Double Eagle M904g – Aka the Original Q Honey Badger

[mightyjebus]

 

A brief history of the RS Honey Badger.

Developed in 300 BLK ammunition for the replacement of the US SOG MP5 SD range however it was never adopted but AAC and then Q went on to refine the Honey Badger and offer it to the civilian market. Currently the range includes an SBR, Pistol (actually an SBR but with brace instead of stock) and lastly a suppressed model.

 

The Double Eagle M904G.

Double Eagle is normally a name I have shunned as they have made some pretty bad, low powered airsoft guns over the years and it would take a lot for me to even consider buying anything from DE. When I saw the new M904G from DE appear on the Taiwangun website I almost overlooked but I thought I’d have a closer look at it seemed to be a good external copy of the real Honey Badger. After looking into DE’s offering a bit more it got my interest when it claimed it had an adjustable trigger, Mosfet as standard and claimed to be able to binary fire out the box.

For info Binary fire is the latest crazy in the US RS market where you get 1 round fired when you pull the trigger and another round off when you release the trigger. I have a mate in the US who has built an SBR in .45 with a binary trigger and it’s mental to fire.

Another selling factor for me was the price. DE are offering various models and the M904G can be had for £106. That’s right, an AEG with mosfet, binary trigger, hair trigger and adjustable burst fire (1-5 rounds per trigger pull) for 104 quid. It’s either going to extremely crap or extremely awesome at that price.

 

So after ordering and waiting a few days the AEG has turned up. It’s packaged inside a nice box with foam protection. Inside the box you get the AEG, Hicap magazine (300 rds), cleaning/unjamming rod, a wind up key for the magazine (also has the standard wheel on the bottom to wind if you want), a spare Deans connector, a Deans to Mini Tamiya connector, a decent manual and a Mosfet setup guide.

 

 

The rifle is made of polymer apart from the outer barrel, Flash hider, Gas pipe, Fake bolt cover, sliding stock rails, part of the magazine catch, charging handle and the nuts and bolts holding everything together.

The polymer used is very thick and has no wobbles, creaks or thin spots. Overall it seems rock solid and will take a lot of abuse.

 

Looking in a bit more detail, starting from the front and working back, the flash hider is a metal copy of the Q Cherry Bomb flash hider which has threads on the outside to take a Q flash hider (Thunder Chicken or Trash Panda suppressors) however I don’t think anyone makes an airsoft version of these so if you want to fit a suppressor or another flash hider you an as the flash hider is held on with a grub screw to the -14mm threaded outer barrel.

 

 

The metal outer barrel has a low-profile gas block fitted and is surrounded by a M lock style rail system. The top of the rail is full picatinny and is held on using a unique clamp system which relies on a nut to hold everything in place. The clamp system seems to be made of metal and also seems rock solid.

 

 

The upper receiver is in the honey badger shape with cut-outs for the sliding stock. There are also some trades for the FALCON fire control system which is the name for the mosfet inside the gearbox. The dust cover looks to be metal and is spring loaded. The charging handle is a raptor style one and when pulled back makes the dust cover flick down however the fake bolt cover doesn’t lock to the rear so you need to hold the charging handle to the rear to adjust the Hop up.

The lower receiver has a fake bolt release, metal receiver pins that are locked in place with allen headed screws, a DE trademark, an extended mag release button, plastic selectors and a very well textured and ergonomic pistol grip.

The trigger is plastic but doesn’t have any flex when pulled to the rear. The trigger guard is designed for gloves and is moulded into the lower receiver (just like the real thing).

 

 

The stock is in the honey badger style and inside is the battery wires which have a deans connector as standard. The Deans to Mini Tamiya in the box allow you to use a battery with a mini Tamiya connector if you want. The sliding stock has 3 positions but if you wanted to extend it more then cutting slots into the metal rails wouldn’t be an issue.

The sliding stock is spring loaded so when you press the 2 side buttons to free the stock it pops out slightly making it easier to deploy.

The stock cap is more like a cross between a stock pad and brace as it has a cutout on the lower part and there is a little lateral movement but nothing to panic about.

There is also a sling loop at the point where the stock meets the lower receiver.

 

 

The AEG comes with a set of polymer iron sights and these seem to be a copy of the IMI Defense polymer flip up sights. The sights have working elevation and windage adjustments and lack the IMI trademarks.

 

 

Let’s move onto how it fires.

So attaching a 7.4v Lipo in the stock tube you hear the mosfet beep to let you know it’s good. Out of the box it is set for maximum trigger pull, safe-semi-auto but after a couple of minutes following the supplied mosfet programming guide I had it on a hair trigger, with binary fire and burst set to 3 bb’s per trigger pull. Resetting it back to standard takes about 5 seconds if want to start again.

 

With the 7.4v fitted it really is a snappy firing AEG. So snappy  that when I fitted a 11.1 Lipo I didn’t see much different in semi but to be honest all this goes out the window anyway when you have the binary trigger set as when you spam the trigger in Semi there are BB’s flying all over the place. It’s awesome.

Mine is firing too hot for UK sites so I’ll need to change the spring out for something a bit lower in FPS.

I’ll also mention that the hop unit is a rotary designed one and looks to work well with .2g’s and I’ll try it out later with some heavier BB’s to see what it can handle.

 

 

Part 2 will be a strip down and there is very little I want to change externally (unlike me) and all I will do to this one is fit a holosight and look at possibilities for fitting a tracer.

Initial impressions are that it’s ridiculously good AEG for the money and I’m looking at Double Eagle in a new light.

Here’s a size comparison of the 904G next to a ARP 9.

 

 

 

 

[Guest]

Great review mate, almost makes me want a sowing machine lol

 

Is it quick change spring?

[mightyjebus]

don't know yet as I haven't stripped it that far. it's on my to-do list

 

[Skara]

wow, looks really promising!!!!!

[mightyjebus]

I did a quick field strip and found tha the gearbox is a quick spring change version but it's anything but quick change if you don't have a very long 4mm allen key. I had to jury rig something to get it out.

 

This is the offending bolt. I wish they had used a normal star headed bolt.

 

Getting the spring out is easy one you get the stock pipe off. I swapped my spring for a Modify S90+ and now I have an FPS of 310. I might try a S100 to see if I can get close to 345.

 

The hop unit is plastic but seems good enough for the job.

 

I'm going to try a few differnet BB weights tomorrow to see how it handles up to .36g

 

[Tackle]

Quick change spring too, this just keeps getting better, I can see Taiwangun selling out soon lol

[Guest]

Oh that’s awesome (rushes off to check bank account)

 

👍🏻

[mightyjebus]

So I tested the AEG today using various weighted BB's and the results are:

0.2g upto and including 0.28g no problem with hop or overhop

0.3g upwards don't hop.

 

I'll probably run 0.28g BB's until I get around to S hopping the inner barrel. If you buy 1 and want to run heavier BB's then you will need to look at another hop rubber/bucking/hop unit to run the heavier BB's.

 

I also tried to measure the inner barrel as I'm curious to see what the inner diameter is however I ran into a couple of snags. The first being the flash hider. The grub screw that holds it on and the flash hider actually have thread lock on them. I wasn't expecting this for such a cheap AEG and is something normally seen on high end AEG's. I had to end up press fitting a star drive bit into the grub screw to get it out and used set of pipe pliers to get the flash hider off. This sounds like a negative but its not. It just means the build quality coming from DE is pretty high. You can see on the picture below the red residue of the threadlock on the inside of the flash hider.

 

Once I got the flash hider off I used my calipers to measure the inside of the inner barrel and got a weird reading of 7.4mm as I pushed the calipers in further it got smaller 6.4 until I couldn't fit the calipers in any further.

It turns out the inner barrel has a taper for the last 15mm of the inner barrel. Again this came as a surprise on such a low cost AEG.

 

I haven't stripped the gearbox yet but I did find this good photo on Taiwangun showing the internals.

 

I've pretty much set on this layout for now (apart from a 3D printed battery entender which is printing as I type this).

 

 

If anyone is interested it's now £104 on Taiwangun and this is a mental price for such a good little AEG. I'm tempted to go buy one of the longer models as I think this whole series from DE could be very good value for money.

 

*EDITED as I don't know which way a red dot goes on a rifle

[Guest]

1 hour ago, mightyjebus said:

So I tested the AEG today using various weighted BB's and the results are:

0.2g upto and including 0.28g no problem with hop or overhop

0.3g upwards don't hop.

 

I'll probably run 0.28g BB's until I get around to S hopping the inner barrel. If you buy 1 and want to run heavier BB's then you will need to look at another hop rubber/bucking/hop unit to run the heavier BB's.

 

I also tried to measure the inner barrel as I'm curious to see what the inner diameter is however I ran into a couple of snags. The first being the flash hider. The grub screw that holds it on and the flash hider actually have thread lock on them. I wasn't expecting this for such a cheap AEG and is something normally seen on high end AEG's. I had to end up press fitting a star drive bit into the grub screw to get it out and used set of pipe pliers to get the flash hider off. This sounds like a negative but its not. It just means the build quality coming from DE is pretty high. You can see on the picture below the red residue of the threadlock on the inside of the flash hider.

 

Once I got the flash hider off I used my calipers to measure the inside of the inner barrel and got a weird reading of 7.4mm as I pushed the calipers in further it got smaller 6.4 until I couldn't fit the calipers in any further.

It turns out the inner barrel has a taper for the last 15mm of the inner barrel. Again this came as a surprise on such a low cost AEG.

 

I haven't stripped the gearbox yet but I did find this good photo on Taiwangun showing the internals.

 

I've pretty much set on this layout for now (apart from a 3D printed battery entender which is printing as I type this).

 

If anyone is interested it's now £104 on Taiwangun and this is a mental price for such a good little AEG. I'm tempted to go buy one of the longer models as I think this whole series from DE could be very good value for money.

Your sight is on backwards

[mightyjebus]

lol..that teaches me for rushing

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, mightyjebus said:

lol..that teaches me for rushing

Superb review though, thank you

[Skara]

Them femme fatale vibes

[mightyjebus]

I forgot to mention I used 4 differnet brand/type of magazines and didn't have any feed issues with any of them.

 

Supplied mag - good

Hicap Pmag - good

Midcap Emag - good

Lonex fast mag - good

 

 

[Zarrin]

Seems kind of unbelievable what you are getting for the price.

I too have always associated DE with the creme de la crap of airsoft guns, but it looks like they wanna play with the big boys now.

[mightyjebus]

21 minutes ago, Zarrin said:

Seems kind of unbelievable what you are getting for the price.

I too have always associated DE with the creme de la crap of airsoft guns, but it looks like they wanna play with the big boys now.

I agree. Normally when I review airsoft guns there is usually some soft of negative point but I'm finding it hard to find anything slightly wrong with the DE I just reviewed.

 

I think that if all the DE models work as well as this then the big boys are going to have to step up to compete.

[Tackle]

I'm gutted, finally found a site I wanna stick with, but they've just announced they're no longer running games there, & me one game away from getting my ukara up & running again after about 6 years without it, time I get it sorted again no doubt the price will have soared lol. 

@mightyjebus, it's all your bloody fault 😜

[mightyjebus]

16 minutes ago, Tackle said:

I'm gutted, finally found a site I wanna stick with, but they've just announced they're no longer running games there, & me one game away from getting my ukara up & running again after about 6 years without it, time I get it sorted again no doubt the price will have soared lol. 

@mightyjebus, it's all your bloody fault 😜

sorry mate, tell your wallet I'm sorry!

[mightyjebus]

Battery extension printed and fitted.

 

[mightyjebus]

inner barrel is 215mm long

 

I also found a youtube video from DE and it looks like there will be a tan version released as well. Also of interest is DE state that if you put a better motor inside the binary firing will be even faster.

 

 

[Tackle]

2 hours ago, mightyjebus said:

inner barrel is 215mm long

 

I also found a youtube video from DE and it looks like there will be a tan version released as well. Also of interest is DE state that if you put a better motor inside the binary firing will be even faster.

 

 

There's a lot of kit on the wall behind him, be interested to know is it all the DE range & how much of it does, or possibly will in the future, contain their new tech ?

[mightyjebus]

Pheas youtube review

 

[Speedbird_666]

Tackle posted the link to this thread on the Z1 forums. I'm so tempted to order one, I even have it in my TaiwanGun basket ready to pay.

 

mightyjebus - have you had chance to open up the gearbox? I've seen the pictures, and it looks decent. But the marketing pictures of Specna Orion gearboxes also look decent too, but in reality they are rubbish (at least in the case of my son's Edge).

 

But £116 shipped. Damn, that's cheap.

[mightyjebus]

I haven't opened the gearbox yet. The main reason is it works very well and I want to run it in anger before opening the gearbox up.

 

I've seen nothing on the build quality so far to indicate that the gearbox will be rubbish. I'm inclined to think it might actually be good inside.

[Speedbird_666]

6 minutes ago, mightyjebus said:

I haven't opened the gearbox yet. The main reason is it works very well and I want to run it in anger before opening the gearbox up.

 

I've seen nothing on the build quality so far to indicate that the gearbox will be rubbish. I'm inclined to think it might actually be good inside.

 

Fair enough.

 

I don't suppose you have any more pics of the 3D printed battery extension? I'd be interested to what space is available with that added.

[mightyjebus]

here's a couple of pictures. You can easily get a 11.1v 1200Mah LIPO inside. I've made it long enough that the stock locks into position and adds a bit more support to the extension.

 

I'll put the extension up on thingiverse once I do a bit more tidying up of the model.