Review - CA SLR105A1 (AK74). Update #2.

[666]

First thoughts for now, mostly external descritpion.
Contents of the box:
- Gun.
- Plastic 500rd AK74 style hicap.
- Cleaning rod.
- Sight adjusting tool.
- Manual for the gun and CA flyers. Whole bunch of new AR's and MP5's

Gun itself:

Gun itself feels pretty solid, lighter than my TM fmu AK. I'd say around 3kg with a battery and loaded hicap. A little stock wobble out of the box, but that can be fixed with some loctite. Gun is full metal, except for a front set which is made out of plastic for some reason. Body and barrel are made out of something that feels like standard "metal" CA uses in their guns and aftermarket receivers. Trigger guard and dust cover made out of really soft metal. Trigger guard can be easily pushed up, towards the
receiver. I can't do that with my TM AK. Flash hider is made out of steel. Feels almost like real steel. Furniture is made out of pretty good plastic. Doesn't feel anywhere close to a real thing, but still good quality. Stock is not devided into two halves like TM, so that means a lot more room for the battery without any mods.Butt plate is held by two screws, just like a
real steel. So, no need for electrical tape with this gun Stock is held by three screws, just like TM stock Front sling hook is located next to the foregrip, just like on the real one. Rear sling hook is on the stock.
Receiver has pretty decent looking trades on it.
Left side:
10 KG 44 6616
Model SLR 105
Cal. 6mm.
SER.001190 (looks like it does have unique serial, I've seen several different numbers)

Arsenal LAS VEGAS, NEV. U.S.A

Right side:
Nothing really, just AB and O for full and semi auto.

Performance:
I fired off around 60-70 rounds indoors, just to see how well it will work. Gun has pretty good ROF with 8.4V 1500Mah battery. Hop up works pretty good as well. I put two drops of silicon oil into the mag before use. No misfeeds or doublefeeds noticed during firing. Can't tell you what's the range or FPS. That will be tested when I'll take it to the game next time.

Internals:
Piece of plastic that holds charging handle looks identical to TM. Mech box looks pretty similar to TM as well from what I can see. Don't really have time to open it up right now, so more detailed description of internals will be added later on.

Negative things so far:
- When pulled back and released, charging handle hits the body, bounces back and gets stuck about 1-1.5cm from where it supposed to be. Handle has to be pushed back in order to close that gap. Both of my TM based AK's don't have that problem.
- Paint job looks kind of strange compared to CA and DTP metal receivers I own. Paint around fire selector is chipping off instead of scratching off like on the other two receivers.
Took some pics of the gun. Cam is not mine, don't really have time to adjust it right now, therefore some pics are not the top quality.

Update #1:
I decided to fire off one hicap (500 rounds) and open up the mechbox. Here's what I found.
1. Lubrication is very poor!
2. Pieces of yellow plastic from the piston found inside. Looks like piston will not live through 1000 rounds on 8.4v 1700mah battery and stock spring.
3. When fired on full auto, selector switch gets loose, goes down and blocks the trigger. Fixed by using parts from TM AK.
4. I also tried firing the gun with TM locaps, Star locaps and G&P midcaps. All mags except for Star worked fine. Star mags don't feed at all.
5. Spring guide is plastic. All pics of mechbox I saw had brass spring guide, similar to Area 1000 guide.

Update #2 (Jan/28/06):
Played my first outdoor game with this gun. I was planing to use it in stock form for a while but after seeing that dying piston I decided to upgrade. Thanks to ILLusion's fast shipping gun had following installed before the game:
Systema BS 6.04 tightbore.
Guarder spring guide.
Prometheus hard piston.
Systema aluminum piston head with bearings.
Unknown spring (clocks at around 400-407fps with above upgrades).
I went through around 300 rounds during the game, I know that not a lot, but I'm not trigger-happy person Gun performed flawlessly, even better than I expected. Very accurate and consistent. I did have one problem, barrel was installed in a rush before game, hop up didn't work at all in the beginning, but after I took it apart and placed everything properly problem disappeared. Loose selector switch problem was fixed by taking little brass tube (I guess it can be called bushing) from TM AK selector assembly and installing it on CA gun.
I also attempted to install G&P metal front. Took me about 2 hours to get it on. Very tight fit. Had to file down some extra metal in order to fit parts AK-18 and AK-14 properly.

[666]

More pictures.

[666]

Last set of pics.

[oOMuDOo]

Thanks for this review. Very interesting.

Looks good to me.

[mcguyver]

good review. can't wait till i get mine tomorrow.

merry christmas to me!!!

[mcguyver]

yeah, i got mine today. i noticed how light it is. about as light or maybe lighter than my tm ak. nice gun though. won't be firing it till spring, so we'll see what happens. if it's reliable then ok, if not, i'll make it reliable.

[666]

Here's what I found couple of days ago. Too bad I lost actual link to that web site. Person attempted to remove the flash hider and discovered that barrel was not 14mm in diameter, it was later found that barrel actually had an adaptor on it. Adaptor looks like it's part of the barrel at first. Also, it's made out of soft metal making it hard to remove without damaging the threading.

[[Avtomat]]

whoa 3 weeks.

but here is the link he is talking about

http://www.red-alliance.net/phpBB2/v...&highlight=slr

[LucidFox]

That doesn't look like an AK-74 to me. This is coming form asome one blind but meh.

Looks more like an AK-105

[666]

No offence, but you must be smoking some good stuff if CA AK looks like 105 to you
Here's what AK 105 looks like:
http://world.guns.ru/assault/as06-e.htm
http://kalashnikov.guns.ru/models/ka130.html
105 has really short barrel and side folding stock.

Here's AK74:
http://world.guns.ru/assault/as02-e.htm