The Classic Army Laser

Specification

Price: £35    Battery: CR123A Lithium camera battery

The CA laser is designed to be cheap and used for Airsoft, this must be taken into account or the review will seem very unfair.

Firstly what do you get? Well you get the laser, battery plus couple mounts and all the screw, allen keys etc that you need to put it together.

Laser Unit

The laser unit is pretty simple to get working.  Slot the battery (CR123A Lithium) in screw on the back with the pressure switch and your done.

There are 2 grub screws in the front for adjusting the angle the laser points at and you can unscrew the front to get the laser out if needed.  But I'll come to that later.  The pressure pad is nice and has a good responsive click when pressed to activate the laser.  This also has a Velcro pad to attach to a stick Velcro pad that should be placed on the gun.

Mounts

There are 2 type of mounts.  The first is the standard barrel mount, this is a very simple clamp where the laser fits in bottom part and the barrel fits in the top.   Then the 2 bolts in the middle are tightened to fix both in place.  This works very well and means you do not need an expensive RIS/RAS unit on your gun to fit it to.   There is one thing to look out for though, if you tighten the mount too much or move it when it is tightened it will scratch a lot of the paint on the barrel.  To prevent this I added a thin layer of foam rubber to stop this.

The next type of mount is the pistol mount, designed to fit on a Beretta Taurus 92F, 96FS, PT92, 99, 100, 101, according to the box.  You can buy the package with different pistol mounts such as Glock, Browning and Sig.  The mount is pretty sturdy but can be a little tricky to fit due to the placement of a few of the nub screws that tighten to the trigger guard.  And to be honest I really didn't bother trying hard to get it fitted to my 92F Ebb.

The beam

The beam is pretty good and has a range of about 15 meters indoors in day light.   Outdoors it's practically useless in sunlight though.  The one thing I don't like about the beam is it does have some light leakage around the main beam point the creates a blur with a bright centre rather than just a dot.

Problems

Now we come to some of the bad points, after mounting the laser on my M4A1 I decided to try to zero it using the grub screws in the side and top of the laser.  I got it pretty close then heard a ping!  On the other side of the laser there are some silver caps, these hold the spring for the laser to push against when tightening the grub screws.   However they are not very strongly placed in the body of the laser, so while tightening the screw the silver cap and spring pinged out the other side.  Some searching and a blob of messy superglue later I managed to get everything zeroed.  I also added some glue to the other silver cap to stop that one pinging out.  It can be quite a pain to zero as the laser inside does have much movement for aim correction.

Conclusion

Well it's cheap and does have some flaws but on the whole I think it's worth the money.   It's nice that it has a kit with everything you need to fix it to any gun.   But they could have made the silver caps fit into the body a little better. Also adding a thin layer of foam rubber to the barrel mount is a very good idea to stop scratching of the barrel.

This was purchased from Zero One, with all their usual brilliant service of answering any question very quickly and having the kit in stock.