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D-Boys Knights Armament PDW
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Reviews
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4816
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Sun October 2, 2011
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Description:
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Dboys Knights Armament Company PDW review by XavierMace
Discuss this review here.
Real Steel History
The Knight's Armament Company 6x35mm PDW is an experimental personal defense weapon designed by KAC, firing a new 6 mm cartridge optimized for short barrel weapons.
As with all personal defense weapons, the KAC PDW is intended to be compact and lightweight (similar to submachine guns), but have a longer useful range (out to the low end of combat rifle ranges, 200–300 m). A PDW would be issued primarily to troops who are not offensive combat infantry, but who might need a highly capable defensive weapon if they were attacked, such as truck drivers, artillery troops, tank crews, aircraft crews, and other support troops. The KAC PDW is over 10 inches shorter (19.5" vs. 29.8" with stocks folded) and more than 1 pound lighter (4.5 lb vs. 5.9 lb) than the current "light" U.S. Army and Marines weapon, the M4 carbine.
Basic Information
At this time, there are several versions of the Dboys Knights Armament Company Personal Defense Weapon (KAC PDW). This particular model comes with the gun, battery box, magazine, two barrel extensions, speed loader and vertical grip. The package includes a charger as well, but not with a US type plug. At this time, the gun is available from several overseas retailers including ebaybanned and RSOV for about $150.
Product Description/First Impressions:
The box is covered in a nice grayscale design with some various pictures of the guns. When you slide the Styrofoam clam shell out and open it up you find the gun. First impression in my case was the excessive orange "tip". This was the single largest complaint about the gun. Rather than just shipping the gun with the required orange tip, they decided to make the entire flash hider, 8" barrel extension, and gas block orange. To make matters worse, they manage to get some orange on the rail as well. If I had purchased it from a US retailer, I would have returned it at this point. Once you get past that fact, the gun isn't bad looking. As with most Chinese guns, the finish is ok at best. The color is nice (what isn't covered in orange) but scratches easy.
Externals
Overall, the gun isn't bad looking. It's just all the little things that add up. One one hand it's a $150 gun. One the other hand, the quality of sub-$200 is ever increasing in with that in mind the gun falls a bit short.
The trademarks aren't bad looking, albeit a bit large. This particular model has laser etched trades. The gun is also available with engraved trades or with no trades at all. The gun includes two barrel extensions that make the total barrel length either 8" or 10".
The gun uses a set screw on the bottom of the gas block to secure the barrel extensions to the gun. The smaller extension is a bit large in diameter and is a rather tight fit in the gas block. It takes a bit of work to remove and insert it. The longer extension fits just fine. There is no threading on the gas block side, it's just the one set screw securing it. The front end is your standard threading and will mount any standard flash hider.
The rails of the gun are another typical weak point on Chinese guns. The rails, most notably the bottom rail, is quite a bit out of spec. I've had a hard time mounting a variety of grips to it. Even the included vertical grip requires quite a bit of force to get on.
The folding stock locks firmly into extended position. This is actually one of the strongest points of the gun. Unlike many other folding stocks, the stock has zero wobble when extended. A quick flip of the stock flips it out and it locks into place. Folded on the other hand is a different story. The gun has an integrated locking pin on the reciever to keep the stock in place when folded. However the locking mechanism on the stock does not have enough tension to keep the stock in the folded position. The slightest bump on the gun (not even on the stock) causes the stock to come loose. While the stock bears a lot of similarity to AK triangle stocks, the integrated rubber buttpad makes it a bit more comfortable than the AK models.
The rear sight itself is a pretty standard flip up rear sight, but with an integrated riser rail. The rear sight is another weak point on the gun. The rear sight is visible crooked and it's too tall which makes it all but useless as an aiming device. I replaced it with the Knights sight from A&K SR-25 which is the proper sight for this gun to begin with.
The front sight is a Knights style flip up sight. It's of reasonably nice build and works reasonably well. After replacing the rear sight, the front sight does it's job well enough.
The QD sling mount on the side of gun does it's job, but has a habit of getting in the way of left side selector switch. The real PDW also has another sling mount on the rear of the receiver right below the stock. I personally think this is a much better position for the mount. The replica has a hole for the sling mount but is too large to use. Hard to say if Dboys intended the functionality or not, but if they didn't, I don't know why they included the hole.
Internals
The internals on this gun continue the overall mediocre trend of this gun. The gun is a bit on the heavy on the lube side and it's that nice gooey sticky lube that seems to be somewhat counter productive. The lube is pretty much everywhere in the gearbox. The holes on the gearbox are a bit loose as some of the bushings just fall out when you take the gearbox apart.
Gearbox removed from gun
The ambi selector and bolt release make this gun a bit of a pain to take apart. But they did at least use a pair of QD connectors on the inside to allow you to remove the upper easy enough.
XYT Gears with plastic sector clip
The gears are plain XYT gears and given the guns performance, must be standard ratio. As you can see in the picture, it comes with a sector clip pre-installed which seems rather pointless given the guns performance is no where close to the point where you would need one.
White plastic piston with ventilated head
The piston, tappet plate, cylinder head, sector clip, and trigger block are all made out of a cheap looking off white plastic. The cylinder is your average 1 hole brass cylinder. The piston head is a blue ventilated head. The seal between the piston/cylinder heads and the cylinder was quite good.
Clear plastic nozzle
The nozzle is of the clear plastic variety and had no airseal whatsoever. This was a little surprising considering the good seal on everything else as well as the high FPS of the gun.
Short spring is short
The spring is the next oddity on the gun. The spring is extremely stiff as indicated by the high FPS, but it's quite possibly the shortest spring I have ever seen in an AEG. Compared to a Modify SP90 spring (top) in the above picture, you can see how short the stock spring (bottom) is.
The brass inner barrel is roughly 200mm long and otherwise plain. I replaced it with a 247mm Madbull Black Python V2. The Madbull barrel is the perfect length if you are using the 10" configuration but if you are using the 8" configuration it sticks out a bit. This is compounded by the fact the inner barrel won't fit inside the stock flash hider. The opening in the flash hider is too small.
The shimming on the gun was also too tight which could explain the guns low ROF. I removed several shim and it still seemed plenty tight.
Power/Magazines
The gun includes 1 120 round KAC PDW style mid capacity magazine. The magazine itself is plastic and feels rather cheap. The magazine has difficulty locking into place and seems questionable at best. The magazine included with my gun does not have any markings on it at all.
Fortunately the Dboys PDW can also use standard M4 magazines. However, standard M4 magazines are no easier to lock into place than the included PDW magazine. Pretty much you will have to give any mag a rather solid whack to lock into place. Once you get the magazines locked into place, there is very minimal wobble, but the mags still drop freely from the gun.
Given the questionable nature of the included magazine, I feel more comfortable using standard M4 magazines. However, they just don't look the same so if you want to truly replicate the look, your choices are limited.
Performance Characteristics:
The gun is also a bit lacking in the performance department. Accuracy is subpar at best, even considering the short barrel length. The included medium length high torque motor seems to be a bit lacking in torque. I immediately replaced the standard mini connector with Dean's connector. Even on a 11.1v 1400mah 20C LiPo, ROF is average at best. The gun chrono's at 410-435fps with .20g Airsoft Elite BB's @15.4rps using the aforementioned LiPo battery and Dean's Connectors. That's not horrid, but it's not great either.
The Dbal battery box included with the gun houses an 8.4v 1200mah battery. The battery is a bit on the weak side for a gun with this type of performance characteristics. In addition, the box itself is a bit large for my tastes. If you are ordering from a shop that offers the PEQ15 and LiPO (such as ebaybanned), I would highly recommend going that route.
Accessories/Modifications
The gun has a fair amount of rail space for such a small gun. However, as stated are out of spec which makes mounting accessories a bit troublesome at times. Beyond that, it's pretty much a pre-configured system. The proprietary receiver and monolithic upper means you aren't going to be replacing those with aftermarket parts unless PDW specific replacements are made.
Upgrades:
For this gun to be truly skirmish ready, the first thing you will need to do is replace the barrel with a decent tight bore if you plan on hitting targets from any decent range. If you were expecting to use it for CQB, I would plan on downgrading the spring. A better battery is pretty much a must in my opinion.
Skirmish Results
Given this gun's smaller size and the purpose it was designed for makes Dboys decision to include such a stiff spring is a bit frustrating. The gun doesn't have the range or accuracy in it's stock performance to keep up against full sized rifles in a skirmish but shoots too hot for any CQB field. If you downgrade the spring, it makes for a pretty nice little CQB gun.
Conclusion:
Overall, it's not a horrible gun but it's not a great gun either. Unless you had your heart set on a PDW, I would probably recommend sticking with a standard M4 or waiting for an improved version to come out. There's much better China guns out there (including ones by Dboys) and in the same price range, Airsoft GI's G4 series or ICS's Sportlines would be excellent choices as well.
End Notes:
Thanks to the Airsoft Retreat membership and sponsors for their continued support which makes reviews like this possible.
Written by XavierMace, 7/22/2009
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I do like pie
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Posts: 6,414
Registered: January 2007
Location: Mesa, AZ
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;)
