This Airsoft holds a special place in my heart. It is the first "real" airsoft weapon I ever owned. Prior to 1992, I had been getting into Daisy's line of "Softair" guns, and I was only moderately enthusiastic about them. They were neat in that you loaded plastic cartridges with BBs and then loaded the cartridges into magazines and through a spring or pump action you loaded the cartridges one by one into the chamber to be fired and ejected like shell casings on a real gun. However, this was a disadvantage as well since the large cartridges severely limited magazine capacity, and it was a pain to go around looking for all your ejected cartridges, which you had to do because they were expensive to replace. In other words, they were no good for tournament use, especially outdoors.

  But then in the summer of 1992 I was able to go to England as part of the International Air Cadet Exchange program of the Civil Air Patrol. During my visit there, I found myself in Nottingham one afternoon with some time to kill and I decided to go into an Airsoft store. What an eye-opener. They had never heard of loading BB's into plastic cartridges. And all the weapons they had were more realistic than anything Daisy had ever put out. They had all sorts of spring and gas pistols, and a ton of spring and gas powered long guns. I didn't have much money, so I picked out a spring pistol in kit form, which was the cheapest thing they had. Since I owned a real P226 at the time, I got a P220, which was the only Sig they had. It may have been a KSC brand kit, because the packaging as I recall looked a lot like what KSC's packaging does now. *UPDATE* I found the box to this airsoft and it still doesn't provide much clue - the nearest I can figure is that the manufacturer is "LS."

Appearance

  The P220 is nice-looking in general. The grips look very authentic and everything is well proportioned. On a real Sig handgun, there is a double concentric roll pin that goes through the slide to hold the breech block in place. This Airsoft even has that detail down - I had to insert roll pins when I assembled the pistol. However, the metal parts (grip screws, trigger, hammer) seem to be made from zinc or some other cheap metal and the finish on them wore off quickly so now the metal is oxidizing. The front face of the slide is a separate piece, and the pressure from the recoil spring causes it to warp outward from the slide a little. And the magazine is just plain archaic - it's like a tube with a full-sized floorplate. It's just big enough to hold eleven BB's in a single vertical stack.

Function

  The action isn't very smooth for some reason and it occasionally gets hung up and you have to push the slide forward by hand. The trigger pull is crisp but long, much like Intrag's P226. The safety has been incorporated into the decocking lever, as on all other Sig Airsofts I've handled. One major negative: this model is based on the European version of the P220. In other words, it's got the magazine catch located at the base of the grip, rather than at the junction of the trigger guard and the frame. This means you can't perform a simple movement with your thumb to drop a magazine; you have to reach up with your weak hand, push the mag catch back with your thumb, and pull the magazine out. Re-inserting the magazine is even trickier. Heck, it's even trickier than re-inserting the magazine on a real European P220. You have to insert the magazine 3/4 of the way into the gun, the hold the gun upside down and pull back on the mag catch with your weak hand index finger, and push the magazine in the rest of the way with your weak hand middle finger. Then you can turn the gun right-side-up and resume shooting. This particular Airsoft is underpowered. It is rare that it breaks through two pieces of standard notebook paper at seven yards, and it doesn't have much range. I don't know if this is because it was a kit and I didn't assemble it properly, or if the kits were just made weaker to begin with, or if it was just weaker because it was an older design.

Accuracy

  Even though the P220 is underpowered, it maintains average accuracy with both .15g and .2g BB's. It is more accurate than the modern Tokyo Marui P228, but less accurate than most other modern spring powered Airsoft pistols.

Overall Impressions

  This is a decent quality Airsoft handgun, and accurate enough for close-up indoor work or casual plinking. It's underpowered, which means it wouldn't be good for serious tournament use, but its lack of power also means you can shoot almost anything in your house without damaging it.