Bad Gun, Great Replica

A few months ago I sold my VFC FNC. Since then I’ve been tinkering with the LR-300 project to get it up to my expected performance standards.

The LR-300 is compact even by the standards of ARs. It’s lightweight. It carries well, points naturally, and with the new pistol grip can be shouldered comfortably with the stock fully collapsed. It has a reliable stop on empty mechanism, and mag changes are some of the fastest of any rifle platform on the market. It inherits all the great things about the AR family that translate directly to airsoft, plus adding a few perks of its own.

It’s also been a pain in the ass to make it perform well, as we’ve documented in our Improving the VFC AR video. It has required lots of hop tinkering, nozzle tweaks, and expensive parts swaps to get decent internal and external quality. Even leaving aside the weak recoil as an unavoidable consequence of the LR-300 design, the VFC V3 ARs in general (along with TM and GHK ARs as well) need a significant amount of work to achieve the combination of performance and build quality we’ve seen from some new releases. In the real world ARs have become the de facto standard 5.56 service rifle for good reasons, but the execution of the airsoft replicas could stand to be improved.

After a lot of thought, I recently bought back my FNC. 

It’s still a long rifle with a long length of pull, and has no stop-on-empty, an awkward fixed charging handle, an AK-like trigger, and a stiff safety. But it also has a solid out of the box hop-up, a snappy cyclic rate, enjoyable recoil and sound, great build quality, straightforward provision for optics, good efficiency and cold weather performance, and maybe most importantly very few documented failures among users.

I can work around ergonomic problems, or easily fix them with modernization parts. I can’t easily fix a gun not hopping well, or cracking a bolt carrier, or blowing out a nozzle o-ring, or running out of gas, or just generally feeling lame to shoot. While the real FNC is completely overshadowed by the AR family in virtually every respect, as far as out-of-the-box airsoft replicas go, the VFC FNC is superior to any of the GBB ARs currently on the market. And it turns out that having a high-quality, durable gun that I can trust to put rounds on target (without requiring lots of tinkering) really does make up for those ergonomic gripes. It’s a bad gun in the real world- but this replica is great for airsoft.

The point of this ramble is that while we’ve seen a lot of airsofters jump straight to GBB AR replicas because ARs are the ‘meta’ (insofar as such a thing can be applied to this predominantly non-competitive hobby), most of the real-world performance characteristics that favor ARs don’t translate to airsoft. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that airsoft ARs are divided into many incompatible systems means they do not enjoy the same breadth of aftermarket support as their real-world counterparts. So as far as airsoft replicas go, there are better guns out there whose biggest sin is simply not being ARs.

The FNC is a particularly extreme example, as there are other GBBRs with that rare combination of build quality, shooting experience, reliability, and performance, but without being hamstrung by poor ergonomics. The VFC AK-74M and HK53, and Maruyama ISO556 and SCW-9, all fit the bill and are worth checking out. The AK-74M in particular is an exemplar in every respect, and now that VFC has addressed the minor criticisms in our review we feel it is the single best out-of-the-box GBBR currently on the market.

So if you’re looking for a new GBBR and aren’t limited to specific guns by impression constraints, we gently suggest considering the more exotic models. It may take some adjustment to get used to odd ergonomics or just a different manual of arms from what you’re accustomed to, but we suspect you’ll find that it’s easier (or at the very least, cheaper) to learn a high-performing new platform than it is to significantly upgrade a familiar but suboptimal one. And if it really comes down to it, you can tacticool pretty much anything into a wannabe AR nowadays. Ultimately, you may have a better experience by stepping outside your comfort zone with a great replica rather than sticking to a more familiar model that is merely good.

A few final notes.

First, yes, we are aware of the VFC KS-1. Promising early reports suggest it could be exactly the V4 AR we were hoping for, but the jury’s still out on that one. All the same, there are some cool new guns on the way that fulfill certain niches that ARs don’t. It’s simply nice to have lots of options that are worth considering.

Second, just to be clear, this is not a prelude to a FNC follow-up- we actually don’t have much to report. Since doing the comparison to the DX FAL, the only parts failures across three FNCs have been a snapped nozzle return spring on one gun and a charging handle breaking in half on another. The nozzle return spring is a common failure point on VFC guns in hot weather and an easy fix, but the charging handle is more serious. It is, however, entirely preventable by applying epoxy, tape, or any other sort of shim to the outside of the charging handle to tighten its fitment to the bolt carrier. It’s the wobble we noted in our review that allowed whiplash during cycling and ultimately caused the casting to fail around the 15K round mark.

And third, maybe you’re wondering why I sold the FNC to begin with. In part, it was because I couldn’t see myself using it over the AK, but mostly it was because the accuracy inexplicably degraded and could not be solved by either cleaning or bucking swaps. After experiencing issues on other replicas, we ultimately traced this problem back to the BLS bio BBs I was using. A few bags purchased in the last year were excessively waxy, causing hop problems in a number of replicas, and rapid buildup of sludge in the inner barrel on MGs lead to an unacceptable degradation in accuracy within as little as 3-5K rounds since cleaning. We’re still trying to determine how pervasive this issue is, but we’ll keep you guys posted with whatever we find.

That’s all for today. As always, thanks for your support.

-Catgut