[juicy]

Just got mine in the mail an hour or two ago (with everything but the original box), so here is a preliminary review. I will update this with performance/reliability pros and cons as time moves on (and I get myself a few TM MEU mags).

My Army R27 is - from what I can tell - a 99.99% copy of the Marui MEU. Army Armaments even copied the plastic three-panel grips, rather than using a rubber wrap-around Pachmayr type grip, like some other clone companies have done. I believe KJW is the one that I'm talking about here, but someone can correct me if I'm wrong... I installed stock TM M1911A1 grip panels on mine, due to the fact that they're slimmer and feel more natural in my hands. Perfect fit, minus the part about the grip weights being a hair too wide to properly fit in the slots in the frame for them. Oh, and I found what looks to be the only Army trademark on the gun under the right grip panel (the magazine notes that it is made by Army as well)!

The Army MEU is full metal, and it feels damn good for a clone GBB. Very little barrel wobble and play in the slide - and the hop up unit/inner barrel is fixed in place as well as a stock TM 5.1. And I'm a nit-picker when it comes to barrel/slide fitment! No seam lines anywhere. Sights have no dots, but the front sight post is serrated (supposedly to increase visibility in certain conditions, this feature is present on the RS MEU). Paint/finish is very nice to the touch, and seems durable enough for regular game play/target shooting usage. Wide, ambidextrous safety levers are both solid, with less than a millimeter of play when the hammer is not cocked, yet the engaging of this safety system with a cocked hammer leaves something to be desired (however, the disengaging of the safety levers gives a very positive feel and click). Hammer drops forward from a cocked position with less vigour than I would have liked, and also lacks a half-cocked position. Grip panels are god damn plastic though... and are wider than your standard M1911A1 grips - I didn't like them one bit. Trigger is a "WTF were you thinking?" super-shiny silver (not quite as polished as chrome though), and does have a hole for a trigger stop set screw... but doesn't have the screw. Cocking serrations at the front and rear of the slide are a blast - I was getting accustomed once more to cocking serrations only at the rear, following the sale of my Socom Gear Wilson Combat. Racking the slide sounds (and feels, but that's not the best part about it) wonderful - not much more to say here. The slide lock looks to mount slightly off centre, but the pin itself looks to have a moulding flaw and thus the entire external part of the pin isn't as perfectly round as the rest of the pin is.. what a fail on the part of Army - but oh well, its been worth the money so far!

Trades are close enough for me; however, I'm no trade whore so as long as there's something scribbled somewhere that looks half-legit, I'm happy. The left side of the slide reads: "MODEL 1911-A1" and "CAL .45" is underneath that. The right side of the slide bears what looks like the Springfield Armory logo and trade ("SPRINGFIELD ARMORY", what else did you think it would be?), but something is a little fishy about it (remember that I haven't cared enough to look up what the real steel MEU trades look like yet). The right side of the frame says, "UNITED STATES PROPERTY" and "N22250162" on the grip-side of the slide stop pin, and "M1911A1 U.S. ARMY"/"1295" on the muzzle side of the slide stop. The chamber has "NW7125 .45 ACP". Rear sights look to me like they're probably a drop-in fit to the Hi-Capa 4.3, and are marked with "NOVAK'S" and "PAT D [...]", sorry I gave up trying to read what the number actually reads here. Front sight post looks to be removable, though I'm not going to bother as of yet.

Popped a mag in, one dry fire. Thankfully, the mag was left gassed up by the person whom I bought this from (for all intensive purposes, as BNIB). Sounds and feels.. meh. But that's how I feel about all Marui-type stock piston heads of the Hi-Capa, 1911 varieties. Hammer spring isn't all that weak after all, though. Nice kick for a stock GBB, regardless. Recoil spring is of a sufficient strength as is - I won't be mucking around with this one as I would like to conserve as much gas as possible for the skinny single stack mags and their small gas capacity.

Next, time to do a disassembly of the slide bits. I installed an Action aluminum piston head, with a design very, very similar to the Nine Ball Dyna piston (just with a different number of ports, and silver instead of red) - the provided screw has the same sized hex pattern as the rest of the BBU screws too - neat-o! No surprises regarding the removal out the outer/inner barrel & hop up stuff - though I found the barrel bushing wrench to be absolutely useless. Oh well, I've got another neat-looking tool to throw in my pistol case now. The BBU came out with one hex wrench, one screw at the position of the firing pin on a RS, one screw atop the slide, going through the rear sight. And... it was greasy beyond lubricating anything. You can see what it looked like, before cleaning in one of my attached pictures - gross, eh? Cleaned that junk up, had to clean out the loading nozzle return spring as well, popped the new piston head in (the stock one looks to be black plastic), and voila! Note that the inside of the slide has some sort of rail spacer in it, underneath the ejection port; removal of this allows me to use my MEU top end with a Hi-Capa frame. Looks to me like my slide lugs have already worn down a bunch as well. Oh well...

Just remembered, there was a spare parts zip-locked baggie containing a few O-rings - not sure what for, possibly the magazine - as well as a spare hop up rubber and loading muzzle with floating valve/blocker/spring already installed. Apparently, the Army loading muzzles tend to break easily.

Onto the magazine, essentially the same as any cloned Marui MEU mag - plastic bumper screwed onto the bottom of the mag, a valve that looks (from the outside, as is installed right now) like a high flow, follower that does not lock into place but provides extra space for loading BB's by pulling the follower all the way down. I really like the MEU feed lip design, though they are potentially fragile (just don't drop the mag feed-lips-down). Insertion of the mag into the (shoddily, might I say. Bevels are not smoothed/rounded out in relation to the inside of the grip at all) beveled magwell is a well-practiced maneuver for me. Oh, right - feed lips won't be spewing BB's all of the place if you do happen to mess up and insert a mag with the feed lips on either side of the frame; I really like this about the design, especially since inserting BB's by hand through the feed lips is so damn easy too.

I haven't had the chance to go outdoors for a decent target shoot, nor have I skirmished this yet. I will update this thread when that time comes. Also, I have not yet disassembled the internals in the frame, but they do feel solid with every trigger pull - no trigger slop out of the box, and none has developed so far. I am wary of installing an upgraded hammer spring at this time, due to the unknown nature of the internals (clones tend to have lower-quality metals used throughout the guns).