TM M3 Super 90 CQB Mod Guide

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

The M3 Super 90 from TM is one of the best non AEGs on the mar­ket.  It uses the now ubi­quit­ous 10 shot red shells and fires each pump with three BB’s from a triple inner bar­rel hid­den inside the outer.  Accur­acy is best described as excel­lent.  The BBs spread a little over range mean­ing that in all prac­tical terms the weapon is not so much a shot­gun but actu­ally a 3 shot counter sniper rifle.

If you think of it in these terms then this lends you the most effect­ive strategy for its use. As a rush­ing weapon against AEGs it looses out in the fact that it takes a long time, rel­at­ive to an AEG, to pump each round and not a little strength.  How­ever, used either defens­ively or as a first strike weapon it shines very bright.

Defens­ively, the spread, power and accur­acy are excel­lent for pick­ing off run­ners or assault­ing forces.  Aimed at head height you can hit two people who are tightly grouped with ease and you can effect­ively put down a bar­rage of ammo.

First strike is the guns use in an assault.  It is very hard to totally defeat a pos­i­tion defen­ded by three or more on your own, but partnered with another player or another gun you can eas­ily take out 6 oppon­ents espe­cially if they are caught on the wrong foot.

The only prob­lem is the default con­fig­ur­a­tion.  The full size M3 is very long indeed.  This makes it dif­fi­cult to use in the second con­fig­ur­a­tion of an assault and very hard to manœuvre through doors, etc in CQB.  It also makes it hard to sling cor­rectly so that you can drop it and switch weapons.  I am going to out­line the meth­ods I used to cor­rect these problems.

Firstly, the donor gun.  The M3 Super 90 is an expens­ive gun bought new, but many people sell theirs through the net and they are often avail­able on the for­ums.  After a few days hunt I bought one second hand for £100.  The only pro­viso is that you con­firm and be sure that the gun is work­ing cor­rectly and hasn’t been broken.  NOTE!  The M3’s com­mon fault is ter­minal to the gun, but invis­ible unless shoot­ing.  I will out­line this later…

Mod­ding for CQB.

CQB is known as follows:

Close Quar­ters Battle (CQB) or close quar­ters com­bat (CQC) is a type of fight­ing in which small units engage the enemy with per­sonal weapons at very short range, even to the point of hand-to-hand com­bat. In the typ­ical CQB scen­ario, the attack­ers try a very fast, viol­ent takeover of a vehicle or struc­ture con­trolled by the defend­ers, who usu­ally have no easy way to with­draw. Because enemies, hostages/civilians, and fel­low oper­at­ors can be closely inter­mingled, CQB demands a rapid assault and a pre­cise applic­a­tion of lethal force. The oper­at­ors need great pro­fi­ciency with their weapons, but also the abil­ity to make split-second decisions in order to limit friendly casualties.

I slightly dis­agree with this defin­tion.  For me CQB is fight­ing close, but not close enough to touch.  CQC is fight­ing within arms reach.  Both have dif­fer­ent skill sets.

Bas­cially, when I am in CQB I use one gun, when in CQC I use two.  So light guns are very important.

Tools you will need:

• Hack­saw
• Rino tape
• Mask­ing tape
• Long thin screwdrivers
• Pli­ers
• Dia­mond file
• Hex keys
• NOTE!  Many of these are found on the bet­ter Leathermans

Things you should buy:

• More shells — I have 9, bought whenever I saw them on the for­ums, £10
• Shell holder — free, came with tack vest, Vel­cro backed
• Torch and bar­rel mount — £12 eBay
• Smokeys TM M3 front grip — £30 Wolf Armouries
• G&P slid­ing M3 Stock — £65 Wolf Armouries

With all of these ready, let’s go!

Bar­rel length:

The default M3 bar­rel is an amaz­ing 1040mm long or 41 inches!  This is frankly mad­ness.  The inner bar­rel length is a good 6 inches shorter.  In other words, the extra length is not needed at all.  So let’s get rid of it!

Pull out the little round cover that is in the bot­tom of the two pipes.

Meas­ure the length of the inner bar­rels and mark this on the out­side of the outer bar­rel.  I used a ruler and pencil.

Unscrew the clip that attaches the two barrels.

Wrap the top and bot­tom bar­rel at the cut point with mask­ing tape.  This is to give you a line to fol­low and to stop slips mark­ing the barrel.

Using the hack­saw cut the top and then bot­tom bar­rels off.  Make sure that you hold the gun steady, observe all safety pre­cau­tions of using saws and most import­antly line up your cut with some­thing so that it is straight.  Leave enough bar­rel to get the clip back on and the laser mount on later.

Using the dia­mond file smooth off any burrs.

Done!

Next, the stock:

Pull off the rub­ber stock plug and unscrew the loooong screw.

Pull off the stock and hand guard.

Mark 1.9cm on the stock tube and be sure.

Put mask­ing tape around the cut line as before.

Cut the tube.

The cor­rect length is such that then you put on the new grip it will be flush on the inside.

Take off the slid­ing stock from the new tube

Using the long screw­driver, unscrew the hold­ing screw while hold­ing the round pack­ing plate with the pliers.

Dis­card the round pack­ing plate

Put the new grip on the tube, check that it is flush.

Using the long screw­driver feed the screw back into the tube and, while hold­ing the tube at such a rota­tion that the bumps are at the top, screw it to the gun. Be care­ful with this screw. It is crap. I man­aged to wreak the stock screw and had to fol­low the pro­ced­ure below.

1. If you screw the screw then don’t panic. If you can’t get it back out (the head threads) then simply put some super­glue on the screw­driver and then hold it in place on the screw head. When dry you should be able to get it out.
2. In the ori­ginal grip there is a sim­ilar screw to the new one, but it is longer. Using the hack­saw cut it to the required length. File it down to a flat end and it should work fine.

Once tightly on, replace the new butt and you are done here.

Extras:

• Remove the two screws on the under­side of the front grip. Basic­ally on the pump. Place the new Smokeys grip in place and, using the Allen keys, screw it in.

• Attach the bar­rel mount to the front of the stock and either place a laser or torch in this mount. I use an AA Maglite that has been con­ver­ted to LED using the small £9 kit you can get almost any­where. This also comes with a push but­ton on/off.

• Either glue or tape the shell holder to your required position.
• Remove the shell guard that holds the shells it. It is a pain to use in com­bat, the shells never fall out any­way and it probs’ will get bus­ted before long.

Done!

Now the gun is mod­ded for CQB.

• The stock can now be reduced in length so that when you are attack­ing you can hold the gun away from the body and manœuvre the backend with ease. On the other hand, when defend­ing you can now extend the stock and improve your aim.
• The bar­rel is much shorter, but import­antly has not lost any accur­acy. The new length is much easier to use in close quar­ters and around corners. Aim­ing time has been reduced and the focal point look­ing over the bar­rel is now closer, mean­ing that very fast snap shoot­ing it possible.
• These two mods’ mean that the gun can be eas­ily slung in many ways. Per­son­ally, I use a Chalker quick sling; the best sling for CQB ever invented.

• The front grip mods’ makes the gun much much easier to rack in a com­bat situ­ation and will stop the arm ache this gun gives for days after. It also acts as a sta­bil­ising point, like a tri­pod, when defending.
• The bar­rel mount allows you to over­come the lack of rails on this gun without resort­ing to the massively expens­ive RIS kit. NOTE! The RIS kit is also very very heavy. This guns weight is already for­wards and you don’t want to add any more if you ever intend to use the gun in one hand.
• Two gun­ning. Now the gun is lighter, you can hold it in one hand and CQC with a pis­tol in your other. This enables you to shoot very close tar­gets with the pis­tol and mid range threats with the increased accur­acy of the shotgun.

Lim­it­a­tions:

TM stock M3’s even­tu­ally break. The dam­age is ter­minal to the guns oper­a­tion and can only be checked by shoot­ing some test rounds. Basic­ally, the back-end of the inner bar­rels gets cracked by a stray BB being loaded. Fix­ing this is harsh. You need to cut open the bar­rel to get to it and have cus­tom made metal tubes placed over the cracked plastic ones. Once this is done you can also upgrade the springs and insert bet­ter inner bar­rels. When mine breaks I will write up how to do it with images, but you can find a good page on Google. If it has gone, I have a print out so PM me.

Gun in Use:

Happy newb owning!

Basho

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