Since it’s Mundane Monday, I’ll take some brief time to cover an internal “upgrade” part I’ve been futzing with for a few weeks now: the Modify Anti-Reversal Latch.
I actually received this part by accident (thanks Evike!), as it’s not one I would typically order. Generally speaking, anti-reversal latches are something that simply drops into your gearbox and wham-o! You’re done. With this particular AR latch, however, I have found it to be the rather inglorious exception to that rule.
But first: what sets this anti-reversal latch apart from the myriad others out there? To start with, this latch has a ‘captured’ spring that is held in place with an E-clip. It also has a slotted shaft designed to allow you to release the latch via a screwdriver for ease of takedown. It’s also reputedly heat treated for extra strength. These are all great ideas, and if they actually worked then this would be an amazing anti-reversal latch.
The biggest problem I’ve found is that this latch is terribly picky with gearboxes. It doesn’t just fit into any gearbox shell and work. In a Classic Army shell, for just one example, it is too tight and the latch will not rotate. I experienced the same issue with trying to install it into several other brands as well. Perhaps the biggest issue I’ve found is clearance issues with the spur gear. Basically that handy little E-clip that retains the ARL spring is too big in diameter and will actually rub against the spur gear on certain gearboxes; in my case this was during assembly into a Ver. 2 VFC shell. So what sounds like the screeching of a stripped piston is actually the murderous howl of your spur gear chewing the crap out of the E-clip.
Aiiieeeeeeeeee >_<
Fortunately the spur gear won out, and the E-clip was destroyed first. Other than the E-clip being destroyed, the latch itself was fine, so I went about reusing it by simply adding a few small shims to space it out properly away from the spur. The biggest attraction of this latch is the ability to release the spring tension by rotating it free with a screwdriver and I wanted to see if this would work in actual practice. So after slapping it all together and cycling the gearbox a few times (everything sounded great this time!) I disassembled the gun and pulled out the gearbox to test it out.
The first problem is you will need a rather small flat-bladed screwdriver to do this. The second is, you really risk breaking the tip of your screwdriver or rounding out the slot on the anti-reversal latch if the gearbox spring is fully compressed and you are using a heavy spring. In my case, I was only using a Prometheus M120, which isn’t the heaviest you might encounter out there. In the end, I managed to get the latch to release, but only after mildly twisting the tip of my screwdriver first. Ultimately, I did not find this to be any faster than my traditional method of using a hooked dental pick to simply lift up on the latch.
In summary, I don’t really find this latch to be worth the money ($12 from most retailers). While it has some interesting ideas behind it, in practice those ideas unfortunately don’t translate very well to practicality.
