Bosnia and Herzegovina Archives

The AK-47 rifle and it’s “banana” 30 round magazine are classics of rugged functional design. While I’ve posted many videos and how-to articles relating to various rifle and pistol variants, I’ve not really covered the steel magazines at all.

I was surfing around and found Matra Group located in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2015 this small manufacturer produced a video showcasing their small facility that makes a variety of steel magazines for AK-47, AK-74 and even Lee-Enfield rifles. The Lee-Enfield may be due to those rifles being supplied to the Yugoslav Partisans in WWII to fight th axis armies.

In the video, they show employees starting with sheet metal and stepping through various steps including stamping, machining and spot welding. For the most part, you will see a very labor intensie process using older general purpose machines. If you like videos that showcase how something is made in and old-school fashion, you will find this very interesting.

Here they are cutting the initial sheet down into usable blanks.

Making the front piecee that will lock onto the front trunnion.

Spot welding the two body halves together.

Here’s The Video

I hope you enjoyed the video! I definitely found it interesting and informative. Just to be clear, I am not endorsing the magazines – I’m just showing their manufacturing process so I can then compare it to the manufacturing used to produce the Croatian AK-47 magazines that Apex Gun Parts sells.

Please note that all images were extracted from the video and are the property of their respective owner.

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