Tag Archives: AKM

AK Smithing / BIY

Video: How to build an AK-47, AK-74, AKM. Complete video tutorial by bfgmovies — Best Rivet and Virgin Barrel Build Video I’ve Seen!

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Folks, once in a while I find out a snap judgement I made is very wrong.  I was watching AK Build videos on Youtube and ran across this video with a very young man with long hair and anime shirt sitting down to talk about building an AK.  I almost snorted because it must be some kind of a gag.  Within the first five minutes I realized this young man was very knowledgeable, articulate and very capable at demonstrating how to build an AK.  I was floored.  I almost missed this because my snap judgement was so off.  Wow.  Watch this.

This young man assembled a 55:59 long video showing you how to do an AK build with a manufactured receiver using a virgin barrel and he explains things along the way.  To give you an idea of the quality, this video was posted in May 2013, has had 104,441 views, 1,114 thumbs up approvals and only 74 thumbs down.  Folks, that is remarkable.

I am sharing a number of photos from the video to get you to realize this is really good.  He steps you through everything including aligning the blocks on the barrels, the barrel to the receiver, drilling pin holes, headspacing, setting rivets and then final assembly, including installation of the fire control group (FCG), function testing, installing the furniture, and finally winding up with applying Alumahyde II from Brownells as the finish.  I’d honestly say it is the best AK build video I have seen thus far that takes you all the way through the process.  This is really worth your time.

P.S.  The music and anime at the end is a nice touch 🙂

If you want to learn more, check out these other two video by bfgmovies:

 

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AK & Related Rifles, Video

Video: I Have This Old Gun – Chinese Type 56 (AKM) Rifle

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The NRA did a nice American Rifleman TV segment on the Chinese Type 56.   It’s only 5:37 long and worth your time.

 

If you find this post useful, please either buy something from one of the Amazon links, or use one of the links to go to Amazon and buy something completely different — as long as you use one our links to go and buy something from Amazon, it helps us out.  For each item you purchase, we get a small bit of ad revenue from Amazon to fund the blog.  The same is true for eBay as well — we don’t get anything unless you buy something.

AK & Related Rifles, AK Smithing / BIY

I miss the Romy G AKM Kits – They were a great learning experience, reliable and fun to shoot

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You know folks, I miss the old Romanian Garda kits.  I literally built about a dozen of them trying different variations on rivets, screws, welding and so forth.  You could get them from $79-119 with the barrel and sometimes even a Tapco G2 fire control group (FCG) included.  Copes, Centerfire, DPH and others had pallets of them.  My wife would give me the eye any time a box showed up from one of them 🙂

That was the good times and then thanks to yet another ridiculous ATF ruling, the kits with barrels were forbidden for import, the well dried up and prices rose.  I actually cut most of the completed rifles up and sold them for parts when kit prices went in the $300+ range.  I sure had a ton of fun with friends and family at the range.  What I personally enjoyed most was making them.  Boy, I made a ton of mistakes along the way but learned too and also learned to respect a lot of concepts that Kalashnikov and his designers put into the rifles including pushing for reliability, simplicity, and so forth.

At any rate, I was going through some photos from January 2013 and thought I would share a few pictures of guns that ran like tops.  These two rifles work great and I learned a ton making them.  The finishes are shades of Minwax stain with hand rubbed urethane stain on top.  I eventually moved to boiled linseed oil but that was long after I built these.  I always liked seing how the stain would take to the wood.  This is also before I started making grips – the wood one is from Ironwood and I don’t recall who made the plastic one.  The finish would have been air dried Duracoat on these.

If you find this post useful, please either buy something using one of the links to eBay and Amazon or click one of the AdNow advertisements.  EBay and Amazon you need to buy something, AdNow pays for each link you visit – no purchase needed.  Doing so will help us fund continued development of the blog.

 

AK & Related Rifles, Gunsmithing

Gasp – not another weld build Romy G

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Yeah, these things were like $79-99 in June 2006 so I did a lot of playing around including experimenting with weld builds.  I still have this one and it runs just fine.  The welds were done with a HF 120 Volt MIG welder running an ArC02 shielding gas.  Basically I did plug welds in place of rivets but did some extra welding on the back trunnion as I expected more stress there.  The lower rails were installed with a 120 Volt Harbor Freight Spot Welder with an AK-Builder tong installed.

My basic conclusion is that welding is fine for casual use rifles but rivets are the way to go with hard use.  The tricks are to take your time, do plug welds and watch your heat.  Your not trying to weld the heck out everything – just to get a decent plug weld to lock the parts into position in place of a rivet.  You’ll notice that for the critical front trunnion, I actually drilled the holes in the receiver and plug welded into the trunnion that had the rivets drilled out.

I use a flap sanding wheel on my angle die grinder to smooth everything down.

A drill bit with the right diameter to line the lower rails up with the front trunnion is used to position the lower rail for spot welding in place.

I went for overkill welding in the rear and put in a few extra beads to take up stress.

Welding in the center support and sanded it down too

This is the rifle ready for testing.

I did Duracoat on this build and two big recommendations I would make to folks who choose to use the air dry Duracoat are to at least abrasive blast the surface and absolutely wait the full amount of time indicated for curing, which is 1-2 weeks or something like that.  If you don’t do these two things, when you move the selector lever, it will scratch the finish off right to the bare metal.  I only use bake on finishes now.  I’ve had great luck with blasting, parking and then applying Molyresin on top but this last step could be whatever finish you want.  The parkerizing is a terrific surface for a finish to really grab a hold of.  A bake on finish is really the way to go with the top coat.

If I new they were going to go up so much in value, I would have done rivets.  Heck, I would have done all the rifles using rivets had I known.  I was just having a lot of fun and learning a ton.

If you find this post useful, please either buy something from one of the Amazon links, or use one of the links to go to Amazon and buy something completely different — as long as you use one our links to go and buy something from Amazon, it helps us out.  For each item you purchase, we get a small bit of ad revenue from Amazon to fund the blog.  The same is true for eBay as well.