[ZShot]

First and foremost guys, let me say thanks for all you awesome feedback, and if you have more keep it coming. I didn't expect to have this much to read this morning.

Secondly, I guess this wasn't very clear, since I got a PM last night. We are ARES US distributor, and in a sense are their representative for the US as well. Obviously the ladies and gentlemen at ARES can't involve themselves as deeply into US forums, and until now we've never really felt the need.

Thirdly,
Some of you may ask "If you're the US distributor why would you get on Airsoft Canada?"

Well if you needed answers about your product wouldn't you go to an active 45,000+ member community too?

Originally Posted by Boris the Blade

I had a ARES MK. 43 which had a polycarbonate mechbox shell, which broke. When it worked it was a fun gun to shoot, but the mechbox shell was poorly designed and the airseal between the cylinder head and cylinder, loading nozzle was non-existent.

I contacted Phil at zshot, and I was told it would take 6-8 weeks for a new mechbox shell to be shipped to zshot from Ares, then additional time to me. I waited from June until last week for zshot to receive the part I needed, then I got fed up, sold the broken MK. 43 and ordered a Realsword Type 56-2. As far as I'm concerned, I'm never buying another ares product, but I will definitely continue to deal with zshot if I need to order parts, Phil responded very fast (usually same or next day) and was honest with what was going on.

Well I'm glad I did someone right. Surprisingly we've had a lot of complaints about our customer service on other forums. I'm still sorry I couldn't get those parts for you. Trust me not being able to get the parts hurts us as well. We've been sitting on almost literally no parts for months. We've disassembled most of our demo guns just to salvage the parts we could. There isn't a single Piston or Sector gear in our entire warehouse :banghead:

Originally Posted by 5kull

I like the fact that your posting on ASC. God knows a lot of people go overboard when you ask an opinion on the Internet. Good luck with the feedback to HK.

Thanks, 5kull. Like I said earlier, I've had a personal account for years, and knew ASC would be able to deliver the answers we needed to here.

Originally Posted by Yuu

I have no issue with your product except the fact stated above and you guys needs to release more of your proprietary parts e.g. (trigger assembly, gearbox, hop-up units, nozzle, and spring guide and etc...) Most your dealers rarely have anything in-stock of your parts.

Thanks, Yuu.

Let me ask this though, other companies that have proprietary parts, do their dealers usually stock them and make them available for purchase? Maybe I'm a little disconnected, but it seems the shops around here only keep general repair parts and will ask that you special order any uncommon parts. Heck my local store is a pretty big KWA dealer, and even when my old KWA went down I had to special order parts to get it fixed up. Do you think asking our dealers to begin stocking some odds and ends parts would make a large difference in regards to our parts support, or would you rather there be a single, centralized website where you can just hop-on purchase any part (by part number) for an ARES gun and have it express shipped to you?

Originally Posted by Yuu

I would love to try to buy and hope ARES KAC LMG would be a lot better with less proprietary parts.

Soon....soooon.

Originally Posted by ThunderCactus

The quality of their design engineering is also in question, as I've seen some pretty incredibly retarded innovations that either started out as, or ended up becoming, demon issues in the gun.

ThunderCactus,

Could you please name a couple of these "demon issues?" I know the Battery in the mag on the M3 is a common gripe with that model, but otherwise, I can't think of any ARES "innovations" which have shown a widespread problem. Sure, some of the features have produced isolated incidents of failure, but generally speaking we haven't seen any features where we said "Wow ARES, What were you thinking?"


Thanks for helping us get the ball rolling, a lot of these things were suspicions of ours (parts support, proprietary parts) , some we did not expect at all. One thing I'm glad to see is that people are offering constructive advice. This is the stuff we really need. I need to know what to tell my boss, so he can relay back to ARES in Hong Kong and we can start to get these issues hammered out.

So for that I want to thank all of you.

Cheers,
Phil