FN SCARred for life

I have a DBoys Scar-H. Having bought it, I found myself not being a great fan. Not just of the replica - which we'll come to later - but of the gun in general; I find it quite bulky and the grip isn't to my liking feeling noticeably slimmer than I'm used to and not particularly comfortable. The magazine is ludicrously easy to release by accident. The stock is quite nice though and the moveable cheek rest is useful but quite far forward.

The replica came with its own problems. To be fair, it was cheap so I wasn't too surprised. The ubiquitous problem of being hot for the UK was dealt with by clipping the spring and it now fires at a slightly underpowered 322fps. I had a trigger mosfet kicking about - originally destined for a CQB M4 - but equally suitable for the SCAR and fitted that while I was at it. The selector switches are pretty vague, especially the right hand side one but I don't see any way to fix that. I might have a look and see if I can source VFC ones and see if they work better. The others issues appear to be intrinsic to the design. Not having seen the VFC version that the DBoys is based on I can only assume that the superior quality of the original has addressed these problems, although I do have my doubts.

DIY front end fix

The main issue was with the front end though. The lower RIS rail bolts pass through two mounting brackets to screw directly into the fairly slim outer barrel. Almost immediately it was obvious that this was not particularly secure and the thin pot metal attachment points quickly wore down under the hardened steel bolts preventing me tightening them and effectively making the gun unusable. I opted for a somewhat Heath Robinson approach and secured a suitable sized nut to the front barrel mounting point using some copper sheet and some JB weld. After some sanding and a quick coat of matt black it looked a bit rough but functional. More to the point it solved the problem and to date has worked fine.

Hole re-tapped to M6 size

The back though was somewhat trickier as the barrel went flushly through a metal block that was securely bolted to the receiver and there was no space to use my previous solution. However, now that the front end was fixed the outer barrel was pretty secure and I decided to secure the rear to the block itself - the hex bolt went through this block to attach to the barrel. Of course, it wasn't that simple. The hole was M6 size and the current bolt was M5. I went ahead though and threaded the hole with an M6 tap. The only problem was that a flush fitting M6 hex bolt would still protrude without modifying the RIS so I selected a shortish dome headed bolt which, while it was raised up somewhat from the RIS, looked much better than than expected. It would, and did, present a problem when mounting a RIS mounted magazine well type grip but the grip was plastic and the bolt was hardened steel. A Dremel sorted out the grip.

While it now feels as solid as a proverbial rock and much stronger than the original it could be strengthened further by dropping a 10mm by 5mm diameter rod and a spring in to mate it more firmly with the outer barrel.

Of course, I managed to break the hop unit while removing the receiver...