Pistol considerations. Need some help.

[Twist]

So I've never used pistol but have been considering getting one. I was thinking about getting an AEP and was hoping to spend around £60 (with a 10er tolerance either side) on it at most. 

Does anyone have any experience with the cheaper AEPs, I'm also open to suggestions as to which to go with.

Thanks in advance.

Edited yesterday at 21:10 by Twist

[Isawatree]

aeps are mostly garbage, very underpowered, poor range. If price is your main concern you could consider an E&C glock which usually runs about 80-90 quid. 

[Twist]

8 minutes ago, Isawatree said:

aeps are mostly garbage, very underpowered, poor range. If price is your main concern you could consider an E&C glock which usually runs about 80-90 quid. 

Is the E&C glock an AEP? Also that's a bit rich for my blood currently, most I can push the boat out is £70.

Reason for wanting an AEP is cheaper overall running costs (Don't have to buy gas). Doesn't need to be a banger of a gun... no pun intended, I'd be happy to save the cash and just spitball the BBs out of a plastic straw, it's more to have a second life if weapon hit.

 would cheap out on a 20 quid spring pistol but I'm feeling like the durability on them would be lesser than a £60 AEP.

Edited yesterday at 21:18 by Twist

[EDcase]

As above, I would urge you to forget an AEP.  They are quite inefficient and underwhelming.

 

HERE is the lowest price GBP that will give you the experience of proper blowback action but may not be as accurate or consistent with more expensive ones.

Of course you'll need some gas and I recommend THIS one.  (Of course its cheaper if you buy in bulk)

 

OR

 

THIS one is quite highly regarded as more powerful but without the blowback action (which is half the fun in my opinion)

[Impulse]

28 minutes ago, EDcase said:

As above, I would urge you to forget an AEP.  They are quite inefficient and underwhelming.

 

HERE is the lowest price GBP that will give you the experience of proper blowback action but may not be as accurate or consistent with more expensive ones.

Of course you'll need some gas and I recommend THIS one.  (Of course its cheaper if you buy in bulk)

 

OR

 

THIS one is quite highly regarded as more powerful but without the blowback action (which is half the fun in my opinion)

 

I would warn against Raven pistols. I have never heard a good review on them that wasn't paid for in Airsoft International 

 

If you want a cheap pistol, I will echo @EDcase on the second one though. An ASG or STTI mk23 with a hop rubber upgrade (I like 4uantum or Flamingo rubbers) and a hadron h-arm goes incredibly hard for about £80 all in, but my experience with them just out of the box is pretty lacklustre; my STTI mk23 barely hit 30m out of the box, but a hop rubber and h-arm or h-plate solved that immediately and they're not expensive upgrades. For a GBB, the Action Army AAP-01 is really good for the price too and will be fine out of the box and even have full auto, though without upgrades I'd caution against using the full auto as the sears tend to shatter if you use full auto too much. Plus all consistency goes out of the window when you flick the brrrrttt switch.

 

AEPs are usually not worth it, and that's coming from someone who owns a TM mp7 and an ASG scorpion, both of which are built like AEPs but a little bit bigger. When it comes to pistols, even the more expensive Cyma mosfet ones are underwhelming, and they're probably the best ones available. You won't get much more than 0.5J out of it, it won't hop anything heavier than a .25 and you'll probably get about 30m range, maybe 40m for a higher end one. My TM mp7 is larger than a regular AEP and costs about £250 new and that just about floats .28s out to 45m. I don't think I'd ever buy an AEP pistol; even my little AEP SMGs barely get any use.

[EDcase]

Clearly the Raven (Nuprol) being so cheap will be lower quality than more expensive options but its an introduction to blowback pistols within your budget.  If it doesn't work properly you can return it.

Keep in mind it probably won't last as long as more expensive options but it may be OK.

I have a few by Vorsk which are also budget options by Nuprol and they perform adequately with no problems so far.

 

 

 

Edited 17 hours ago by EDcase

[The_Lord_Poncho]

If you are have a UKARA number (hopefully if you have played three times as indicated you will have?), you can get the E&C glocks from Hong Kong for about £45. I've had one for a while, and they are pretty good. Spare mags for £13. Postage will add to the cost, but if I'm guessing, you could probably get a pistol, spare mag, and get it posted to you for £80-90.

 

18 Airsoft is a good shop, postage usually less that two weeks. https://www.18airsoft.com/collections/gbb-pistol

 

Cans of gas can often be cheaper to buy from sites, but if you aren’t using a pistol much, you shouldn't get through much.

 

Just make sure that you write your UKARA number next to your name when you type in your address to minimise the likelihood of customs issues.

[Fatboy40]

10 hours ago, Impulse said:

AEPs are usually not worth it, and that's coming from someone who owns a TM mp7 and an ASG scorpion, both of which are built like AEPs but a little bit bigger. When it comes to pistols, even the more expensive Cyma mosfet ones are underwhelming, and they're probably the best ones available.

 

"AEP's" with the Tokyo Marui "CMG" gearbox in them, so the MP7's / MAC 10's, can have work done on them to make them damned good (Kingdom of Airsoft in Scotland can do this / sell parts, but is it worth buying a £200 AEP and spending another £200 or so on it?).

 

My son's has a CYMA AEP with a MOSFET in it and my God the trigger response was still terrible, it was the first airsoft item he ever sold on. 

 

@Twist under very specific circumstances an AEP can be used in a skirmish, if you're well hidden so see the enemy first and they can't see you, but the real downside is the awful trigger response so you'll never win in a one to one firefight (the AEP trigger delay is enough for a good GBBP player to fire and duck a little).

[Impulse]

15 minutes ago, Fatboy40 said:

 

"AEP's" with the Tokyo Marui "CMG" gearbox in them, so the MP7's / MAC 10's, can have work done on them to make them damned good (Kingdom of Airsoft in Scotland can do this / sell parts, but is it worth buying a £200 AEP and spending another £200 or so on it?).

 

My son's has a CYMA AEP with a MOSFET in it and my God the trigger response was still terrible, it was the first airsoft item he ever sold on. 

 

@Twist under very specific circumstances an AEP can be used in a skirmish, if you're well hidden so see the enemy first and they can't see you, but the real downside is the awful trigger response so you'll never win in a one to one firefight (the AEP trigger delay is enough for a good GBBP player to fire and duck a little).

 

That's my plan with my scorpion; I want to make it into a little monster as a sniper secondary. Got a shoulder rig that will hold it, and I also have two drum mags for it. If it goes well, I'll probably send them my mp7 as well, but that actually shoots fine out of the box.

 

But you are correct. CMGs are... similar but different to AEPs, and far more capable of upgrading. Traditional AEPs are basically as good as they will be when you them, and that level of performance is awful, especially the trigger response as you say; it's absolutely horrendous.

 

One other consideration with AEPs is... your target won't always feel your hits, especially at range. I've had it before where I've tapped someone, a trustworthy player that I know and who does take his hits, with a single shot at 40m with my mp7 and he turned and shot me because he simply did not feel that .25 being fired at 0.6J hitting his plate carrier at that range. It's an unfortunate reality of airsoft and isn't always because your target is a cheating bastard  

[Tackle]

As others have said, aep's are lacklustre at best, imho you'd be better off saving a bit more cash & going down the gbb route.

A quick browse of the classifieds shows a plethora of reasonable guns for £100 or less.

But stay away from raven, nuprol, or any of the other moody brands, they'll just leave you with a poor initial gbb experience. 

So get an idea of models you like, much of it is cosmetic, then look at what's available & cross reference for reviews, but take much of what you see on YouTube with a pinch of salt, many are paid reviews or kiddies that don't know or have any better comparison experience. 

 

[Twist]

Thanks again everyone for all the advice and recommendations, it's genuinely appreciated.

 

Of course, if I could grab a GBBP, gas and possibly a spare mag for £60 (£70 at a hard push), that’d be awesome. I had a look on 18Airsoft and I do see some Double Dell pistols around £40, plus £10 - £15 for a spare mag, plus £10 for 300g gas, without shipping that's within budget but I've heard DD aren't great.
 

I get that AEPs aren’t the top performers compared to gas pistols, but given where I’m at financially, I’m just after a cheap secondary that’s sturdier than a £25 spring pistol and doesn’t have ongoing costs (like gas). I’ve got a bit of birthday money (£60) left over, and I’m not in the most stable financial position right now, so the cheap AEP as a one-off cost seems like the best way to feed the airsoft addiction and still feed myself.

 

A 300g green gas bottle costs around a tenner, which is half the cost of a day's airsofting. Granted, I’m not sure how many mag fills I’d get from a 300g bottle (guesstimate of 30, found here, though the experiment doesn't seem to have been fully completed), but for now, I'd rather spend my cash on actual gameplay rather than consumables. (I already have a metric assload of BBs, so that’s not a recurring cost currently.)

 

Once I’m more financially stable, I do plan on getting a gas pistol, so having an AEP as a secondary would also come in handy for lending to friends if they don’t have gear or a secondary.

Edited 8 hours ago by Twist

[Galvatron]

36 minutes ago, Twist said:

I get that AEPs aren’t the top performers compared to gas pistols, but given where I’m at financially, I’m just after a cheap secondary that’s sturdier than a £25 spring pistol and doesn’t have ongoing costs (like gas). I’ve got a bit of birthday money (£60) left over, and I’m not in the most stable financial position right now, so the cheap AEP as a one-off cost seems like the best way to feed the airsoft addiction and still feed myself.

 

 

Well that's not true. AEP has ongoing costs in needing to charge batteries and the fact that rechargable batteries have finite charging cycles so they will need to be replaced in time. 

 

Consumables are part of play, some are just more overt than others.

 

I don't even think AEP is worth it as a stop-gap "solution" because they're barely better than when I used one 20+ years ago. If anything, I'd say the gap between AEP and GBBP is greater now than it was back then.

 

The other ongoing cost you perhaps haven't considered is depreciation. AEP is undesirable on the brand new market, even more so in the used market as the battery may be in poor charging health and getting spares may be a pain.

 

If I can be so bold to speak for the other respondents, we're saying this because all of these criticisms of AEP are like cases where we've seen no shortage of people who despite advice given to them, they went ahead anyway and bought something they went on to really dislike and became more frustrated trying to resell it.

 

Edited 8 hours ago by Galvatron

[Anonymoose]

16 hours ago, Twist said:

So I've never used pistol but have been considering getting one.

 

They're not used much anyway unless you're carrying a DMR/sniper and have a minimum engagement distance. If you haven't needed one so far, you probably won't unless you change to DMR/sniper.

 

Honestly you're better off saving the money. I take a pistol to every game and practically never use it.

[Lozart]

1 hour ago, Anonymoose said:

 

They're not used much anyway unless you're carrying a DMR/sniper and have a minimum engagement distance. If you haven't needed one so far, you probably won't unless you change to DMR/sniper.

 

Honestly you're better off saving the money. I take a pistol to every game and practically never use it.

 

Yeah, but pistols are cool.

[The_Lord_Poncho]

20 minutes ago, Lozart said:

 

Yeah, but pistols are cool.

As I usually use something with a MED quite a lot, I tend to use my pistol quite a lot. In many cases i could probably retire a few meters and use the DMR/bolt action/or leave the task to my AEG toting brethren - but you are right - a bold pistol charge is a lot of fun!

[Anonymoose]

15 minutes ago, Lozart said:

 

Yeah, but pistols are cool.

 

Oh absolutely, and that's why i have many and always carry one in games, but the choice between spending £60 on a crap one and going without, i'd save the money.

[Lozart]

4 minutes ago, Anonymoose said:

 

Oh absolutely, and that's why i have many and always carry one in games, but the choice between spending £60 on a crap one and going without, i'd save the money.

 

Fair.

 

 

[EDcase]

I'll say its better to get an extra magazine for your rifle than go for an AEP.

I used to carry a pistol too but only used it a couple of times at all and the hassle of prepping it and clearing after a game was almost not worth it.

Only snipers and DMR truly need a secondary.

 

I still think the Raven is good enough to get a feel for their use without breaking the bank but if you can't even afford gas then best forget the idea until you have more money collected.

 

 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by EDcase

[ButcherBill]

Please don't waste your money on an AEP, you will regret it.

Get a used pistol from the classifieds, they're usually good value & might come with an extra mag too, gas isn't expensive either & you'll never use much in a pistol.

I've yet to use a secondary in a game (don't play much to be fair), so a used pistol would do the job for you.

[Impulse]

27 minutes ago, The_Lord_Poncho said:

As I usually use something with a MED quite a lot, I tend to use my pistol quite a lot. In many cases i could probably retire a few meters and use the DMR/bolt action/or leave the task to my AEG toting brethren - but you are right - a bold pistol charge is a lot of fun!

 

Part of the reason I love my bolt actions and DMRs. An MED is just an excuse to use my pistol more.

 

I usually advise people looking for a pistol to go with an AEG to go with the mk23 purely because it gives them something that their AEG won't do for them (the capacity for silent kills). You will rarely, if ever, use your pistol for actual gunfighting since your rifle is just the better option and midcaps last a long time, so why not have a pistol that does something your rifle doesn't do. Squishy trigger isn't really an issue if all you're using it for is taking the occasional silent shot.

[Rogerborg]

My AEP is in its component pieces, awaiting yet another Quixotic attempt to make it usable.

 

As stock, they're all about 0.4J / 200fps with 0.2g, maybe a fraction more.  As noted, the semi auto trigger response is poor, even when running them on lipo.  The cheaper ones that come with nimh batteries have truly dreadful semi response, and given that they're only really usable in CQB due to the low energy, you'll always be at a big disadvantage in any snap-shot duel.

 

They do work, after a fashion, but you'll always be disappointed with them.