Well i had to get one of these even though it was hard to justify the cost for a modelgun, a pistol at that. With the exchange rate being as crappy as it is it worked out around the £260 mark for the gun with no rounds, which is a lot of money but there were a few reasons i had to have this one.
1. Its a Tanio Koba and although i have never owned anything made by him before his reputation is enough to want anything he makes.
2. Its a complety new system for the det pin and open rounds.
3. new materials
4. only 300 being made, at least for the moment with any luck he will make more models if this is a success.
This is not a full review as i have only just received the model but first impressions are very good. This is one well engineered model, everything is tight and smooth, no rattles even the barrel bushing locks and fits very well. the trigger and hammer are very smooth you only have to touch the trigger and the hammer falls, this is a HW model so weight is pretty good and standard for a modelgun 45. Stripping is the same as all 45's but there are 2 internal differences that i think are done to take stress from the barrel when firing. 1. is a spring over the barrel as well as the normal recoil spring and the recoil rod guide is spring as well at the end that fits into the cam and apart from taking stress out of the barel and cushioning a bit i dont see why these would be needed, good idea though as anyone with an mgc 45 will know with real size rounds barrels dont last long.
Firing, which of course is the main bit, as i say i have only just got it so have only been able to fire off a couple of mags. The rounds are real size but open style and made out of a plastic come glass fibre i think loading is simple as with all open style rounds and so fast to load and to clean, the det pin is as all open round det pins but now this one has a rubber o ring seal on it and i beleive that the seal is smaller than the inner of the round but when the cap fires it expands the seal to create a seal and it sems to work fine.
This model fires well, very well, my first 7 rounds were fired with no problems and more to the point nothing broke, the slide has a really crisp action to it and the gun makes a good crack noise when fired rounds are ejecting with a lot of force and go far. the 2nd mag fired great as well though for some reason the slide locked back on about the 4th round for no real reason i could see, apart from that performance was excellent.
This is an expensive model but its sort of a custom gun when you think of it and it looks great and works really well the new open round system that Tanio Koba has developed work really well and i am going to see about getting det pins for other 45's and see if i can use this system in other models. Only the old small round mgc 45's have given me confidence to fire the real size always break barrels, i know i have only fired a few mags through this but i am confident that it will last.
I have put a vid on the vid page there are 2 other vids for this one on 318 site and of course on Tanio Koba's site and plenty of pics. I think all these models have been sold so if you want one (though price will put most off and i dont blame you) you are probably out of luck.
Fri Mar 06, 2009 4:44 pm
