Well Warrior MB01/08 Review

Hi guys,

Firstly, apologies if this is kind of old news. I know the Well MB01 (Warrior) has been a widely accepted Maruzen clone on the scene for quite a while now but I couldn't find an MB01 review on here and I was looking for an excuse to try out my prowess at reviewing something, so here it is.

Secondly, thanks very much to inthetallgrass who recommended the exact gun I ended up buying well over a year ago in my intro thread when I was debating between getting a clone, or paying a bit extra and going for the TM L96.

So, the rifle I ended up getting seems to be exclusive to the retailer that sells it, the Well MB01/08 from www.taiwangun.com. Oddly, at the time of writing this I actually cannot find the listing on their site, either the site must be being updated or they have discontinued ALL their Well products!!

The Well MB01/08 is essentially a Well Warrior MB01 with the tapered and fluted barrel from the MB08. I had looked into buying a Well MB01 anyway as I am not keen on the folding stock of the MB08, and PDI barrels are as expensive as they are sexy!

Purchasing and Delivery

I found TaiwanGun very pleasant to deal with. I E-mailed them with a question about when the olive stocked verson was going to come back into stock and they replied extremely quickly and accurately, and there was no noticable language barrier between my English and their Polish whatsoever.

Payment was a little odd, as TaiwanGun use an external online banking company to process their credit-card payments, but it was still very easy to use. Once the wheels were in motion I was able to track the progress of my order on the website, and once it had been despatched I was able to track the parcel (in incredible detail) through UPS. The gun cost just under £90 and this went up to almost dead on £100 once I had paid for postage. At the current exchange rates that is around $160 US give or take a dollar or two.

It arrived four days later all the way from Poland to my address in the UK, and as I missed the first delivery on Friday it was re-arranged for Monday with no hitches or aggro at all.

Opening and First Impressions

I am not entirely sure why, but it seems to be the fashion when reviewing airsoft weapons to provide pictures of the box, so here is how it came through the door:



Another plus for TaiwanGun was that I had typed a notice to customs officials explaining that the gun was a replica and providing my UKARA number and contact details for my registered skirmish site. I had only expected it to appear in the small-print of the delivery note, and I was very nervous that customs would delay things, but in actual fact they had printed the whole notice in huge letters and stuck it to the outside of the box. They seem very clued up about UKARA and what customs look for.

So, under the black plastic and a generous helping of bubble-wrap this is the box itself:



Just a plain cardboard box really, but it did have this rather amusing sticker on the outside:



Now, I know they have to cover their own asses, but I liked the idea of NOT aiming it at humans! []

With the box open I was presented with this:



The instructions were mainly pictures but they managed to translate the labels for the parts of the gun and there were picture instructions of how to put it together.

I had been worried about the stock being light and creaky and brittle, but I was pleasantly surprised. Ok, the plastic isn't up to real-steel standards but it does a good impression. It does have a visible seam but it wasn't nearly as harsh as it could have been, the two sides are lined up perfectly and there was no moulding flash anywhere.

The receiver and barrel were much more heavy and solid than I expected. The outer barrel was ever so slightly loose against the receiver but a tiny tweak using the provided allen-key fixed that.

The magazines (3 provided) are plastic internals in a nice, sturdy metal case. A speed-loader is provided and works well enough but the sling, although functional, was pretty basic (it is now fitted to the soft-case of my .22 Weirauch)

Assembly was extremely simple. Stock meets receiver, two allen-bolts are already in place and are tightened up. Done. This is what I ended up with:





Once I had it together I tried to drop the cylinder sear and take the bolt out, but the sear was extremely stiff to the extent that I physically couldn't budge it. I disassembled the two parts of the gun again and pulled the sear out without the restriction of the trigger guard. It did come out with a very hard tug, and I was able to slide the cylinder and bolt out of the receiver.

The first thing I noticed was something that has been noted among many Well L96 reviews that I have read, and that is a fairly hefty layer of thick, sticky grease over the cylinder and inside of the receiver. It needs cleaning off and replacing with proper gun-oil but to be fair to the manufacturer, they only want to put the stuff on once so they used stuff that would never wear off, whereas as the owner I have the time and motivation to clean and renew lighter oil once a week or so.

The other thing that I noticed was that the end of the cylinder-head looked like this:



And for those of you who know their stuff, you will notice that there is no velocity-reduction insert. It is not actually promised by TaiwanGun, what they say is that "if the insert is fitted, velocity will be reduced to appx 290 fps" but it is slightly annoying that mine is the one they chose to leave out as my main skirmishing site has a 350 fps limit across the board.

As standard the Well MB01 is supposed to shoot closer to 475 so now I need to either find an insert or follow the spring-cutting section of inthetallgrass' very helpful silencing guide which, although I was going to do eventually, I was going to wait until I had the parts to put together a high-FPS cylinder set before I cut the stock spring into a low-FPS cylinder. In the meantime I was just going to play with the insert in or out depending on which site I was playing at.

First Pictures

Here are the first few pictures of the gun re-assembled and taken outside:













Now, before I get onto the first test I would like to point out that although I believe that "out of the box" should literally mean "as the gun came out of the box" I allowed myself a couple of discrepancies: Firstly, the gun does not come with a scope, and I thought putting up a reliable grouping without a sight would be counter-productive. Secondly, I had bought this silencer adapter from Airsoft Pro and as I think it is the ONLY silencer adapter that fits the MB08/MB10 barrel I fitted it because I was scared of losing it! Lastly I fitted the bipod adapter block that I got from Action Hobbies just because it looks cool and my missus kept telling me it was a little model tank when it was lying around the house...

I ordered Guarder deluxe 25mm high scope rings from Fire Support and fitted my AGS 3-9 x 40 scope that I borrowed from my Weirauch pending arrival of the scope I bought for the L96







First Shoot

The first thing I did was to fire an entire magazine at my first target. The bolt action is quite smooth but there is a knack to getting a smooth pull and return every time, otherwise the bolt can stick, especially on the way back in where the square back of the bolt meets the receiver. The pull is not too heavy but it's certainly heavy enough that I couldn't keep on target through the scope whilst I was racking it.

The trigger pull is pretty heavy considering that a sniper rifle is designed for accuracy. With this being said I am used to an EXTREMELY light trigger pull on my Feinwerkbau target rifle so it may just take some getting used to. Before I bought it I thought the safety trigger would be annoying but I actually didn't notice it at all, it will certainly get me by until goodies with the words "Zero" or "X-trigger" start being fitted.

The firing position is extremely comfortable. I tried my first shots through an L96 at my last airsoft game (an MB08) and found that very pleasant. I have only fired 100 shots or so through the gun so far, but it remains very comfortable to use. The cheek-rest is adjustable, but I found having it all the way down was the most comfortable position, although the MB01/08 comes with the finger-bolts that remove the need for tools when adjusting or removing the cheek-rest which also speeds up removal of the bolt.

Here are my first three targets with Blaster Devil 0.3g bbs (which were recommended to me by a friend who very kindly lent me his SVD for my first ever skirmish playing as sniper recently) they were shot the length of my garden which is roughly 10 metres (about 33 feet for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic) and to get an idea of scale, the targets are on A4 size paper.

Target 1:



Target 2:



Target 3:



As you can see, the groupings are not bad. It is shooting high and to the left, but at this short range I don't want to start messing with the hop just yet. When I get the new scope I will try and rectify the horizontal error and then go to a longer range to start tweaking the hop. I don't have access to a chrono at the moment so I don't know exactly what it is shooting at, but the back plate of my target is steel of similar thickness to a car body-panel and it is now full of dents.

Incidentally after around 100 shots the cylinder sear has now freed up to the extent that I can drop it without disassembling the gun. I will have to monitor this over time to make sure it doesn't go the other way and start dropping of its own accord.

Summary

In summary the Well MB01/08 represents very good value for money. It is a sub-£100 airsoft replica with a ready-fitted fluted barrel for a good deal less money than the MB08.

Build quality is perfectly acceptable considering it is essentially a toy gun, it's nice and heavy and although the plastic parts aren't incredibly high quality they are blemish free and have a nice feel to them. I had to fix one of the magazines because one of the tiny pins that hold the plastic part into the metal part had popped out of its hole, but that was literally a 30 second job.

The internals are widely accepted to be crap, but even out of the box (almost) it will do fine for a relative amateur like me, and has plenty of upgrade potential because of it's Maruzen DNA for when my abilities start to exceed those of the gun.

Taiwan Gun were a very helpful and easy-to-use retailer and I would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone in the UK (or the US for that matter, but I cannot comment on delivery times or customs issues)

I will comment on things like durability and longer range accuracy as and when I have that information, I will also add pictures when I paint it, but for the meantime I will leave you with proof (for those who were confused) that an L96 bipod adapter block really DOES look like a little model tank: []