Review - Well Warrior 1 L96 (Noob's perspective)

[enigmahack]

I want to start a disclaimer stating that I realize that this isn't a "real airsoft gun" but for someone that's just starting out... I think it's a heck of a steal and wanted to post a newb's review of my first experiences, in the interest of hopefully saving a lot of headaches/noob threads about it. *If we only knew how to use the search button lol*

I had typed this all out on the Atlantic Airsoft forum, so I'll just link there. If anyone wishes, I could probably import it into this forum for ease of access however.

Hopefully, this will be a help to SOMEONE anyway.


I haven't seen many Warrior 1 reviews, and I don't think any here at all, so I'm going to post my own with the hope of helping someone else decide if this is the rifle for them or not.

Also, if anyone wants me to try tests with this rifle, I'd be more than happy to do what I can with what I have.

Before I start, there's a couple of things I'd like to mention:
I purchased this rifle from A&A Airsoft. The guy that was there was very very helpful, honest, and quick to respond to e-mails. I appreciate that his customer service was so prompt and helpful - great guy.
Also, I'm still a noob to airsoft, so quite honestly this review might be biased with my lack of experience. That being said, I tried to offer as much factual information as opposed to opinion that way you all have the ability to create your own judgment instead of relying on "how I feel" about things.

Ok - On with the Review.

Service - awesome. Mentioned above.

The shipping took a little over a week, but I didn't pay for faster shipping so I got exactly what I expected lol

The packaging was entirely adequate, and did what it was supposed to (It made it to me safely)



Instead of just letting it sit there, I decided I wanted to see what was inside ;-)



"WTF" Was my initial thought: I ordered the Well Warrior 1... not this Mauser SR thing. (Honestly, I was a little put off by it... ) I didn't quite know how I felt entirely though, and it looked exactly like the Warrior 1 so I decided to open it up and take a look.



Well, it LOOKS like a Warrior 1... so I took a little closer inspection to see what details would lead me to believe it is.

I didn't take pics of when I took the trigger assembly apart, but I did shoot this:



After closer inspection, I was relieved to know that it actually is the exact same 3rd party/china replica. Didn't actually SAY Warrior 1 on it, but everywhere I check has the *EXACT* same parts and labeling, so I'm satisfied that I am getting what I asked/paid for.

In more detail of what actually came with this rifle:



The only thing I'm not showing there is the mounting clamps for the scope (at this point I didn't realize that I didn't have them there until I went to mount the scope and couldn't find them anywhere.)

What we're looking at is 1 Mag, (Capacity say 23, I can get 25 in but haven't really pushed it beyond that), cleaning tube (plastic rod), barrel assembly, stock, scope, bipod, allen/hex keys, speed loader with L96 mag extension, strap.

My thoughts on these items:

Mag: Metal, solid, and works. Simple, I like it.
Cleaning tube: It's a plastic rod. I'll probably get an actual cleaning rod or pipe cleaner or something that will do a better job, however it'll get stuck bb's out of there if I ever get any (here's to hoping I don't)
Barrel assembly: Metal. Heavy Metal. I'll talk about it more later.
Stock: It's plastic which is fine... It's a very solid plastic which I like. I think I might prefer a metal one, but it's heavy enough as it is, and I do find that it's well balanced so it's pretty easy to carry.
Bipod: I have an opinion on that later too
Allen keys: Yes - they're metal too lol (They work, whatever)
Speed loader: Nice - I didn't have one of these before now - holds around 90 rounds and seems to work well enough on all of my guns
Strap: Wow - the strap is awesome! BUT: The metal brackets are garbage. They're a thin, cheap metal and look like they could come off at any time. Honestly, the straps nice, but I wouldn't trust the mounting clips whatsoever. I could see the gun go flying in the middle of a game... My advice: "File 13" it. (Throw away)
BB's: Yeah - no markings... no weight, no way to tell if they'd jam up the gun. I saved them for my handgun, but I doubt I'll even use them for that. (Toss away for most of you I imagine)



So here it is, fully assembled.

Initial thoughts:

HUGE. I didn't expect it to be this big. I mean, I knew it was a larger rifle, but this is really massive and pretty heavy too. Around 8-9 lbs... very solid feel honestly.

What's metal: The entire internal trigger assembly is metal, just the external casing is plastic. The trigger itself is also metal, except the dual inner trigger which needs to be pressed to allow the actual trigger to be pulled. (It could be metal, and I just can't tell, but it looks and feels slightly different than the rest of the materials. I could be just crazy though)

The entire barrel itself is metal, and so are the scope mounts. The scope is also metal, and seems to be pretty good... Standard 3-9x40 scope that came with the rifle. The stock is plastic, with very solid rubber parts, and doesn't feel flimsy at all. I wouldn't want to drop this rifle, but I feel confident that if I did, it would be totally fine.

The BiPod is also metal, though I'm not very impressed with the quality of the bipod. I mean, it works, yes, but it's just very... flimsy? Once it's attached to the front stock of the gun, it's well in place, and as I understand it, it's supposed to be able to flex a little so you can aim, etc... Maybe I guess I'm not used to what a good-quality one is like so I can't make a direct comparison. I just thought it would be more solid than it is.

I did take this rifle apart and one of the issues that other people have had is that the barrel spacers are often misplaced (slide around) which can have a negative impact on their accuracy. I did disassemble the barrel and removed the brass barrel (noticing several things along the way that I'll mention) and the spacers were definitely misaligned. I used some tape to make sure they don't slide along the inside of the tube, and put everything back together:
Success (I was able to hit stuff just fine)

So far my initial thoughts were good... but I was having this nagging issue: I couldn't set up the scope for the life of me - I just couldn't get it to sit properly or aim right.

Well - here's where I'm going to fully admit my "noobness" for airsoft. When I assembled this rifle, the accuracy was horrible. I started troubleshooting, trying to find out why:

I took apart the entire gun and discovered a few things (The barrel spacers being the first issue, but I fixed that)
The hopup, which sucks by the way, was just a little piece of rubber, being pushed down by a round clamp that is adjusted with a female hex screw.
Does it work, sure, but not very well - it's quite inconsistent and I couldn't figure out why!

After more searching, I realized that it was actually crooked! So I took apart the hopup and did my best to straighten things out. I have a Taurus 24/7 springer that uses "V-hop Technology" and it seems to work really well... I don't know why they didn't use that instead, but I DO know something that I'd like to upgrade later on... that before using this one, I didn't think makes any difference.

Anyway, I fixed the hopup the best I could, adjusted the spacers, cleaned out the inner barrel of any grease/grime/debris, and put things back together.

So it started shooting VERY straight... I was extremely impressed.

**Message truncated due to size**
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[enigmahack]

I wasn't impressed at all with the scope however. The gun would shoot perfectly straight without the scope at all, but when I actually USED the scope, the scope was aimed WAY to the left... I couldn't figure it out. Also, the windage/elevation adjustments didn't seem to do anything either.

This is where my noob-ness to guns comes in: I had the scope mounted wrong. The top has writing on it saying that it's a 3-9x40 scope... well, I had that on my LH side. (The whole scope was rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees)

Once I realized this, I adjusted, put it back and suddenly everything was finally working *EXACTLY* the way it's supposed to. In fact, from about 30 feet *which isn't much, I know* I could not only hit a very specific target, but I could hit it several times precisely. Let me show you what I mean:



This target is about a foot tall, and it's got a kind of sticky surface so that when you shoot it, bb's stick and then roll to the tray below.

Well, I was shooting bb's on it, and kind of doing a "robin hood" type deal where I'd split the previous bb in half, with another BB.

From 30 feet, hitting a 6mm bb reliably seems impressive to me. Maybe it's expected from a standard rifle and I'm easily impressed... I'm interested in doing longer-range shots...

Okay... because of my apartment building situation, unfortunately I don't have a range longer than 30 or so feet in any given direction without shooting out a window (which I'm not about to go and do) so I went right to speed tests. I have vids for those, using the poor man's chrono.

Before I get to that, I want to show that target I was using after shooting it less than 50 times with the L96:



I have other guns, but they max out at around 315-320fps, so when I saw this I was like... !!!
All I could do at the time was giggle thinking about how powerful and accurate this gun was lol (I didn't even care the target's broken, I'll buy a new one and just reinforce it better before using it) And needless to say, the wall behind it has several NASTY dents where I've shot straight through the target. I'll have to fix that before I move out lol

Okay, moving on to the chrono vids.

Firstly, this is my first "real" airsoft gun and even that's a cheap Chinese "faux" rifle, but it's more real than any of the other airsoft guns I have; I will fully admit to being a noob in this category. However, I'm a reasonably intelligent person and would like to believe that I am still able to contribute to this community, and I will eventually become less of a noob with more exposure to the sport.

Secondly - The quality sucks because I'm using my girlfriends camera (Some Canon S3 IS zoomy camera thing. I just know it takes pretty pics and video lol) so I apologize in advance - hopefully it works well enough.

Lastly - I have a DAMN squeaky floor and didn't really realize how bad it was until after having shot the video. I apologize for that too. lol

Okay, so here's the first vid:

(These vids were encoded with Xvid, however were sent to Youtube so they should be automatically converted to be compatible - let me know if any of you can't view it for some reason)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFDXbDuJ38o

I wasn't surprised at all to see that it had gone through both sides, especially after what it did to the other target I had previously used.
I had also mentioned in the video that there were some online forums/resources I used. This is the main one that gave me the idea to do the poor man's chrono and how to do it.

http://www.airsoftretreat.com/review...php?product=71


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Se71RO8A0

This was the bottom shot - based on other peoples results, I expected it to go through, but not totally dent the top of the can. I was starting to like what I saw here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PojZNcI-VrI

I'll be honest - I was disappointed, simply because I figured it might go through the bottom edge... only to realize that I wasn't 100% sure that I fully understood where exactly the bottom edge was. It was worth a shot either way, and made one hell of a dent (on both the can AND the BB)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFqI6o8dg78

Here's basically what happened here:

I felt I needed to explain the details of the bb's, so I started with that, and then decided I'll do all 3 shots in 1 vid.
I wasn't entirely sure exactly where to shoot sometimes, so I tried to explain enough and if someone can update me, I'll re-take some shots to try and provide more accurate results.

Shot 4: In the vid, I was extremely surprised that it didn't go through. Did it on a different can offline, and it worked just fine. (Notice the silence while I sat there going WTF lol)
Shot 5: Wasn't sure it was the right spot, but it left a massive hole so that was cool.
Shot 6: I missed somewhat, but I also don't know that it was the right spot I was trying to shoot. It was cool as heck to look at though because you can totally see where it looks like it "pulled" the metal back as it was being fired... very interesting. I didn't at all expect it to go through, but interesting results regardless.

Damn squeaky floor.

The vid cut off after me basically saying "I didn't hit it directly on, and I don't know if we're supposed to or not, but ... "
" but I'm going to post this anyway, and have a look online and see if I can get some clarification for further testing."

And that's when it beeped to say you're done lol

Further testing will follow, including a longer range accuracy test/series of tests, as well as testing for heavier bb's.

IMO, I don't really like using .20 for this gun - it seems almost too powerful for those, so I'm going to get a bunch of .25 from Tristan and see how those work instead. I was also considering going to a .28 or .30, but I'm thinking I want a tightbore barrel first before that happens.

In the end:
Weight - 4.5 of 5 (Heavy enough, but not a burden to hold)
Performance - 4.5 of 5 (I'd give a 5, but I think there's always room for improvement
Accuracy - N/A (I haven't been able to do long-range tests, but as of right now, it would be 5/5 based on my experiences with short-range shots)
Simplicity - 4/5 (Even a noob like myself was able to very easily take it apart and put it together. Just don't ask me to set up a scope lol)
Reliability - N/A (I haven't had it long enough yet, but so far, it's been rock solid.)
Willingness to Recommend - 4.5/5 (For those who are more experienced, you might have preferences about these toys already... but for someone in my shoes who's new, I highly recommend this item)


A&A Airsoft:
Shipping - 4/5 (You get what you pay for - I paid 25$ or something and got it to me in less than 7 business days from Alberta I think it was.)
Customer Service - 5/5 (Awesome. Simply put: Awesome. Fast to respond, honest and makes things happen.)


Final thought:
Awesome gun. I can't say enough. One minor thing I forgot to mention though is make sure you take the little allen key and tighten all the little bolts in the stock. Almost every one was a little loose, and needed just a gentle twist.



If you have suggestions, questions, comments, concerns, etc.. please feel free to message me here, via IM at enigmahack@hotmail.com (MSN) or via PM.

Thanks for reading!

[Styrak]

I love on the first video, how you measure the distance to the can, and then promptly cock the gun and move it to a different position. Not that it affects the performance that much, but why measure it before!? Lol.

[Amos]

What do you mean this isn't a real airsoft gun?

I own one of these things and it's 99% compatible with all the laylax upgrades...

Just because something isn't Maruzen doesn't mean it's not actually an airsoft gun.

[Styrak]

Yeah man, this is a clone. It's an airsoft gun. Looks pretty decent too.

[Affliction]

I was actually going to get one of these at some point. I love the look of the L96. I haven't actually seen them on Mark's site, how much does he charge for them?

Great review, I think I'll get one after reading this.
-VM

[enigmahack]

I love on the first video, how you measure the distance to the can, and then promptly cock the gun and move it to a different position. Not that it affects the performance that much, but why measure it before!? Lol.

Hahaha, I know - What happened is I had the butt stock set up on a popcan and piece of Styrofoam so I could show the distance was less than 2 inches. Then I went to cock it and... couldn't... LOL - Had to end up moving it.

What do you mean this isn't a real airsoft gun?

I own one of these things and it's 99% compatible with all the laylax upgrades...

Just because something isn't Maruzen doesn't mean it's not actually an airsoft gun.

I personally agree with you, I've just seen a LOT of people that are... well less accepting that you and I are. I was trying to humor that audience, while still giving a valid perspective to all other audiences.

Just of curiosity, which part would you recommend upgrading first and where did you go to get those upgrades? I was looking for a Dees Custom 6.01 500mm barrel, but I guess there's still the whole potential issue of getting it across the border. (He was saying that some customs officers see the word airsoft and don't even question, they just get rid of it.)

[enigmahack]

Originally Posted by VipaMave

I was actually going to get one of these at some point. I love the look of the L96. I haven't actually seen them on Mark's site, how much does he charge for them?

Great review, I think I'll get one after reading this.
-VM

Thanks for the comment

http://www.aasurplus.ca/virtuemart/44.html - down at the bottom. They're 370$ roughly, but IMO worth every penny - ESPECIALLY if they're upgradeable! (I knew some upgrades could be done, just not as many as I've very recently come to find out!)

[Styrak]

Originally Posted by enigmahack

Just of curiosity, which part would you recommend upgrading first and where did you go to get those upgrades? I was looking for a Dees Custom 6.01 500mm barrel, but I guess there's still the whole potential issue of getting it across the border. (He was saying that some customs officers see the word airsoft and don't even question, they just get rid of it.)

You won't have trouble importing an inner barrel. It's just a metal pipe. I don't think Dees Customs ships to Canada though.

[enigmahack]

Originally Posted by Styrak

You won't have trouble importing an inner barrel. It's just a metal pipe. I don't think Dees Customs ships to Canada though.

Yeah, I asked - that was the response that I received though.

I'll have to look for another tight bore somewhere though - I've heard that the 6.03mm Prometheus is a decent buy... but some seem to think it jams sometimes. I guess it depends on what's being put through it.

I'm open to suggestions, but sounds like I might be on the right track already

[Affliction]

Oh, it seems I've forgotten to ask: Is the outer barrel threaded? Its not that I like silencers, but I have a Muzzle Velocity Reducer I need to put to good use

-VM

[Styrak]

Upgrade it so you can downgrade it with a velocity reducer? Haha.

[Affliction]

Originally Posted by Styrak

Upgrade it so you can downgrade it with a velocity reducer? Haha.

Field restrictions... field restrictions... field restrictions.

;(
-VM

[Ronan]

What everyone is curious is performance, performance and performance.

Personally i couldn't give less of a shit what my sniper looks like (VSR, camo paint, and gun ghillie), what i do care about is performance

Doesn't matter if your gun looks superb if you can't hit your target.

Please please please do a review the performance of the gun. I doubt its going to be great but Amos stated its compatibly with top of the line aftermarket parts which is very important.

Overall nice review, it's nice to see that *some* clones actually have a nice looking finish, but lets see about performance

[Affliction]

Originally Posted by Ronan

What everyone is curious is performance, performance and performance.

Personally i couldn't give less of a shit what my sniper looks like (VSR, camo paint, and gun ghillie), what i do care about is performance

Doesn't matter if your gun looks superb if you can't hit your target.

Please please please do a review the performance of the gun. I doubt its going to be great but Amos stated its compatibly with top of the line aftermarket parts which is very important.

Overall nice review, it's nice to see that *some* clones actually have a nice looking finish, but lets see about performance

I hope I'm not sounding too vain, commenting only on aesthetics but I've read tons of reviews of the Well L96 and I've yet to see a bad review. So far the verdict is:

PRO
-Cheap(er)
-Good FPS
-Good Accuracy, comparable to high-quality airsoft.
-Comes with accessories (albeit low quality)
-Computability with the Maruzen counter-part's upgrades
-Great value in general

CON
-Feels a cheap, body is clearly plastic-y
-Lack of quality control

Not that I think the accuracy and FPS sucks (I'm sure its great stock) but as far as I can tell, most people buy snipers and heavily upgrade them anyways--Replacing almost all of the stock internals.

It is a great gun for the value, though ~400-ish is sort of pushing the envelope when TM guns are only approximately $100 more. Other (crapsoft) retailers I've seen retail the WELL L96 for approximately $300-320 CAD.
-VM