How to fit a small LiPo in your KAC PDW (should work on VFC and clones by Bravo, DBoys, JM)

[MaciekA]

Some people have been asking me how to shove a LiPo into the handguard space of the KAC PDW. It's a tedious and annoying process that will have you swearing a few times, but once you've done it once, you could teach your dog how to do it ... Here's the details:



Note: VFC's website has a detailed exploded diagram you can always refer to if my graphic above ever disappears.

1) Make sure you study and carefully observe how PDW-06 or the "dummy bolt plate" works -- you will need to be able to reassemble this after removing some bits.

2) The parts in PDW-07, the faux piston rods, are going to be removed permanently and tossed into your spare parts bin. The space where these rods are is where your battery will go. I have confirmed a G&P 7.4V 1000mAh LiPo can fit in this space and field the gun in this fashion.

3) You will need to remove the two fat cylinders on the rear of the dummy bolt plate. In my graphic they are labelled "B". This is the key step that allows a 1000mAh stick to finally have enough room to fit.

4) Once you put your LiPo in this gun, you will want to re-assemble enough of PDW-06 to keep the barrel steady and in place, but leave out the two cylinders that retain the faux piston rods. I left out anything I was too lazy to put back and wasn't *absolutely* necessary. I even left out those two cylinders on the front.

5) You will need to rewire your gun for Deans, or potentially something smaller if you can manage it. I am using Deans and that works fine.

6) To make this whole process easier, you are going to have to get really comfortable with removing, putting back in, and generally working around the barrel guide block at the rear of part PDW-08. You will be spending a lot of time routing the bullet connectors around this thing, so observe how it's configured before you attack this project and get good at moving wiring through there. First time is a doozy, but it gets easy with practice.

7) STAGE putting your battery in and ensuring you'll have enough freedom to pull your charging interface out of the handguard for when you need to juice this baby up. Do the staging and test BEFORE you completely re-secure and rebuild the entire gun. That's right, the LiPo is going to stay in there for a long time. This is a dedicated battery for now.

Here is what your gun will look like when it is charging:



Here is what the battery looks like in the handguard. Barely noticable except for the wiring on the charging interface cable!



You can easily do a lot of work to hide this battery so that it's not so obvious. I'm lazy and this was good enough for me.

I'd love to see other people's results. My only regret is that I can't fit a 3 cell LiPo in this thing.

[Kable]

Works 100%. Just finished doing mine. No more hockey tape on my gun :P

[AngelusNex]

i found this caused my barrel to point down about 5 degrees, which made it nearly impossible to zero any optics to it.

[MaciekA]

Originally Posted by AngelusNex

i found this caused my barrel to point down about 5 degrees, which made it nearly impossible to zero any optics to it.

I found this to be the case on the stock gun with no modifications and traced it to a looseness of the barrel adjustment / retaining screws at the underside of the base of the handguard. It's not too hard to fix but it is definitely something to watch out for.

[AngelusNex]

nah mine was the tiny lipo was a milimeter too thick to fit right

[coach]

What happens if you run out of power and still need to shoot?

Well, my PDW runs on gas instead of lipos.....but you could build a dummy flashlight to house another small lipo and mount it on the side rail with a pigtail and connector sticking out, just long enough to reach your guns connector.

I'm not really a fan of PEQ boxes especially on small guns.

[MaciekA]

Originally Posted by coachster

What happens if you run out of power and still need to shoot?

This hasn't actually happened yet, but it could definitely happen with only 1000mAh. I tend to bring a lot of backup weaponry for myself and my team.

Well, my PDW runs on gas instead of lipos.....but you could build a dummy flashlight to house another small lipo and mount it on the side rail with a pigtail and connector sticking out, just long enough to reach your guns connector.

Interesting. Maybe even have a little switch on the bottom of the gun that lets you route the wiring to the secondary battery. Maybe even have the battery stuffed into a foregrip.

Damnit, I won't be able to get this out of my head now..

[sarosh]

What did you use to wrap around the stock?

[MaciekA]

Originally Posted by sarosh

What did you use to wrap around the stock?

Paracord. You can get about 100ft of it for under 8 bucks. I got mine at HERO but there are a lot of places that sell it.

[Arkode]

Lol, I'm sorry for the necro but I couldn't resist adding something... if you are looking for more options as far as batteries go, maybe take a look at hobbyking.com... they've got a decent selection of 3s/2s lipos that have been broken up into seperate cells for more convenient spacing >^.^<.... kac pdws need more love... there's hardly any material on them anywhere... thanks.

[MultipleParadox]

So you created an account on this forum just to necro a 3yrs old post, and make publicity about a shop we (probably) all know, selling stuff we (probably) all know about.
You're not affiliated to Hobby King are you?

[Arkode]

just adding my 2 cents for the people who didn't know, lol. Am not affiliated with hobbyking... just a fan of their merchandise as I used to do quite a lot of R/Cing. They only recently started carrying airsoft guns/gear and a lot of it is much cheaper/better quality there than it is in other places, I know this from many years of shopping there, and if you and "we" already know about this site then I'm sure you might be inclined to agree with me instead of posting a rather critical retort to what was intended to be helpful information to pdw users such as myself. As I said before, there's not a lot of info on pdws on the internet when I search for it, so this is for the future prospective few who might be looking into getting one of these underated but awesome guns... I mean... from the information I posted, one might find out that instead of the overpriced, 2s 20C 1000mah battery that the owner of this thread mentioned, they could get a battery that was same size/smaller and was 2000mah 3s 25C for cheaper And thats a hell of a difference to a guy who has virtually no up to date info on his/her pdw

[Jogawild]

Hey Arkode,
Care to post a link for a large capa battery that would fit in my VFC?
Cheers!