I have been toying with the idea of acquiring an AK-47.
I really don't know that much about them so I thought I would start doing some homework.
After watching a few YouTube videos and seeing the absolute fucking garbage for sale out there, I may just reconsider this option.
This is a pretty good video that shows you what to be aware of concerning workmanship and parts quality from a couple of different suppliers.
This first piece of shit is to be avoided at all costs.
The video is almost ten minutes long and if you already know about this stuff then you probably don't need to watch it.
If, however, you are like me this is good stuff to know so that you don't plunk down some hard earned FRN's and wind up with a piece of junk.
7 comments:
Take your time there is one out there with your name on it.
One day a long time ago I was in a gun store looking at AK platform rifles...just for shits and grins because guns are scary and dangerous and should be outlawed.
Picked up one of those Saiga things and I was immediately unimpressed. Funny how they are saying here that their receivers are good, but I felt the entire package was lacking.
Cheap, what felt like hollow plastic hand guards and stocks, hosed down with Krylon stamped and riveted bullshit was my first impression.
Admittedly...I know next to nothing about AKs. I'm sure there are quality ones out there, but the Saiga didn't get me high at all.
My 2 cents...
If you're ooking for quality you need to look at something from a country that respects it's military. Russia and China don't qualify. They have (and probably will again) sent soldiers into battle with no gun at all, telling then to pick up a rifle from a fallen comrad.
Israel makes some pretty good AK- knock-offs, as do other countries that have smaller, better trained armies. Most people in this country go for the AR-series because they are American-made. I think they've got too damned many parts, thus making them harder to maintain, YMMV.
PTR91 or similar would be a better bet. Or if your stuck on the AK get a galil. The israeli stuff tends to be high quality.
Thing to remember about the AK47 is that the basic design was created to be cheap at all costs, because tens of millions of the things needed to be stamped out ASAP in case the Great Patriotic War started back up again. It's remarkable that it is as reliable as it is given this fact, but one of the less pleasant things is that accuracy was one of the costs that the Soviets were willing to give up. As Stalin put it, quantity has its own quality, and they were more concerned about the quantity of lead the thing was able to put downstream and the quantity of rifles that they could actually deploy ASAP than whether you could actually hit the side of a barn with the thing.
So basically anything made with the old Soviet tooling is crap. You can make an accurate AK-47, but you can't do it with the old Soviet tooling. Tolerances are too loose and sloppy. Of course, once you tighten up the tolerances you are also making it less reliable (one reason the old AK's are so reliable is that the tolerances are so loose that any dirt / grit / etc. that gets into the works just falls out rather than jam anything), so that means going to good fresh ammunition from a reputable manufacturer rather than dirty old crap that could have been stored in a bunker in Yugoslavia for fifty years. You certainly don't want any of the ammunition coming out of the old Soviet bloc, that's all crap that was manufactured to be cheap, not to be good. That crap works fine in a loose tolerance AK-47 but will jam one manufactured with tight tolerances.
All in all, it's a great design for mass citizen armies that really aren't very good at hitting what they shoot at anyhow, but if you're wanting it for sporting or target shooting purposes, finding a good AK-47 and good ammo for it is going to be a chore. I have no recommendations myself because it's not a rifle I'm interested in -- I'm more of a stealth guy who prefers guns that don't set off the alarm bells of civvies (but are just as deadly as "scary black guns") -- but I wish you luck.
If you want a 7.62x39 weapon that is accurate forget the AK and go with a Ruger Mini-30. I have gone through a few different AK's and SKS's and they are fun to play with but their accuracy just isn't there. The 7.62x39 round is a round that looses a lot of its energy after 200 yards and it will drop off fast.
The Israeli AK variant is probably the best AK followed by the Albanian. The AK is a slop machine by design - the philosophy of the Russians was to build a weapon that could be operated by a peasant. The weapon needed to be simple and low maintenance; Mosin-Nagant bolt action, SKS semi-auto, and the AK47/74 all fall into that category.
For an accurate and dependable 30 cal weapon an AR-10 in 308 is hard to beat. Other weapons to consider would be the FAL, Browning, M1, or Garand.
I bought a Bulgarian years ago and have been pleased.
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