AGM MP40 Review

[McKee]

AGM MP40 Review



I got this MP40 for 80$ (half price) because it was “defective”. I figured why not, might as well give it a shot and see if I can fix it up, and if nothing else it would make a good wallhanger. I was pleasantly surprised with the product I received after excessive shipping delays.
There are already several good videos on youtube running down the basic operation of the gun, so I’m not going to waste my time describing those features in detail. Linked below is an excellent once-over if you want to get oriented to the MP40’s operation.
AIRSOFT Basic Field Review of the AGM MP40 - YouTube



Construction/Design:

The AGM MP40 is indeed a china gun, but don’t count it out yet. The gun is of metal construction, a combination of stamped steel and aluminum, and sports an interesting two piece design. Depending on what model you get, the lower receiver has either brownish or black plastic side covers that cover up the lower receiver and pistol grip. This simulates the Bakelite used on the real MP40. The plastic has no structural bearing on the gun: it’s just there to cover up the guts. A spring loaded knob underneath receiver is pulled and rotated, and the entire upper receiver group and front end comes apart from the pistol grip and lower receiver. Here you gain access to the battery, mechbox, and hop up unit. This is excellent for quick field repairs of jams since you can quickly get access to the hop up chamber with no tools and rounds can be shaken or poked free. The battery just sits in behind the mechbox and this gun will hold a mini battery (including small-mid sized lipo packs) with plenty of wiggle room for wires and connectors. The selector lever for this gun chooses full or semi automatic, and the safety is a simply switch hidden in the bottom of the pistol grip which cuts the circuit from battery to mechbox. Simple but effective. The fuze is a standard tube fuze held in the pistol grip. The faux Bakelite pistol grip and side covers are held on by long screws that go through the gun and secure to a nut on the other side of the cover. This is handy since the nuts are easily replaceable at any hardware store so if you strip or lose them, its not the end of the world. Might not be a bad idea to use blue loctite on these just incase. DO NOT over tighten the front screw. Seriously. This will clamp the operating rod from the trigger to the mechbox and cause the gun to not shoot. This is the reason I got the gun half price, since it was “defective”, but in reality it just required turning one screw a quarter turn loose. The folding stock mechanism is good, but the stock is quite guilty of wobble both side to side and vertically. There are mods to fix this however, but out of the box its pretty noticeable.

Summary of construction and design: Good solid materials throughout, plastic is nice and doesn’t make the gun look or feel cheap. The upper and lower receiver have some loose play to it. Not terrible, but this is the price of the easily stripped nature of the gun. The wobbly stock is a downside, although I don’t think it would bend or break easily.

Internals/Performance:
This gun shot 345FPS immediately with .20g bbs. Not bad for out of the box performance. The mechbox is greased with whatever crazy melted caramel Chinese guns are lubed with, so I disassembled and degreased the whole thing and redid it with synthetic Teflon grease. Nylon bushings and a plastic spring guide are glaring problems out of the box, so I recommend swapping those out right away. Also, give the o-ring a good stretch. As with pretty much any gun, do a proper shimming job immediately as well (this one needed it). Outside of that, you shouldn’t require any upgrades except maybe a spring if you want to adjust FPS. I would be careful with cranking up FPS however since the mechbox is a unique modified V3 design, and you’d be hard pressed to find a replacement if you cracked it from a strong spring. After my simple mods, I was shooting 360 fps and 1000 rpm ROF. I will likely downgrade the spring, since I swapped the spring into my M16 with perfect airseal to test it and it was shooting 380FPS. That means there is approx a 20FPS loss of air from the MP40 and this is likely from the lack of an airseal nozzle. Unfortunately, the MP40 nozzle is of proprietary length so there is no direct replacement. Chinese guns are sometimes a crap shoot on internals but they actually aren’t too bad on this model. Don’t waste your money upgrading everything immediately, these simple mods (less than 15$ of parts) should keep you rolling for quite some time. Be careful, however, as the anti-reversal latch is a real pain in the ass to keep in place while closing up the box, and you may want to consider some sort of religious ceremony before attempting to reassemble. Accuracy is not bad considering the length of the inner barrel is quite short, but this is an SMG. It has a great rate of fire out of the box (1000rpm w/ 9.6v nimh) and is an excellent candidate for a close quarter or dense woodland environment.

Internals/Performance summary: Better than you would expect. It does require some TLC out of the box if you want to keep it running reliably, but after that it shouldn’t let you down as long as you don’t expect sniper rifle accuracy. Great gun for close in fighting, and even out to medium range.

Magazines

The AGM lowcap magazine the gun comes with is a metal 50rd magazine. I bought a box of King Arms 110round midcaps (cheap and readily available) to go with it as well (plastic). Both magazine types work well and feed reliably but the gun must be modified to accept KA mags! Its not difficult to do and takes about 5 minutes, a guide to it can be found here:

http://ww2aa.proboards.com/index.cgi...ay&thread=7596


Overall:
I was very pleasantly surprised with the AGM MP40 and will likely use the gun often in games. Not bad considering it was a fixer-up wall hanger to begin with. This is a great gun if you have a little technical know how or want to get a gun doc to do the little out of the box maintenance this gun needs. I play very rough with my guns and I have no doubt this will stand up to the rigors I put it through and then some. You really can't beat the field practicality of this construction and field strip-ability of the gun. Considering the lack of WW2 guns readily available, this is a very viable option if you’re looking to do some WW2 airsoft or just want to collect a decent looking model. Despite a few shortcomings, the value for your dollar on this gun is outstanding and I would recommend it to someone who is wary of buying a china gun.

PICS:
Trigger Mechanism 1
Trigger Mechanism 2
Gun Field Stripped
Access to hop up chamber
External View: Stock extended
External view: Stock Collapsed
Battery Compartment
Stripped side panels

[MaciekA]

Great review. This is the sort of story that makes me tempted to take more chances on buying used or broken stuff just to see if all it needs is a little tweaking.

[Forever_kaos]

Mine has been running smoothly and amazing for 2+ years now.
Sold it off to a friend, regrettably. Then sold off to another buddy and finally back to me a few months ago.

So far only the cylinder bits have been replaced for a better airseal, nearly perfect.
Out of the box when I first got it 2 some odd years ago, it was only popping out ~200 FPS and still is around there.
I am very happy with how it shoots, therefor I am in no rush to upgrade it any more until something breaks.

The hopup works wonders in mine. Not a single thing as been replaced there.
If anyone is curious though, it takes an AK style. It requires a bit of modding to fit and work.

I use the King Arms ~100 round midcaps.
They take a good 'oomf' to seat in the mag well at first, but have been running flawlessly with no mod.

Big plus one for this beasty in my books.

[McKee]

Originally Posted by Forever_kaos

I use the King Arms ~100 round midcaps.
They take a good 'oomf' to seat in the mag well at first, but have been running flawlessly with no mod.

Yeah from what i've read some of them will take the KAs without mod, some won't.. just luck of the draw I guess. You still need to give them a slight love tap to get them to click into place even with the mod (at least with mine) but its not that big of an issue.