Outside Context

The boys from Snatch review the Clas­sic Army SCAR.

- Why are we review­ing the SCAR Turk­ish? What’s wrong with your cur­rent AEG?

- Oh noth­ing Tommy, its tip top…I’m just not sure about the colour…

Oh, how the worm has turned.

Clas­sic Army were once the pariah of air­soft.  Their guns were plagued with unre­li­ab­il­ity and their repu­ta­tion was a joke.

The latest gen­er­a­tion of CA guns have been, well, some­thing spe­cial.  Power­ful, spe­cial­ist and much much more reli­able.  Not as reli­able as Tokyo Marui’s guns, but much higher in spec.  This change star­ted with the amaz­ing CQB, which very quickly became con­sidered as the best “off the shelf” gun in the world.  Sure some of them had prob­lems, espe­cially with the pis­ton head, but CA were listen­ing closely and the next gen­er­a­tion on from that “clas­sic” aeg has arrived.  Kieran bought the first one; the Kitty Kat ‘alike SEAL CQB, a M4 made into the smal­lest form pos­sible with a stock.  He has been play­ing with it every week and loves the solid reliability.

CA then set to work on some­thing very spe­cial indeed; the SCAR.

— My God, Tommy. What have you been read­ing? Fuck me. Hold tight. What’s that?

- It’s me Multicam.

- No, Tommy. There’s an AEG in your gunbag.

- It’s for protection.

- Pro­tec­tion from what? “Zee” Darkan­gels? Where did you get it?

- Boris The Blade.

- Boris The Blade, or Boris The Bullet-Dodger. Bent as the Soviet sickle and hard as the ham­mer that crosses it. Appar­ently, it’s just impossible to kill the bastard.

WIKIPEDIA:

SOF Com­bat Assault Rifle, or SCAR, is a mod­u­lar rifle made by Fab­rique Nationale (FN) for the U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Com­mand (SOCOM) to sat­isfy the require­ments of the SCAR competition.

…The SCAR fea­tures an integ­ral, unin­ter­rup­ted Pic­a­t­inny rails on the top of the alu­minium receiver, two remov­able side rails and a bot­tom one that can mount any MIL-STD-1913 com­pli­ant accessor­ies. The ori­ginal SCAR pro­to­types used the same Pis­tol grip and lower receiver design as the FN FNC.

Stats.

— Tyrone’ll drive for us. He’s done a rally driv­ing course.

- Of course I have

- You said he was a get­away driver. What the fuck can he get away from?

- Don’t worry about Tyrone. He can move when he has to. Worry about get­ting us a gun. What’s that?

- This is a SCAR, Sol.

- It’s a fuck­ing anti-aircraft gun, Vincent.

- I want to raise pulses, don’t I?

- You’ll raise hell, never mind pulses.

My SCAR Loadout:

Basic stats are excellent,

• Unique Serial Number
• Metal Char­ging Handle
• 7mm Metal Bear­ing Gear Box
• Hi-Cap Magazine (300 Rd)
• Metal Flip up Front & Rear Sight
• CNC made Metal Upper Receiver
• Up to 9.6V Mini Type Bat­tery can be used
• Fibre Lower Receiver & Retract­able Fold­ing Stock
• Magazine Released Catch can func­tion in both sides of receiver
• Bear­ing Spring Guide, Bear­ing Pis­ton Head, Sealed Nozzle & Cylinder
• Motor without screw type

Indeed the SCAR is very much Fla­vour of the month and raises both hell and pulses. Com­puter games like Ghost Recon have made the SCAR an almost per­quis­ite for the ultra-SAS style lead-out. Lets have a look at some of the guns design fea­tures and how they add to a play­ers cap­ab­il­it­ies in battle.

The Good.

— The fact that you’ve got “Rep­lica” writ­ten on the side of your gun…and the fact that I’ve got “SCAR”…written on the side of mine…should precipitate…your balls into shrink­ing, along with your presence.

The gun is a proper rifle. Longer than per­haps you would expect, it is suit­able for almost all ranges.

The fold­ing stock obvi­ously improves CQB per­form­ance and the mul­tiple rails are a geardo’s best friend. The fold­ing action is excel­lent and very easy to do even in midst of battle. The stock locks in the fol­ded pos­i­tion but unlike the LR300, you can eas­ily un-fold the stock. So quick chan­ging as you move in and out of pos­i­tions is simple and effect­ive. I would say that it is almost identical to the G36 action. The cheek pad also moves but I per­son­ally think this is a gim­mick rather and some­thing that will make any dif­fer­ence at air­soft ranges.

Folded stock:

The upper part of the body is a solid single piece of metal, which gives the gun fant­astic twist res­ist­ance and far exceeds a TM even with a body upgrade.

Nice trades:

The iron sights fold down for when using a red dot and this is a great fea­ture if, like me, you change your red dot often. The selector switch is on both sides, mak­ing the gun lefty friendly, which is nice in CQB where even as a right hander you will be swap­ping shoulders all the time.

- Heavy, isn’t it?

- Heavy is good. Heavy is reli­able.  If it doesn’t work, you can always hit him with it.

Weight is in the middle, when the bat­tery is in, but the gun is heavy for sure. I can still effect­ively single hand it, but smal­ler play­ers will struggle.

It comes with all the clips needed to prop­erly sling the piece and I have attached it to my Chalker with no problems.

In use, with the stand­ard bat­tery, its range is stock CA. Noth­ing spe­cial and at Long­moor I def­in­itely had to ‘aim up’. But for Elec­trowekz ranges, the gun per­forms very well indeed. It is very accur­ate and all my BB’s are land­ing in a very tight circle. I have no prob­lems at all in pick­ing off a hanging chain 9 out of 10 times at 35ft. My SCAR ROF is fast and the gear­box sounds great. The gear­box includes a Teflon type cyl­in­der as well as an alu­minium pis­ton head and spring guide with bearing.

FPS was meas­ured as 310 straight (.2BB’s) . This is very nice indeed and I was very glad that the gun was not too hot for CQB.

The body comes apart with ease, only a few pins to remove and the whole breaks down into 3 main parts.

Upgrades are already out and CA have star­ted selling a 10volt upgrade kit! This obvi­ously means that the gears are made of stern stuff. The motor is a high torque so upgrad­ing the spring is pos­sible too.

CA SCAR Enlarge Stock (Tan) With 10.8v 1700mah Battery

ROF is good, but not amaz­ing. Say around 800 a minute.

The stock 1700 8.4v bat­tery las­ted me 6 hours of com­bat. Now, I am not the most trig­ger happy of people and never fire in sus­tained mode. How­ever, I do think that even with the small, it was very good.

The Bad.

- Do you know what Nemesis means? A right­eous retri­bu­tion as delivered by an appro­pri­ate agent. In this case an aeg; the SCAR.

So far so nor­mal for a SCAR review. Lots of good­ies and things to get you excited. How­ever, this gun is not without its problems.

Firstly, the paint. Now I have a mul­ticam loadout and the SCAR’s tan paint job fit­ted the bill. How­ever, the paint on the upper part of the body come off very very quickly. My SCAR is strewn with scratches through the paint and I haven’t dropped it or stored it in any rough way. It is all through nor­mal play where the gun swings against my rig. Very disappointing.

Secondly, access­ing the bat­tery is a night­mare. You have to fold the stock, use an allen key to undo and loosen the bolt. Then the stock slides out. Often it just falls out and the bat­tery hangs by its wires, which cant be good for them. Finally you have to reverse all this to attach it back! In com­bat bat­tery changes are effect­ively impossible.

Folded stock, get­ting to the battery:

Now, there is a way around this, but it is a mod in effect. Basic­ally there is a small screw hold­ing the stock to the bolt that the allen key attaches too. You can remove this and thus the entire stock will slide off if you pull the stock pos­i­tion back far enough. An answer, yes, but not a very sat­is­fy­ing one.

Thirdly, the rails are fixed using an allen key size that I couldn’t find in 4 dif­fer­ent sets. This includes my US set, my leather­man, my bike set and all my ran­dom scope keys. This means that I simply can­not remove a rail form the side. Pos­sibly not an issue for you, but for me; try­ing to attach a gun­cam, it was a bar’steward.

Finally, the rail is very low to the top of the gun.  So low in fact that with a full face mask on you can hardly use it.  I have had to buy a M4 scope riser.

ATN Holosight:

Res­ults.

- Good dags. Do you like dags?

- Dags? What?

- Yeah, dags.  Dags. You like dags?

- Oh, dogs. Sure, I like dags. I like SCAR’s better.

I like the SCAR. It is by far the best built stock gun I have ever used. Envi­ous looks fol­low it around the bat­tle­field (if that is your bag) and hit newbs will sur­round you in battle (it that is your bag). Its bat­tery life is fine, its range is good, its power is heavy, its stock folds, it takes every type of extra.

How­ever, most new style M4’s have all of this. So what are you getting?

Your’re get­ting the little details that make this gun spe­cial. The small touches that show a gun that has been designed to replace the M4.  It has out of the box fea­tures that you would expect to be on an M4, but actu­ally aren’t.

I love mine.

The DAs tool up:

Here is a movie of the gun in use at Long­moor.  It is take from the point of view of a cam­era attached to the gun, but you can clearly see the ROF and accuracy.

Regards,

Basho

Tech­nor­ati tags: air­soft, SCAR, basho

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