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