Tokyo Marui 5-7

[lurkingknight]

Finally got my hands on one of these, and if anyone thinks I will spare TM from nitpicking at what it costs vs what you get since I am not known for liking on other 'premium' brands like systema, you are greatly mistaken. I will #%$! on any product that does not meet expectation or what is promised.

So let's get to it.

I'll just do a quick overview of my impressions. This is the first new TM I have purchased. The pistol without the mag seems very unbalanced from the abs lower and all the metal hardware up in the slide, but with the mag in, it balances out nicely.

About that ABS... if ever there was a reason for TM to switch to nylon fiber... this would be it. The frame feels VERY thin in some places, so thin that I worry about it cracking or breaking if dropped or hit by a passing branch while running.

The seams are nice, the flashing at the join is quite visible on the frame, and in fact, I expected a cleaner join from TM. There was enough of an edge to scrape and cause some discomfort for my hand on the back of the grip and under the trigger guard. The seam is most pronounced on the frame at the rail.

The action of the slide is super smooth, it felt like butter when racked.

I have 3 mags. All of them have flaking or bubbled paint because it's not adhering to the metal of the mag... this is unexpected from TM, where people say fit and finish is everything with this brand. The paint is expected to rub off with use, so it's not a big deal, but this is against the perception of the brand.

I didn't shoot or chrono it out of the box... plenty of vids on youtube out there.

What my goal is from this point out is to install and prepare all the reliability mods I've found in order to see how viable this gun is long term.

There are tons of reviews of 5-7s out there, this will not be a typical review for accuracy and performance.

I have collected a number of techniques and parts lists from various 5-7 owners from the web to fix the shortfalls of this gun.

Problem:

The outer slide is known to crack at the front of the gun using green gas/propane due to there being a 2 piece construction, outer and inner. It's actually a 3 piece construction if you take it apart. The outer shell, the front inner slide and the blow back unit that is not joined to the inner, but just butted against it.

Solution:

RTV silicone the inner slide into the outer to make it 1 piece, so it transfers shock loading along the length of the slide, not just at the front when it blows back. I should've used a black rtv gastket maker, instead I used what I had which was permatex high temp copper exhaust gasket maker. The slide was completely disassembled and I added the creation inner slide for some more kick on the blowback. It's debated whether or not the creation inner contributes to outer slide failure or not. If you look at the front of the stock slide (and creation) you'll notice there's actually a gap between the 2. I have a feeling if you fill this with silicone during the merge, it will help distribute the shock load, as it is in stock, there's 3 points of contact, and the slide cracks at the mold seam.

The TM inner slide is plastic, and actually if you look at it, doesn't follow the contour of the abs outer slide perfectly... this is sort of bad because the more surface area you have, the more load you can transfer across a larger surface area. The TM inner just barely touches the part of the outer where it narrows, this puts more force on the now 5 points of contact that hit when blowback occurs. The creation slide actually fits flush on all surfaces and mates to all corners.

I applied a liberal amount of silicone to the creation slide and mated the outer and inner, snapping the 2 together and then further compressing the 2 with a vice between 2 pieces of wood. The excess squirted out the seams and front sight. IF you do this, be super careful and clean that #%$! as soon as it pukes and clean it well otherwise it will mark up your gun.




Problem:

the outer barrel floats on 2 posts inside the hopup unit. Recoil action pushes and pulls the outer barrel against these 2 posts and eventually the outer barrel fails and falls out of the gun.

Solution:

Replace the soft outer barrel with a steel one.
Apply rtv silicone on the posts and end of the outer barrel. To cushion and snug up the slop at the join.

Be careful not to get silicone into the hop up rubber or the inner barrel, the inner goes much farther into the the hopup unit so it's unlikely you'll get any in there, but silicone can get messy.

I put enough silicone on the end of the barrel that when the 2 halves of the hop up unit were rejoined, again it puked out the seam.

While I was in there, I installed a PDI 6.01 barrel.

I set it aside 24 hours for the silicone to cure and took it to chrono.

Shooting about 310-320fps with .2s on propane in my basement at around 18C. Blowback feels very crisp. I have a feeling though that the gas efficiency might have been effected slightly by putting in the creation slide, but I'll have to study it more closely on the field.

The slide had a tendency to get stuck at the rear position when slowly racking by hand. This is because the recoil spring is actually rubbing on the creation slide and when fully compressed will get caught at the front end of the slide. Some silicone grease from my AEG kit solved this issue. Though I may go to something a little heavier and longer lasting like a marine grease.


At 310 in cool conditions, it makes me wonder what it would shoot if I put a longer inner barrel on and installed a threaded outer barrel with a suppressor. Or installed a high output valve on the mag.

I also took some of my 1000grit sandpaper and cleaned up the seams on the front of the slide. This will help me spot any cracks that may develop over time, hopefully the rtv will do its job and it will hold together... cause if it breaks, there's little chance of repair... splitting the inner from outer may not be possible without destroying the outer slide.

On a side note: the Guarder kids are of less quality than the TM abs, those frames and outer slides are known to fail faster.

My parts list:

creation inner slide
PDI 6.01 tightbore
MAG steel outer barrel
tube of permatex exhaust gasket maker (I'd recommend a black gasket maker if you get the black 5-7, it's less visible. You can see copper/bronze seams in my slide if you look closely.

or with the power of megapixels.. it's quite obnoxious, but I don't care, as long as it holds it together.

You can see the gap between the 2 slides in the front here, I'm thinking of trying to pack more rtv into that area to help cushion it. I was a little worried about getting silicone into the barrel opening so I didn't go overboard on the front of the inner slide when applying the gasket.


since taking the photo I've reworked and packed more silicone into the gap at the front so it's solid now.


In this shot you can see how the creation slide fits into the outer. The step where the outer gets wider is where the creation slide actually fits much tighter than the stock marui one. I think this is a bit better as there is more front facing surface area on the creation slide to put force into the length of the slide, rather than the front. The stock TM inner has a step that is not as deep and it's more tapered along the middle of the slide.


In this shot you can clearly see what the hopup unit is doing on the underside of the creation slide. It's rubbing the powdercoat/anodizing right off the aluminum. And in the front end you can see where it all impacts where it's rubbed clean in the top corner. This was the spot it would bind without the grease I've applied.



These shots were taken after the first game day, after maybe 14 or so mags put through the gun.



edit: 2013/11/24

I lost a mag during a game and replaced it with a new mag ordered from ehobby (plus an additional) both mags came packaged differently than from canarmo where I purcahsed the gun and mags originally. The mags themselves from ehobby were in sealed plastic bags inside the tm packaging and the paint was much nicer this time around. Not sure what to make of that, probably just a different batch.

I've also secured some spare parts: second outer slide, and 2 more complete hop up units ordered from a parts broker in japan that volunteers his time to order factory parts for donations. I should be set until the hammer/firing pin assembly separate out of the lower frame... when that happens the frame will be useless and I'll have to try and secure either a new lower frame or a whole new gun. That shouldn't happen for a while though, in a matter of 1000s into the 10000s of rounds.

[pestobanana]

Maybe I'm stupid but I just got mine and my inner slide seems to be made of metal.

I already suffered a minor failure on day 1 where a screw come loose and was lost during use, and the now loose part causes the slide to lock bak unintentionally cannot be released without sticking a screwdriver in the gun I release it. Simple fix though, hopefully a replacement screw won't be too hard to find. They are wry small though.

[lurkingknight]

Yeah whem I reassembled the slide I loctited everything. The inner slide will be really glossy plastic thats the front portion the rear portion is the blowback unit which is metal

[pestobanana]

Okay makes sense, thanks. I'm a total noob when it comes to GBB guns.

Where did you order the inner slide from? All the sites I've found had it out of stock.

Originally Posted by lurkingknight

Yeah whem I reassembled the slide I loctited everything. The inner slide will be really glossy plastic thats the front portion the rear portion is the blowback unit which is metal

[lurkingknight]

Tokyomodel company in hk.. i just happened to be browsing and it came up in stock

[pestobanana]

Damn, I still haven't been able to find it in stock anywhere.

Originally Posted by lurkingknight

Tokyomodel company in hk.. i just happened to be browsing and it came up in stock

[e-luder]

Originally Posted by pestobanana

Damn, I still haven't been able to find it in stock anywhere.

Message the guy at TMC.
I had to PM him AND Creation to basically beg for them to sell me one...

[pestobanana]

TMC is out of stock though...

Originally Posted by e-luder

Message the guy at TMC.
I had to PM him AND Creation to basically beg for them to sell me one...

[e-luder]

Originally Posted by pestobanana

TMC is out of stock though...

Yeah. Sorry.
In my case, I PM'd BOTH of them WHILE they were out of stock.

After I PM'd Creationm, they sent a batch over to TMC and TMC sold them to me. That's how I got mine.

[lurkingknight]

Okay, so I've had the pistol prepped for a while now, it replaced my kwa 226 as my go to pistol, this thing is just so great.

I use my pistol a lot. Basically while I cover one field of fire with my rifle, I have been known to draw my pistol and fire in an entirely different arc. The 5-7 with .3s in the way I've prepared it absolutely outshoots some AEGs in terms of accuracy. It scares people.

I've put maybe a total of 50 mags through the gun by this point, maybe more. 50 is a safe bet. I have 4 mags, I will fill them and shoot them at the end of the day at least 1 time, sometimes 2 over the course of a game day.

So even after the reliability preparations, I broke it down today after a game in a lot of wet dirt. dry cake mud everywhere, on mags and such. So as I was cleaning the frame and magwell I decided to strip the barrel group out of the slide and inspect for the dreaded issues.

Front end... still solid, no cracks, no nothing. Looks like it's holding up well.

The outer barrel really takes a beating from the recoil spring. I'm pretty sure the spring wants to pull the barrel right out of the hopup unit, that's why it breaks.

So the outer barrel was loose in the hop up. Not a good sign.

I tore it apart and immediately one of the pegs on half of the hop fell out.



You can see here after I removed all the gasket maker, that one peg has cracked/sheared right out. The other side is missing chunks at the front facing and rear facing ends. This is pretty much in line with the theories that the slide stroke under power will eventually rip the outer barrel out of the hop.

But interestingly... the INNER barrel locks are ALSO sheared off. The small rectangles lock the inner barrel in place.

At this point, I have 2 spare hop up units to try again.

I'm thinking I might epoxy/jbweld the inner barrel into the outer and epoxy that into the hopup unit. Not sure if I want to try it with the upgrade barrels or the factory ones.

The stock inner and outer barrels are made of much softer materials. But it's likely they'll shear instead of the hop up unit.

[Ricochet]

I had two of these guns. I really liked them both, but it suffered from a few issues that I didn't have with my other TMs. Firstly they'd become sluggish in hot weather, and often wouldn't cycle at all. Secondly was that they didn't like propane/green gas. Early life they were snappy, but it take long for them to get really weak. I had never heard of this happening in a TM pistol. Later I found out that these guns were made strictly for HFC gas, and couldn't handle propane/green gas. I have been tale now by several sources to never run a TM pistol on propane/green gas unless it specifically says green gas ready on the box, or if it's an older style TM GBBP. I since traded up to a TM PX4 Storm and love it. The TM ABS plastic is a bummer, but I have had several and none have broken. TM performance in an out-of-the-box gun is fantastic, even at lower FPS. There are a few companies like Creation and RA-Tech that do make metal and/or reinforced parts for certain TM pistols. And of course PDI, Nine-Ball, and many others make many internal upgrade parts for their pistols.

The thing I miss most about the FN 5/7 is the magazine's reservoir capacity.

[lurkingknight]

TM pistols are NEVER made for GG because they put the guns over 1J limits in japan which make them firearms (illegal) They can still get hfc 134 though which is why they're not likely to change.

my kwa 226 also has issues in hot weather, it's an issue with ambient temperatures, internal mag pressure and vaporization pressure. You can't get the release valve to pop because the internal pressure is too high. Only way to do it is to put a stronger striker spring in but that increases gas flow and with the 5-7 that's a bad idea due to the fragile nature of the hopup.

It's still a snappy shooter, it was still snappy and loud and hard kicking sunday when I had it out. Luckily I was prepared for this and have spares of the hopup unit.

[pestobanana]

I had that exact same problem in warmer temperatures. It was due to two reasons, one was my mag release wore down to the point that the mag was not seating high enough for the knocker to hit it effectively, the other was the hammer spring. I replaced the hammer spring with one from the MAG spring set, and got a new mag release from Guarder.

Fixed the immediate problem and it started to shoot well again, but the knocker ended up getting chipped from the stronger spring. The Guarder hardware is also garbage. I haven't gamed my 5-7 since I installed the hardware, but 3 of the 5 pieces have already broken.

[lurkingknight]

the dream is over. T_T


Well.. not sure how many rounds went through it.. but the screw posts that keep that entire assembly anchored in the frame have let go.

Little hope of repair. Doesn't mean I won't try though.

That's disappointing.

[BioRage]

Originally Posted by lurkingknight

the dream is over. T_T


Well.. not sure how many rounds went through it.. but the screw posts that keep that entire assembly anchored in the frame have let go.

Little hope of repair. Doesn't mean I won't try though.

That's disappointing.

Time to get a TM M&P9 or USPC