Do you hate ARES?

[Boris the Blade]

I had a ARES MK. 43 which had a polycarbonate mechbox shell, which broke. When it worked it was a fun gun to shoot, but the mechbox shell was poorly designed and the airseal between the cylinder head and cylinder, loading nozzle was non-existent.

I contacted Phil at zshot, and I was told it would take 6-8 weeks for a new mechbox shell to be shipped to zshot from Ares, then additional time to me. I waited from June until last week for zshot to receive the part I needed, then I got fed up, sold the broken MK. 43 and ordered a Realsword Type 56-2. As far as I'm concerned, I'm never buying another ares product, but I will definitely continue to deal with zshot if I need to order parts, Phil responded very fast (usually same or next day) and was honest with what was going on.

[THe_Silencer]

Ares makes OK AEGs imo. They have the nicest, most realistic, and overall sexiest G36 AEGs on the market (now in tan!). THey're also very well priced to boot, unlike the atrociously overpriced ACRs. Sadly, QC is very hit or miss with Ares and everyone already knows about the proprietary internals. This alone turns me off from Ares in general. Having sub-par internals that cannot easily be replaced is a deal breaker for many airsofters.

[ThunderCactus]

Originally Posted by Amos

I'm not a fan of products. I've been tinkering with the insides of airsoft guns for the past 5+ years, and I've been doing it professionally for at least the past 2 years.

They tend to use low quality metals, far too many proprietary parts and have very poor initial build quality (internal construction is always very off on every ARES I've worked on)

Their guns are nice looking and try to be very innovative... but they still fall short in quality and reliability.

+1 damnit, the use of proprietary parts that are made of inferior materials and often poorly engineered has made me lose ALL faith in them. The quality of their design engineering is also in question, as I've seen some pretty incredibly retarded innovations that either started out as, or ended up becoming, demon issues in the gun.
It's also worth noting I passionately hate STAR airsoft which is more or less the same company.
Neither brand could PAY ME to consistently use any of their airsoft guns.

[SuperHog]

Hello Zshot,

Warranty on airsoft guns is no existent in this industry. If a gun is know for reliability then people tend to go with the gun that gets good reviews.

If your company decides to go with proprietary on parts and not have them available you created the dislike for your products from customers and dealers as well. You have been aware of it so just an executive decision and have the parts available either through dealers or direct as a form of customer support.

Most people have stay away your guns also because of the trigger micro-switch and other fragile parts. So what is stopping you folks from going back to the tradition switch assembly which is readily universal and available to everyone? (KWA has the 2GX proprietary mech box but it is built tough and reliable and gets good reviews)

You ask a question if people hate Ares, we don't hate Ares, we just buy other guns because they are more industry compatible and parts are available.

A year from now if Ares does not change, and you ask the same question, people will give you the same answer.

[ZShot]

First and foremost guys, let me say thanks for all you awesome feedback, and if you have more keep it coming. I didn't expect to have this much to read this morning.

Secondly, I guess this wasn't very clear, since I got a PM last night. We are ARES US distributor, and in a sense are their representative for the US as well. Obviously the ladies and gentlemen at ARES can't involve themselves as deeply into US forums, and until now we've never really felt the need.

Thirdly,
Some of you may ask "If you're the US distributor why would you get on Airsoft Canada?"

Well if you needed answers about your product wouldn't you go to an active 45,000+ member community too?

Originally Posted by Boris the Blade

I had a ARES MK. 43 which had a polycarbonate mechbox shell, which broke. When it worked it was a fun gun to shoot, but the mechbox shell was poorly designed and the airseal between the cylinder head and cylinder, loading nozzle was non-existent.

I contacted Phil at zshot, and I was told it would take 6-8 weeks for a new mechbox shell to be shipped to zshot from Ares, then additional time to me. I waited from June until last week for zshot to receive the part I needed, then I got fed up, sold the broken MK. 43 and ordered a Realsword Type 56-2. As far as I'm concerned, I'm never buying another ares product, but I will definitely continue to deal with zshot if I need to order parts, Phil responded very fast (usually same or next day) and was honest with what was going on.

Well I'm glad I did someone right. Surprisingly we've had a lot of complaints about our customer service on other forums. I'm still sorry I couldn't get those parts for you. Trust me not being able to get the parts hurts us as well. We've been sitting on almost literally no parts for months. We've disassembled most of our demo guns just to salvage the parts we could. There isn't a single Piston or Sector gear in our entire warehouse :banghead:

Originally Posted by 5kull

I like the fact that your posting on ASC. God knows a lot of people go overboard when you ask an opinion on the Internet. Good luck with the feedback to HK.

Thanks, 5kull. Like I said earlier, I've had a personal account for years, and knew ASC would be able to deliver the answers we needed to here.

Originally Posted by Yuu

I have no issue with your product except the fact stated above and you guys needs to release more of your proprietary parts e.g. (trigger assembly, gearbox, hop-up units, nozzle, and spring guide and etc...) Most your dealers rarely have anything in-stock of your parts.

Thanks, Yuu.

Let me ask this though, other companies that have proprietary parts, do their dealers usually stock them and make them available for purchase? Maybe I'm a little disconnected, but it seems the shops around here only keep general repair parts and will ask that you special order any uncommon parts. Heck my local store is a pretty big KWA dealer, and even when my old KWA went down I had to special order parts to get it fixed up. Do you think asking our dealers to begin stocking some odds and ends parts would make a large difference in regards to our parts support, or would you rather there be a single, centralized website where you can just hop-on purchase any part (by part number) for an ARES gun and have it express shipped to you?

Originally Posted by Yuu

I would love to try to buy and hope ARES KAC LMG would be a lot better with less proprietary parts.

Soon....soooon.

Originally Posted by ThunderCactus

The quality of their design engineering is also in question, as I've seen some pretty incredibly retarded innovations that either started out as, or ended up becoming, demon issues in the gun.

ThunderCactus,

Could you please name a couple of these "demon issues?" I know the Battery in the mag on the M3 is a common gripe with that model, but otherwise, I can't think of any ARES "innovations" which have shown a widespread problem. Sure, some of the features have produced isolated incidents of failure, but generally speaking we haven't seen any features where we said "Wow ARES, What were you thinking?"


Thanks for helping us get the ball rolling, a lot of these things were suspicions of ours (parts support, proprietary parts) , some we did not expect at all. One thing I'm glad to see is that people are offering constructive advice. This is the stuff we really need. I need to know what to tell my boss, so he can relay back to ARES in Hong Kong and we can start to get these issues hammered out.

So for that I want to thank all of you.

Cheers,
Phil

[tintin1223456]

I can understand sometimes why a company would have proprietary parts. What is the reason for having a clockwise thread for the flashhider, when everyone else it seems uses counter clockwise thread?

[THe_Silencer]

Originally Posted by tintin1223456

I can understand sometimes why a company would have proprietary parts. What is the reason for having a clockwise thread for the flashhider, when everyone else it seems uses counter clockwise thread?

I believe real steel firearms are clockwise threaded. counterclockwise is a TM standard, like most things in the airsoft industry.

[ZShot]

Originally Posted by tintin1223456

I can understand sometimes why a company would have proprietary parts. What is the reason for having a clockwise thread for the flashhider, when everyone else it seems uses counter clockwise thread?

Back in the time of the dinosaurs a lot of companies used a 14mm Clockwise thread. TM was one o f the first companies to exclusively use 14mm CCW thread, and when their AEGs became the standard many new manufacturers followed suit. Unfortunately, ARES has been around for quite some time and when they started they picked CW threads (since neither side is overly predominant).

However, I suppose it is something we can ask - they may switch if there is enough interest!

[SuperHog]

Are all the Ares distributors worldwide getting together to suggest to Ares Hong Kong that their business and manufacturing needs to be changed?

If you, ZShot is the only one, I doubt a single thing will be changed.

[Kokanee]

Airsoft is much more expensive in comparison to the USA, as such players here are much more hesitant to invest in a new rifle/pistol etc if it uses proprietary parts. Especially when the "Maple Curtain" between us and the states results in complications with the honoring of warranties and importing replacement parts.

Having been involved in the sport since '02, and having seen the evolution from TM dominance in the industry to the explosion of independent manufacturers, then gas guns etc... My humble suggestions are as follows;

- Eliminate the reliance in your designs on proprietary parts, or if not possible ensure that ARES sets up a web store where replacement parts can be ordered by ARES customers worldwide;

- Coordinate with one of the major retailers here in Canada to be the official ARES distributor, for the purpose of stocking above mentioned parts in country, and to organize the honoring of warranties; and

- Address the lackluster reputation of your internal parts; most likely the easiest way would be to subcontract this to a company known for the reliability of their internals. Your externals have a great rep for accuracy and build quality, but these days there are many brands with "good to go" internals out of the box, no one expects to have to do anything more than replacing a few wear items like pistons etc occasionally. Anything more turns prospective buyers off and sends them buying another brand with good internals.

Thanks for listening to the community, I hope you find our feedback to be constructive and useful.

[ThunderCactus]

Originally Posted by ZShot

Sure, some of the features have produced isolated incidents of failure, but generally speaking we haven't seen any features where we said "Wow ARES, What were you thinking?"

Anything you've ever made that's been proprietary, that goes for internals and externals.
It's all fine and dandy when you have company sponsored maintenance, and the distributor fixes the guns since they get all the parts.

But when someone comes to me and says "hey my gun broke, put upgrade parts in it" or "hey I want this gun to shoot 1500rpm at 400fps", then I have to deal with that crap.

Unless I'm absolutely sure the base model of an AEG is fully compatible with aftermarket parts, I won't even touch it.
When purchasing an AEG there are two things I look for; Sturdiness, which is the quality of materials they make the gun from. And compatibility with aftermarket parts, because I fully upgrade my guns as soon as I get them.
So far G&P has been the market leader for me in robustness and internal accuracy.

ARES doesn't make as awful a stock gun as crossman or STAR or ICS, but it's still not good enough for me to recommend it to anyone.

[bujitjit]

First of all, I'm not trying to start an argument, but just few things I want to clarify. I must say I’m a big ARES fan, and big fan on innovative and original design.

I honestly don’t see problem with having proprietary parts. Each factory creates their own parts for their own products.

Its really funny to see this kind of complain only appear in the airsoft industry! So in other words, you guys would expect a H&K part to fit into a COLT, or you expect to find BMW parts in a Honda dealer?

Come on man, standard parts don’t even make sense. If you guys are wining about standard parts, who should be the Standard then? Marui? Because that’s the only brand that famous and most people would at least have one in the past? And exist longer than other?

So in that case, why don’t everyone start buying ARES, and eventually ARES will become the STANDARD parts then!

Further more, ARES stay true to a lot of the detail compare to the real steel, like the clockwise threat is probably one, and they have stock tube that can be dissemble from the body, unlike those marui crap that attached!

As for reliability issue, I see ARES as Hyundai, they are getting better and better for both internal and external.

Also, they do have an OFFICAL CANADIAN DISTRIBUTOR, the info is on their own website, or if you are too lazy to find the info, I would love to give it to you! They got me the parts without any problem.

However, ARES pretty much just entered CANADA this year IMO, before 2011 when OneWorld still the distributor, you hardly able to find any ARES product in any store, but now its pretty easy to find one.

Give them some times and I’m sure their proprietary parts will be easily assessable in the future.

Lastly, as we all know, airsoft is an expensive sport in Canada when compare to other countries, if you guys don’t like the special parts, don’t even touch airsoft from any manufacture then, build your own…lol !

*P.S. Its really funny that you guys purchased an item that wasn’t suppose to be sold in here and then complaining you can’t find parts or get the warranty for it. Like the Mk.43 that mentioned above is not officially in CANADA yet, because I’m waiting for one as well!

[Skladfin]

Originally Posted by bujitjit

First of all, I'm not trying to start an argument, but just few things I want to clarify. I must say I’m a big ARES fan, and big fan on innovative and original design.

I honestly don’t see problem with having proprietary parts. Each factory creates their own parts for their own products.

Its really funny to see this kind of complain only appear in the airsoft industry! So in other words, you guys would expect a H&K part to fit into a COLT, or you expect to find BMW parts in a Honda dealer?

Come on man, standard parts don’t even make sense. If you guys are wining about standard parts, who should be the Standard then? Marui? Because that’s the only brand that famous and most people would at least have one in the past? And exist longer than other?

So what do you do when a proprietary part is broken?

[Swattiger]

Originally Posted by Skladfin

So what do you do when a proprietary part is broken?

I wrote to their head office to request a replacement and will pay the cost + postage. Works well for me, even for a TM Thompson whole hop-up set.

[Danke]

Ares has been in Canada for a long time. There have been several prior sources for them.

I have had several discussion with Zshot and suppliers in Hong Kong about Ares and it boils down to right now the folks who run Ares don't understand that not suppling spare parts hurts their business. It's not that airsoft is unknown outside of Asia so that's why their sales are low. It's that the other guys hustle for the business, and as a result they get the $.

I'd like to see better support for Ares in North America since I like what they do. Zshot will take what they read here and in other spots and then condense it down and present it to Ares. And hopefully as a result they will come to an understanding why they should make spare parts available in a timely manner.