THROUGH ROSE-TINTED SPECTACLES...

I’M DEDICATING MY COPY THIS MONTH TO BILL PRYCE-THOMAS, MAINLY BECAUSE IT’S ALL HIS FAULT!!

This piece grew out of the article on the Marui 18c AEP you’ll find elsewhere in this issue; writing about that got me reminiscing about Marui guns in general and how good they were. Now, since I am the first to call out mindless nostalgia I’ll try and get a grip on myself and not pretend that everything was awesome. I’m also not going to touch on their more recent models, which I have worked on and appreciated from a technical standpoint, but I have never used in anger.

However, if you’ve been involved with airsoft for a while, it’s highly likely that you have had a few Maruis. Off the top of my head I’ve owned and skirmished 6 FAMAS, M16A1, P90, several SPAS 12s, at least one Benelli M3, a few Tactical Launchers, several spring pistols, at least one AEP – the Glock18c and at least one VSR-10. There has also been at least one M1A1 Thompson and every single spring rifle they made – the G3, XM177E2, M16A1 (beside my desk as I type), the Uzi and the Skorpion. There may have been more tom be honest.

Now I will concede that in part that was due to availability – i.e. the lack of anything else that worked nearly as well or a lack of cash on my part – hence all the springers - but it’s not a world of a lie to say that they all worked well and were better designed and built than many of the guns available at the time. They were not without their flaws, and I’ll come onto some of those in due course. Also being Marui, they contained a lot of ABS plastic and were, by today’s standards, not terribly powerful. But they were also the first, as far as AEGs were concerned, and their designs have either been directly copied or adapted by pretty much every other manufacturer producing guns now.