Northeast FAMAS Impressions

As part of our promise to keep our backers in the loop about our upcoming reviews, we wanted to share our preliminary impressions of the Northeast/Gunpoint FAMAS. We'll follow the same general format as our videos, just abbreviated.

Externals

Right off the bat, the build quality on this gun is excellent. It's primarily composed of machined aluminum- like the real thing- but with heavy use of steel for small parts and a sleeve enclosing the portion of the outer barrel that protrudes past the handguards. The barrel itself is aluminum rather than steel, but besides that, we don't notice any significant deviation from its real counterpart. Even the plastic is good stuff, being glass-reinforced nylon PA6.

The gun also has a ton of external bells and whistles. It has a bipod. It has a movable grenade launcher mounting ring. It has not one but two different grenade launcher sighting mechanisms, integral night sights, adjustable windage/elevation/range, and multiple sight apertures for different lighting conditions. Most of these features have little or no applicability to airsoft, but are accurate to the real FAMAS, and partially explain the high price.

Internals

The externals are... even better, actually. The above photo is of the fire control group after about five thousand rounds- not only does it not show any significant wear, it isn't even scratched, nor has the hardened surface of the steel even worn through on critical points. That purple-brown is some of the best heat treatment we've seen on an airsoft FCG, and we see no areas of concern. The fire control and bolt carrier are also easy to access and disassemble. That said, accessing the hop-up requires disassembling the entire gun from the front working backwards- however, the stock hop is surprisingly capable, using a Maple Leaf bucking and barrel out of the box in a rotary-adjustment hop unit.

For the gun itself, it is good to go out of the box and can be safely used with high pressure gases in relatively warm weather without risk of damage. There are just two caveats.

First, it uses a MWS-like nozzle and rocket valve arrangement, so an adjustable valve is not a straightforward modification. We modified ours to do about 1.3J at 70F/21C, but it does get up to 1.5J at 85F/29C. There are a few people working on aftermarket for this.

Second, the magazine design has two issues. Northeast omitted an o-ring on the output valve stem, which is not a problem in warm weather but compromises cold weather performance. Adding an off-the-shelf 4mm o-ring was sufficient to seal it up and dramatically improve efficiency below room temperature. Also, the gas router design gets 'dragged' by the nozzle, which spoils the seal and causes a noticeable drop in power on the second and subsequent shots (unless the router is given time to settle back into position). We were able to solve this by dremeling a ramp into the rear edge of the router. We'll show both of these fixes in the full review.

Lastly: the mag holds 25 BBs and a whopping 30g of gas, despite being smaller than a 30rd AR mag. It'll siphon on full auto past 25g or so, but on semi it has a ton of gas to work with. The stop-on-empty system is wholly contained within the magazines, and when empty the gun simply goes click. And no, AR mags (of any brand) will not work in this gun.

Controls

Even as someone who likes bullpups, I have to say, this is a weird layout. The safety is not particularly intuitive and is easiest to manipulate with the off hand, so this is one of those guns that goes off of safe when the game starts and goes back on safe when the buzzer sounds. Mag changes are also funky, as the mag is not quite straight insert, but rather has to angle forwards (the opposite of inserting, say, an AK mag) a little bit. The charging handle is easy to grasp though and both charging handle and mag release are ambi, so loading and shooting is equally easy left-handed or right-handed. The trigger pull is long and heavy, but has a decent reset and isn't hard to rapid fire.

All in all, it's not that big a deal, just takes some getting used to.

Performance

This gun is loud, snappy, and high-recoiling. It achieves that combination through decent amount of moving mass, fairly strong recoil spring, and slight short-stroke (producing comparable bolt travel to an airsoft AR). This all comes at the cost of efficiency- in terms of raw shots per gram, it's about the same as a TM MWS- but with so much gas per mag to work with, it still manages 5-7 mags per fill. On a mag chilled to freezing, with our valve modification it squeezes out about 45 shots before it stops cycling, where out of the box it won't even clear a mag.

It's also surprisingly accurate:

We don't think most users will feel a need to swap the bucking. At 1-1.5J with .32s and up it works well.

Practicality & Aftermarket

The biggest issue we've run into with the gun is that the irons are difficult to use. The 'hump' on the stock precludes a heads-up posture, requiring a forward lean to get a sight picture, but over-ear hearing protection will still hit it and get deflected out of position. An optics mount solves this, but there currently does not seem to be a great off-the-shelf solution- the one in the above pics is a modified EMG mount, cut short and belt sanded on the sides to narrow it somewhat, installed in place of the original night sights. There are also 3D printable solutions, and Northeast is working on a PGMP kit.

Otherwise, the gun has been straightforward to work with, but there isn't really any aftermarket to speak of.

Conclusions

It's a cool gun. Is it ~$900 USD cool? That depends on how much you want a FAMAS- or perhaps just a high-quality bullpup, without the quirks and limitations of the GHK AUG or KWA F90. The lack of adjustable power and mediocre cold weather performance feel a little dated, but it seems both issues can be addressed and otherwise we have no substantial long-term concerns.

Of course, we will be covering all of the above points- and more- in excruciating detail when the full video releases, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

-Catgut