By Orbital on Thursday, December 10,

1998 - 08:25 am:

I've put my SOCOM through the works in the last 9 months or so. I do lots of

shooting at home and end up pulling it out almost every day I go out on an airsoft

game (which has been plenty this season). It's hard to say how many shots I've

fired, but my best guess is in the low thousands.

I've found that most of the wear occurs on the slide, barrel and magazine.

For the slide, the grooves seem to stand up quite well for the number of rounds

I've put through the gun. There are no noticable deformations but it would be hard

to tell how much wear has occured it it were uniform along the entire slide. I use a

teflon lubricant on the barrel and slide to minimize wear. After every game I strip

my gun down from slide to the valves on the slide. Dirt and grit will quickly wear

down the brass nozzle.

The outer plastic barrel has shown signs of small stress fractures. There are of

course scuff marks along the front of the barrel where the slide rubs against but

this has no effect on the performance of the gun. Just lubricate it well here. The

latch which catches the spring has also shown scuffing, but functionally the

integrity remains.

The worst functional failure I've had so far is with the magazine. The ABS plastic

BB follower which also puts pressure to close the slide lock after the final round

has shown considerable wear. It has worn down so that the slide lock doesn't

always catch the follower. The brass nozzle ends up smacking into the follower

and the gun ends up half open on the last round instead of remaining fully open.

To fix this, I'm going to reinforce follower tab with some epoxy. Hopefully this will

fix the problem. As for as the frame of the gun goes, it is standing up to the test of

time. It's a great double handed gun (single handed shots are hard) with a large

magazine. I have a lot of fun in CQB games with this gun.

I am however looking into getting a WA .45 TAC Special, not so much becuase

the SOCOM has failed my expectations but becuase I have a gun collecting

mentality.