FCC 416D: From the Outside In

[mcguyver]

Just to add icing to the cake, another faux body pin fell out. Note the miniscule glue residue:



The pin next to it is a Systema one that I had to install when I received the gun and it was missing in that spot on both sides.

[ThunderCactus]

I used to run, then tool, fixture, and supervise a few CNC machines, tolerances are easy to keep within .003" on the lowest quality "high end" machine ESPECIALLY if you're making parts from billet. Cast is a whole other story.
If you're making thousands, okay, a few bad parts might slip through, but that's why you have quality sampling. And they should have caught all these problems in the initial prototype before they went and made a huge run of $3000 CTWs
They have to have quality control on their production lines, so it's a pretty massive blunder if an out-of-spec gearbox made it into a finished product...

[mcguyver]

$3000 CTWs? lol

Frank, sometimes you are a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day.

[GBBR]

Originally Posted by thundercactus

i used to run, then tool, fixture, and supervise a few cnc machines, tolerances are easy to keep within .003" on the lowest quality "high end" machine especially if you're making parts from billet. Cast is a whole other story.
If you're making thousands, okay, a few bad parts might slip through, but that's why you have quality sampling. And they should have caught all these problems in the initial prototype before they went and made a huge run of $3000 ctws
they have to have quality control on their production lines, so it's a pretty massive blunder if an out-of-spec gearbox made it into a finished product...

ctw? O_o

[jomor]

LOL a little CNC and a little PTW you get a nice CTW LOL

[mcguyver]

So, I have spoken with my retailer, and he has ordered a replacement gearbox for the 416. However, it is down until it arrives, and I am not sure when that will be exactly.

At this point, nobody from FCC has been in contact with me at all since the emails I posted in post #2. They apparently have asked one of their Canadian retailers not to comment neither. I have a hard time with a company who wants to be secretive and run things quietly. I believe they are hoping that people forget about what I have found and will buy their products anyways. That is simply not right, nor is it fair. If they had come forth and acknowledged their issues, and worked to resolve it, different story. But silence does no favours to anyone.

It is therefore incumbent upon me to not recommend that anyone buy FCC's guns. Some of their parts are OK as replacement for Systema in cases where they have a unique non-OEM product, but as a general rule, they are no better than factory components from Systema and Systema is the hands-down preferred choice for replacement parts. The tolerances are simply too loose, and FCC has spent their capital trying to make themselves "different", when they should have spent it all making themselves the same.

There is another 416 enroute to me soon, and it will get a complete teardown to further validate my assessment.

So, to sum up, I absolutely and unequivocally do not endorse nor recommend FCC. This is not a permanent assessment, FCC needs to put the effort in to copy Systema and not blaze their own trail into oblivion.

[jomor]

I have to say I'm dissapointed. I was going to buy one but your honest review has changed my mind. I will go with a VFC and Lonex the inside! Thank you for such an indepth review and I'm sorry that you are going through all that hassle!

[mcguyver]

OK, well, I had to look another PTW that had failed on the weekend. The owner reported smoke coming out of the buffer tube. I did a complete teardown looking for burnt electronics, but found none:



This black spot on the ECU looked like a promising candidate, but it turned out to be a spot of crud.





Water did enter this gun. You can see residue on the selector board and the right side of the gearbox. The gun still ran during the RAAT downpour, but it went 3-burst in both modes.

The FET board looked fine, no obvious signs of smoke release, for that is the magic that makes electronics work. Once you let it out, things stop working.

That lead me to the final culprit, and here it is:



The motor was caked in burnt brush dust:



Now, there is always some amount of brush dust present on a motor. If it is shiny and copper-coloured, it is a sign of brush wear, sometimes premature due to a commutator that is not true. But this dust is black. That means that it has been burnt. The mechanism of this burning is the arc formed between the brush and the commutator. It can happen for alot of reasons. One of them being a damaged brush. It could also be a poor commutator, broken brush spring, poorly moving brush, weak brush spring allowing the brush to skip on the commutator.

At any rate, this motor is likely toast. It has seen perhaps 25,000 rounds, maybe a bit more or a bit less. I will look into it further once the owner and I have spoken.

Now, it would be a little unfair to readers of the previous posts on the 416 gearbox failure if I did not provide a frame of reference for the issues of lubrication, gear lash and wear. So, with this gun, a 2012 Systema, I figured I would tear it open to show you the differences. I already knew it as soon as I openned the 416's gearbox, but just to give you a comparison:

FCC:



Systema:




FCC:



Systema:



Please note the gear lash and lubrication. I relubed the Systema box this spring, and I do it the same way Systema does, grease in the right areas and no more than necessary, the gearbox must have lubrication, but it should not be dripping grease everywhere. Some is better than none, and too much is worse than none.

The more I look at FCC, the more I want Systema.

[wildcard]

Hey Brad just a FYI FCC gearbox have use only Oberon lube and not the Lithium based grease systema use, so there is no need for "excess" amount like in other gearboxes in fact the amount use when viewed is almost look like non existant but they are there, so the gearbox may look like it needs lube but actually each and every part do have a coating of this Oberon lube, just a FYI.

http://www.oberonlube.com/Indust_Home.htm

[ThunderCactus]

If you had said "certified labs" lubricant, I'd of been extremely impressed. Coming from actually using it myself in an industrial, long term application, against other high end greases, certified labs absolutely blows the competition out of the water in the molybdenum and lithium greases that I tested.

Now I'm not trying to pick anything apart, I'm just curious if they're actually using a super high end grease. What oberon grease specifically do they use? What's the base stock and additives?

[mcguyver]

Originally Posted by wildcard

Hey Brad just a FYI FCC gearbox have use only Oberon lube and not the Lithium based grease systema use, so there is no need for "excess" amount like in other gearboxes in fact the amount use when viewed is almost look like non existant but they are there, so the gearbox may look like it needs lube but actually each and every part do have a coating of this Oberon lube, just a FYI.

http://www.oberonlube.com/Indust_Home.htm

Systema only uses lithium grease in the brand new 2013 and Mad Max gearboxes. For the last 8 years, it has been a petroleum gear grease. It is still the best. First thing I did was yard that stuff out, lithium has no business in the gearbox.

The wear that occured was not satiated one bit by the the lubricant they use. They should stick to gear grease.

[wildcard]

Originally Posted by ThunderCactus

If you had said "certified labs" lubricant, I'd of been extremely impressed. Coming from actually using it myself in an industrial, long term application, against other high end greases, certified labs absolutely blows the competition out of the water in the molybdenum and lithium greases that I tested.

Now I'm not trying to pick anything apart, I'm just curious if they're actually using a super high end grease. What oberon grease specifically do they use? What's the base stock and additives?

Frank, originally they were using the G55 open gear lubricant, but they find that it was too thick, in the Systema manual they specify against using heavy lubricants so they switch to the recommended G38 Oberon Multi purpose grease with a NGLI -2 rating

I've only started using this grease recently on my other GBB and AEG I can actually see the improvement on my AEG LMG (G&P MK63) its actually quieter/smoother than my other G&P 249 and on the Illusion MEU teh action is a lot more crisp and attract a lot less gunk than teh superlube I've been using.

[ThunderCactus]

They don't give me much info on the site, but reading the page for the G55, yeah I agree it's too heavy. It's a heavy, high pressure, low speed grease.
What about using G56? Hard to tell without some finer details, seems like it's more geared towards our application though.

I'd agree that there isn't enough lube though. Although a thin film, in theory, should be enough, that's only in a perfect world where the gears don't wear. Ideally, any powder that inevitably wears off the gears needs to be encapsulated in grease. With a proper high end grease, particles are fully encapsulated and prevent further wear. But you need a grease thats either thick enough, or has high enough adhesion to not fling off.
A simple test you can do, is take a glob of grease, put SAND in it, rub it in there, and if you feel any sort of abrasion then the grease is no good. The grease should feel a little clumpy, but not abrasive at all.
I did the comparison between moly based chuck-ease (which is what EVERYONE uses in lathe chucks) and certified labs premalube (aluminum stock with moly added), and the difference was night and day. And most importantly, although they're both NLGI-2 greases, the chuck ease had very low adhesion and most of it ends up on the splash guards of your machine, whereas the premalube stays in the chuck SO well, and is so resistant to washout, you only need to grease it once every 2 months vs once a week.

[wildcard]

Originally Posted by ThunderCactus

They don't give me much info on the site, but reading the page for the G55, yeah I agree it's too heavy. It's a heavy, high pressure, low speed grease.
What about using G56? Hard to tell without some finer details, seems like it's more geared towards our application though.

I'd agree that there isn't enough lube though. Although a thin film, in theory, should be enough, that's only in a perfect world where the gears don't wear. Ideally, any powder that inevitably wears off the gears needs to be encapsulated in grease. With a proper high end grease, particles are fully encapsulated and prevent further wear. But you need a grease thats either thick enough, or has high enough adhesion to not fling off.
A simple test you can do, is take a glob of grease, put SAND in it, rub it in there, and if you feel any sort of abrasion then the grease is no good. The grease should feel a little clumpy, but not abrasive at all.
I did the comparison between moly based chuck-ease (which is what EVERYONE uses in lathe chucks) and certified labs premalube (aluminum stock with moly added), and the difference was night and day. And most importantly, although they're both NLGI-2 greases, the chuck ease had very low adhesion and most of it ends up on the splash guards of your machine, whereas the premalube stays in the chuck SO well, and is so resistant to washout, you only need to grease it once every 2 months vs once a week.

This OBERON G38 is nothing like the superlube the "abbrasion" test definitely pass but one thing I noticed on my MK63 gearbox is the original amount that I applied have dissapeared but when I remove the gears its'a actually still there (from the feel and cloth) and it look like it bonded? to the metal so on my GBB I only applied a little in fact it was way less that what I normally put. I did play around with different kind of grease/lubricants before went as highend as the same PTFE based bearing grease as what the USAF use (stupidly expensive) but in the end the superlube took care of things until I was introduced to this by the FCC guys.

anyway BRSM sorry for the thread jack Brad.

[ThunderCactus]

Cool, sounds like it just disperses and has excellent adhesion.
AEG gears are generally excellent for wear resistance though, I can say I've never seen any sort of significant wear on a set of high end gears in a G&P mechbox and I've run a few sets dry just to see. Of course, if the bearing holes are off, like in a CA, wear happens a lot faster and more significantly.
Has FCC said anything about the gearbox? Have they already corrected the gear lash problem?