Here's every problem I've run into while my team has taken a trip through the CA36 family.
1. Magzines: The magazines are made out of weak plastic and the trap door for the bbs has a habit of breaking in such a way that the magazine no longer hold bbs feed into the main compartment and the trap door hangs limply open. This equals massive spilling of bbs, however, to get around it, I have used duct tape on the trap door and only wind my mags once they are installed in the replica.
2. The two prong-like contacts that touch the selector plate's contact, have a habit of slowing bending down away from the selector plate and this cause major issues when one tries to switch selected modes (don't worry, the way the G36 is made, the replica will be on safety in the safe position). This can come to the point where one or both firing modes no longer function. To fix this issue, I take the gearbox out, bend the prongs up towards the slector plate, so they sit correctly. This fixes 99% of the slector issues you will incounter. ECHO 1/JG's solution is to eliminate the slector plate's contact and solder the prongs together, avoiding this issue all together.
3. Out of 3 CA36 replicas, 2 had fairly prominent splits in the seam line of the stock. This is fixed with some pressure of the hand and some glue.
4. My CA36 has had an issue where two cracks began to form on either side of the last screw that holds the barrel assembly in. This only occured on my CA36 and niether of my cousins CA36k's or any other CA36 I've seen, so I believe this is due to my abuse as a user and should not be contributed to failure of the replica.
5. The folding stock is slightly fragile and if the replica is dropped or tossed or banged with enough force, it will snap clean off the replica's body. I've only seen one CA36k have this problem and it was because the owners decided to chuck it onto his bed with the stock extended, snapping the pieces which conected it to the body.
6. Selector switch falling off: Now I'm skeptical as to whether this was the fault of me putting the replica back together with too much force or was just from poor quality super glue CA attaches the selector switch to the replica with. Regardless, the selector switch did fall off my cousin's CA36k, however, with caution of salvaging parts and carefully applying of gorrilla glue, it was fixed in the period of a night. This incident only occured this one time and after I had taken the replica apart the previous day, so I feel this is again, user error.
7. Not really an issue if the user wishes to keep their CA36 stock, but in my case, I bought a used upper reciever to replace my damaged one and have found that the pin holding the stock in is quite a ***** to get out. After an hour of hammer with a pin-punch, it has only progressed a fourth of an inch. :roll: This puzzles me as my friend's pin in his ECHO 1/JG G36c fell clean out of his. Perhaps CA used some strong adhesive to hold the pin in, or perhaps bent it in, explaining why I can't seem to get the damn thing out.
Other than these few issues, I have encountered nothing that I would deem a note worthy issue of the CA36. I have yet to anybody's CA36's contacts or wiring to give out, but then again, that's only out of the eleven G36 owners I have played with and two of them have had theirs easily over a year. Perhaps in the future one of theirs may give out, but I again, I have yet to see it.
One of the major things that hit me about the CA36 and CA36k is their utterly amazing accuracy in stock form without adjusting the scope at distances my M15's hop up has trouble getting bbs in even a reasonably horizontal trajectory. I would like to also note, that the CA36 held utterly no advantage over the CA36k's when we tested them head to head. We were quite shocked to find them both pull off similar distances and accuracy. Even on full auto, while using a G36c iron sight, we managed to hit a man-sized target with almost every bb (about 3/5) at around 100-120ft. with .20 gram bbs.
*Note: The wind was very light that day, and we were targeting a stationary target. Regardless, I still find this amazing accuracy.
P.S. One difference we noted was the G36 seemed to have a lower zoom than either of the G36k's which both have somwhere around 3x zooms while the G36 had around 1.5-2x zoom.
Also, I frequently work on my friend's ECHO 1/JG G36c, and if externals are not a top priority, I strongly suggest it, however, you may want to get a tightbore and new hop up rubber to improve it mediocre accuracy. If externals are major, then I suggest the CA36 family as they feel much more 'awesome' because of the fiberglass while the ECHO 1/JG feels like ABS plastic with some light texture.
