WE-Tech SCAR Light Gas Blowback Rifle Review

By Brandon
March 22^_nd, 2011

Introduction

Gas Blow Back (GBB) rifles have become a fad in the last few years.  Some people love them, some people hate them, but one way or another, most players have some sort of opinion on them.  One of these (that I’ve got rattling around the collection) is the WE-Tech SCAR Light replica.  People cite GBB Rifles as offering a more realistic shooting experience, with ‘recoil’, realistic magazine capacities, and a louder muzzle report.  Critics loathe the expense, the finicky and temperature sensitive nature of GBB replicas, and the expense of several $50 magazines for a minimal loadout capacity.  Either way, I own these and want to review it, and will do so as a jaded owner, who after owning one in hopes of an awesome gun, notes that it is indeed interesting, but not god’s gift to realistic replica shooting.  That’s a mouthful; lets skip the fluff sections and on to the review.

Appearance

Starting from the front of the gun is the flashhider with the gun in its short barreled configuration.  Note the excellent looking flash hider with quick detach threads for AAC style suppressors. Now allow me to have enjoyed wasting 5 seconds of your life as this part is not WE.  The majority of American import models cross the ocean with the ubiquitous orange plastic birdcage or an orange painted steel birdcage attached with permanent lock-tite.  Mine was this way, and I bought an DyTAC AAC Phantom (CW/+) style flash hider to try and get a correct looking metal flashhider.

Moving back, we come to the front sight tower.  This sight is adjustable for elevation like any AR front sight and locks up or down.  Anyone familiar with SCAR replicas will be familiar with this, especially the delicate feeling locking plunger that needs to be depressed to flip the sight up or down.

Due to the bolt being fully forward, the vents in the upper receiver are currently blocked.  The bolt carrier is quite long and extends to the front of the gun.  More on that later.

Moving further back, we get to the fire selector, and bolt catch.  The fire selector is marked S-1-A, which should make sense to just about any airsoft player (however stands for Safe, Semi, and Automatic just in case it doesn’t) and is ambidextrous.  The fire selector has a good stiff detent, and clicks into place well.  This gun, being a gas blowback and all, features a working bolt catch.  You can plow through your magazine load, and after firing the last BB, the bolt will lock back.  Shove in a new magazine and slap the bolt release lever, and the bolt will push forward into battery, chambering a BB and rendering the gun ready to fire again.  There is the option to turn the bolt catch off via a switch on the magazine, which allows you to dry fire the gun to your heart’s content without having to hold the bolt release down – an excellent feature for chairsofters.

Looking at the receiver while we’re here, the plastic lower and pistol grip are of a good quality, have a nice texture and appear well finished.  The upper receiver is made of  aluminum and is anodized to a hue just between Tan and Gold.  Again, the build quality feels good and the level of finishing appears appropriate.  The WE SCAR GBB does have some trademarks on the lefthand side of the receiver which read “MK16 MOD 0  CAL. 5.56 MM.” followed by a unique serial number.  Slightly above these, there’s a mystery designation of “B0897″.  Kudos to WE for sticking to realistic trademarks (no “6MM” markings here) though they had to omit any Fabrique Nationale markings.

Moving back to the stock, we find it to be made of the same plastic as the lower receiver.  It has an adjustable length of pull over six positions via the button on the back of the stock.  The cheek piece is also up and down over 2 positions.  The stock folds to the right hand side of the gun and locks against the side of the receiver.

I’ve had two annoying failures with the stock;

• The first failure I experienced is that the button for adjusting the cheek piece unscrewed itself from use alone.  Putting the sprung button back together was an incredibly annoying experience, requiring screw-driving through a tiny little hole under the cheek piece once it has been removed.  I highly recommend avoiding doing this in the field.  If you have purchased a new SCAR which has not developed this problem yet, back out this screw slightly, apply some semi-permanent lock-tite and re-tighten.
• The second failure I experienced was the stock hinge plate cracking at its attachment point to the receiver.  The way the gun disassembles requires the stock to slide onto the receiver as it retains the recoil spring.  A lot of the force on the recoil spring is channeled from its guide rod into the stock; causing the hinge plate to crack where it attaches to the receiver.  More or less, this is from WE not including any recoil buffer in the gun.  What this means in layman’s terms is that the stock will eventually be kicked off the back of the gun from the weight of the bolt transferring force into it.  I’ve seen it happen to enough other WE SCARs, (and other WE guns that are not SCARs even!) to know that this failure is an inevitability.  New reinforced hinge plates are offered by WE, but it’s a problem that could’ve been mitigated from the offset.

Mike’s Notes: The WE SCAR’s design doesn’t include any sort of recoil mitigation, which results in its propensity to break stock hinge plates and the aluminum receiver end-cap to which they attach, especially in guns run on CO2.  Why is this a problem?  Well, as long as the force from the gas you’re using is strong enough to overcome the force from the gun’s recoil spring, the very large and heavy bolt carrier will dissipate any remaining rearward momentum into the gun’s reciever cap and stock hinge plate.  The more powerful the gas, the more damage the bolt carrier does to these parts.  In my personal SCAR, I noticed a fracture developing near the top of the plastic stock hinge plate.  My solution was to add a recoil buffer to the spring guide:

What I did: cut out a piece of 70 Duro 1/8″ Sorbothane in the shape of the rear of the spring guide.  Made a small hole in the very center of the Sorbothane to allow access to the spring guide’s disassembly screw then super glued it into place.  Corresponding with this, 1/8″ needs to be taken off the front of the plastic tube of the spring guide and 1/8″ of some of the rear of the receiver’s inner rails which prevent installation of the now thicker spring guide.  It may sound scary, but it’s all relatively simple and can be completed in 30 to 60 minutes if you have the materials and tools available.

Sorbothane is a material which is used for its properties of shock and vibration absorption.  Now when the bolt carrier reaches the end of it’s travel, it will compress and dump most of its remaining energy into the Sorbothane buffer pad.  Installing the custom recoil buffer arrested any further progress of the crack that was propagating in my SCAR’s hinge plate.  If anyone thinks this sort of mod is ridiculous, consider that WE’s newest model, the G36 includes a recoil buffer from the factory.

With all that said, we’ve gone over essentially the full externals of the gun.  Now we will take a look at the hilariously easy to access internals.

Disassembly

Did I say disassembly is easy?  What an understatement.  No skill is required to take the WE SCAR apart, see below.

1. Remove the magazine
2. Pop the front pin on the plastic receiver out of the body
3. Pull the front of the lower receiver down, and out to remove the lower receiver from the gun
4. After the lower is off, pull the stock down, and it will slide down off the back off the gun.  Note that it is holding in the gun’s recoil spring guide.
5. Pull the recoil spring and guide rod out the back of the gun
6. Pull the bolt back until the cocking lever is at the removal hole at the back of its slot.
7. Pull the cocking lever out of the bolt
8. Pull the bolt back out of the back of the receiver.

At this point, you are done, and this has required no tools.  I wish AEGs would break into their main components without tools as this does.  Removing the barrel is only somewhat more complicated and requires the use of the Torx driver cleverly disguised as the gas block’s regulator knob.

Performance

It’s no lie that these guns are fun to shoot.  Given that they are GBB, and every shot sends the weighty metal bolt flying backwards with a satisfying pop from the gas, and an associated clack from the charging handle and bolt hitting the back of your receiver (while breaking your stock), the gun does give the user significantly enjoyable feedback.  The gun’s receiver is pretty hefty however, which serves to damp the recoil a bit (WE’s newer G39c kicks like a horse from a heavy bolt, and a light plastic body).

Gas consumption is… well, consumptive as most of WE’s products are.  Cooldown is a huge issue on full auto, and one can hear the gun slow down its cycle as the mag gets more and more depleted.   You get a huge gas reservoir in the shape of a STANAG magazine, but it takes a lot to move that big weighty bolt.  Expect (if shot reasonably) to get a magazine and a few spare BBs from one mag.  Dumping on full auto will leave you lucky to clear the magazine of BBs before your gas charge piddles out with an unflattering hiss.   Also remember, cold weather effects gas blowbacks significantly.  We’ve seen at least one person quit airsoft at the DMZ because their SCAR did not work (In Colorado winter cold mind you…) on their first outing with it.  Funny stuff…

The guns come out of the box shooting somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 FPS on propane/green gas (perhaps explaining some of the consumption issues.)  Dropping the gun’s FPS below this number for site restrictions will require use of an NPAS gas piston, which can be installed fairly simply.

Mike’s Notes- In stock condition using propane as the power source, expect these guns to shoot anywhere between 450 to 500 ft/s depending on atmospheric conditions.  You’ll need to do some custom work on the stock gas piston or install an RA-Tech NPAS adjustable gas piston to bring these down to reasonable muzzle velocities.  As with any gas weapon, performance will depend largely on how well it is maintained.  Using proper oils in greases in the right spots as well as keeping the gun’s internals free of dust and dirt is key to having a reliable replica.  For the gun’s gas seals, I recommend a good dose of airsoft spray silicone or a mid weight silicone oil.  For the mechanical parts which slide across one another (bolt carrier & reciever rails, hammer, etc) I recommend liberal application of SuperLube grease.  Most silicone oil is too thin for these applications and will result in undue wear.

While the gun has a hopup, BBs fly poorly, and in just about every unpredictable direction shot to shot.  I’ve simply accepted this as a fact of life on mine, and Mike’s attempts to mod his hopup into consistency have proven fruitless.  Mike suspects the brass Escort/Sunproject based internals chop bb’s as they are loaded, causing erratic flight when hop is applied to it.

Mike’s notes: the loading ramp which is used to funnel BBs into the chamber can come from the factory with some very sharp edges which will take small shavings off of BBs as they are pushed into place.  Some simple work with a sharp knife or rat tail file will eliminate this problem.  Unfortunately, that won’t fix the gun’s trajectory issues all-together.  The proprietary hop-up system on the closed bolt SCAR doesn’t ever seem to apply enough force to the BB even on its highest setting.  One potential fix would be to add some sort of tiny spacer underneath the BB which is used to press on the strange ring-shaped hop bucking.  Doing this on my SCAR improved accuracy slightly, with less random fliers as a result.  I’m still pretty unhappy with the SCAR’s stock hop system but have heard great things about the RA-Tech Stinger hop unit.

Really, this gun is fun to shoot, but if you’re aiming, you’ll probably only hit things on accident or coincidence.

Conclusion

Performance: 2/5

Fun to shoot, but totally inaccurate.  Too hot for most fields out of the box.  Modifications are needed to make the gun shoot well and increase durability.

Design:  3/5

The gun is solid and well put together, but nothing really sets it off for me as being anything better than good looking.   One might feel that this looks better than the real thing since all the plastic pieces are the same color but it suffers from easily chipped paint on most of the gun’s black parts (fire select, rails, front sight), like most WE replicas.

Value:  2.5/5

At $260 stateside, the gun straddles the gulf between the premium AEG SCARS (Classic Army, VFC, Ares) and the budget AEG SCARS (AGM, Dboys).  Once the cost of an NPAS unit, a new hop-up and the high cost of magazines is factored in, you’re looking at premium cost nonetheless.

Overall: 2.5/5

Provides excellent realism and a great shooting experience and, but money and effort is required for the SCAR reach its full potential.