Tanaka M9 Heavyweight with MGC carts

Another short vid...........
This time using my Tanaka M9 Heavyweight (non-Evo) and MGC/KSC 9mm carts.  Swapped the detonator of course, but that's it.

I wondered how it would shoot with the 7mm carts and it fired flawlessly through three test mags.  I thought maybe some of you all would wonder, too.

Sure is a lot easier to load and clean the 7mm carts!  Not sure, but the 5mm Tanaka carts may have a little more pop to them.  Could've been due to the caps I was using, as I have had them for 5+ years in storage.....

Good to know but the new evo rounds are a lot gentler on the gun these days and as they dont have so much umf! behind them they dont eject as far or as hard, which is a good thing when firing in a confined space. Also the seals dont break or come off like they did on the old rounds, though 5mm seals are so small you cant expect them to last long

Yes, the 5mm o-rings on the old style carts are my biggest complaint with that cartridge design. I'll give the Evo's a go soon, but I like the crisp blowback of the older carts they way they are.
I've heard of the Glock being somewhat fragile, but has anyone heard of the M9 from Tanaka being fragile?

The M9 never seemed to appear for sale anywhere so no one i think ever got the chance to pick one up. You are the first person i know who has one, so how they coped with the old rounds i have no idea.

I didn't realize the older, pre-Evo Tanaka M9 was sort of rare.  Glad they are in my collection!

I had the MGC's before and I think the Tanaka's had some improvements.  The HW slide markings were a little cleaner and the finish was smoother.  I do miss the Beretta markings, though, as the Tanaka does not have the PB stamp on the slide or Beretta logo on the grips like the MGC.  I don't have an MGC any longer or it would be nice to do a quick review and comparison.

Anyway, durability in firing is good so far.  This one I bought used from a forum member here, so I can't say exactly how many rounds have been fired - but I'd guess maybe 50 rounds of 5mm Tanaka (pre-Evo) carts and 30 or so 7mm MGC/KSC carts.  I've also gotten some Evo carts just this week and fired 15 more shots of those.  

Firing performance for this model is very, very good.  I've had one jam in my firing experience with it and one failure-to-fire (a cart or cap issue, not a gun issue).

I will say I prefer the Tanaka 5mm pre-Evo cart for firing performance.  The blowback is strong and the cartridge produces good sound and smoke effects.  I also dislike this cart, however, as I have said before because of the tiny O-rings that dislodge or even tear after only a few uses.  There are also more parts to this cartridge design, which is a bit of a pain.

The Evo cart is nice in that it doesn't appear to have the o-ring issues (at least initially) that I experienced with the older version of the same cart.  However, the blowback does appear to be significantly reduced, by design as I expected.  I wasn't sure how they would perform in a non-Evo M9, but they fired fine.  My slide did not lock back on the last round, which was the only issue I noted.  More testing with the Evo carts may prove that this was just an isolated issue, but probably related to the reduced blowback.  The change in cart design appears to be limited to the slots cut in the inner tube assembly and a different piston design.  I believe all other parts of the cartridge are identical, so parts between older and newer carts could be swapped around.  I also imagine (haven't tried yet) that you could reverse the tube in the new carts to get the old cart blowback power and not have the o-ring issues.  Maybe the best of both worlds (power, effects and no o-ring problems) as long as it doesn't impact durability of the model.

From what I can tell, Tanaka's M9 Evo model changes from the standard model basically include a different recoil spring (softer I'm sure to compensate for the reduced blowback power of the carts I assume), a different detonator design (not sure why, as my old deto worked fine during the initial test), a new mag spring (again, I assume softer), and one other tiny spring change (don't know what it's called, but on the right side of the gun, under the grip I think).

The older MGC/KSC 7mm carts are probably somewhere in the middle on performance between the older 5mm carts and the newer 5mm Evo carts.  However, they are tried and true and no o-ring issues.  

Also, I need to correct an earlier comment I made in a post about the Evo model color.  It appears that the M92 Evo is grayish, but the M9 version is still black, like the older version M9 and MGC's M9.