rerouting m16 mechbox wiring for m4 application
 

anyone done it and have some pics of the routing ??
or at least some insight on doing it ?

First off you need the front wire assembly. Because you cant do it with a rear assembly (correct me if I am wrong).

from m16 to m4!? i dont think you want to take that route. youll be really limiting your battery size capacity.

with the wiring out the back you can use a full stock or a crane stock, but either way a large battery.

with wireing out the front you really can only use a small battery unless you use a peq box or m4-s.

i would reconsider myself, but if thats what you want, you have to break down to the mechbox; remove the two body halves, remove pistol grip and motor, body pin, mag catch, slide the mechbox out.
next open the mechbox up, re-run the wireing from the back hole along the wire channels to the front wire hole, voila, done. sounds eays, but no its not, getting the mechbox back together will take you a while.... have fun!

honestly ive never had someone do this, usually everyone does the opposite and puts a full stock on an m4.

As were my first thoughts. If you are content on doing this I would suggest taking it to a doctor. But as stated above a crane stock would be a good idear if you wanted a colapsable stock.

oh, and when the spring and guide slip out and your mechbox internals explode outwards and scatter everywhere... make sure you find them all. WHEN this happens make sure you find the little nut that sits inside your spring guide, the spring guide, spring, piston, prolly your spur gear, the antireversal latch (and spring!) and the shims off the gears which hopefully stayed inplace after this happened.

a tip - use a skinny screw driver place in into the spring guide, place something heavy on that to hold your spring and piston down, next place another skinny screw driver in the air nozzle, place something heavy there, then you have two hands free to make sure your anti reversal latch and spring stay in place, your trigget and trigger return spring stay in place, along with working the gears and bearings to move into the bearing guides. its hard, you CAN do it.... but do you want to? there are people who you pay to put up with the argeuouse task of working on v2's.

Or better yet, take it to someone with experience in AEG's. And you will need a front switch assembly, unless you are highly skilled with a soldering pen (not an iron), have access to quality, thin walled wiring (ie. buy the switch).

Or you could abandon the idea and get a crane stock of some form. There's lots to choose from.

I have wired a gun custom for a guy with 16awg wire and allowing the use of a battery Front OR Back :) This was certainly a job and a half to do as any of you experianced guys will wonder how the hell I managed to fit all the wires inside the mechbox. Well, you can check out my work log here:
LINK

the metal body had to be modified to allow the wires to be routed on teh outside of the mechbox as well feed wires inside the buffer tube into the crane stock. Well I'll let the pics tell teh story, just don't ask how long it took me to do up.

awsome johnyDo!!

:p

First off im more than capable of opening up the mech box and am well aware of how to do it without all the gears and bits flying everywhere don’t let my post count fool ya
I just picked up a m16 systema mech box and would prefer to keep the battery up front, as for the soldering I repaired cell phones in a previous job im sure if I can reflow a cell board or re solder a charge connector onto one of those boards ill be fine soldering in the mech box however it sounds like the crane stock is the best way to do this from what you people are saying so ill look into that instead (see battery size)
(just a note the members of this board could try just answering a question without filling it with a tone of condescending overtones) If im misinterpreting the response I received here than i apologize in advance
like instead of describing the mech box exploding you could try just saying if you are going to open it up be careful as they like to fire all the bits everywhere when you open it this is best achieved by using a small screw driver and holding the spring guide in place while lifting the top half of the mech box off
P.S. thanks for the info Johnny do for the requested info

I'll back JohnnyDo up in saying it's totally possible to switch between front and back wiring. I've done numerous re-wire jobs the past couple years, takes some attention and creativity to do well, but isn't that difficult overall. Sometimes a good Dremel is required to get it right.

I'll add this in, get two sets of Deans connectors, they make life a lot easier when dealing with tight quarters (front end battery hook ups), more so because the complete male/female connector is the same size as one half of a large Tamiya connector, plus the Deans is lower resistance and more reliable.