Back in 2015, Rob Ski went to Definitive Arms to build an AK. In this video, they really get into the details of building an AK and anyone regardless of experience level is bound to learn something. You can watch in this 36:13 video as Rob builds his AK under the expert tutelage of the guys at Definitive Arms.
There are some great tips in here for riveting, getting the barrel blocks on square, etc. Definitely worth your time. After watching all these build videos, I really wish I had the time to build another.
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This is a cool review of an actual North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Chinese Type 56 AK. It was a captured rifle and brought back to the US. Ian of Forgotten Weapons does one of his usual exemplary reviews of the rifle and discusses its history.
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In this video, Rob Ski, of AK Operators Union, does a great job explaining how to lubricate your AK. Rob is the real deal having grown up around AKs and having also served in the US military. Be sure to Like him on Facebook. He’s always posting news and information.
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Brownells has turned out a nice for video set regarding AK 47/74 Maintenance. Here they are:
AK 47/74 Firearm Maintenance: Part 1 Disassembly
AK 47/74 Firearm Maintenance: Part 2 Cleaning
AK 47/74 Firearm Maintenance: Part 3 Lubrication
AK 47/74 Firearm Maintenance: Part 4 Reassembly
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Back before I had the AK-Builder trunnion drilling jig, I needed a quick and easy way to locate where to drill the holes for the front trunnion. A fellow showed me the PostIt note method and boy was it simple and it worked.
The front trunnion is drilled for the rivets from the first kit so those holes need to be located and drilled on the receiver.
Simply take a standard PostIt Note, stick it to the side of the clean receiver and then rub a dirty finger or pencil lead over the PostIt to see the outlines of the holes appear. By the way, if the trunnion and receiver are clean, your Post-It adhesive will hold the note in place, which is what you want.
So line the PostIt note up on the receiver’s top and right edges.
Center punch the holes. I like using an automated punch so I have less to juggle.
You then have your holes to locate your drill.
Use a hole finder to be more accurate and/or start with a small bit and work your way up in case you need to move a little bit one way or the other.
That’s it. Easy as pie and pretty fool proof. Lessons learned for me was to clean the parts to protect the adhesive, make sure the edges are aligned and then that nothing moves when you punch each hole. You do one Post-It note for each side and you can write the trunnion serial number on it and safe the Post-It for future reference.
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I get one or two emails a year from a purist telling me that what I did was evil, that I am a clueless half-wit, etc. Folks, innovation happens by trying new things. I have built more AKs than most – using rivets mainly because they do work best. There are a ton of reasons why rivets are best for joining forged blocks to sheet metal.
In terms of welds, do I understand the risk of destroying the heat treat in the locking lug area, the risk of causing embrittlement around the plug welds, that the Soviets explored this and dropped the idea due to cracking? Yes, I do and tried it anyway because I wanted to explore how to compensate. So, don’t send me hate mail me because I will not bother responding.
If you want to try and experiment, go for it. Should you do this with an AK build that you want to be historically accurate or plan to use heavily perhaps even under full auto, then the answer is “no – don’t do it”.
Yeah, these things were like $79-99 in June 2006 so I did a lot of playing around including experimenting with weld builds. Â I still have this one and it runs just fine. Â The welds were done with a HF 120 Volt MIG welder running an ArC02 shielding gas. Â Basically I did plug welds in place of rivets but did some extra welding on the back trunnion as I expected more stress there. Â 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.
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I like to heat treat my entire lower rails before I install them. Some guys just heat treat the tip but I go for overkill. When I would get flats and rails from AK-Builder for whatever I was doing, I’d do all the lower rails at once and store them oiled in a bag for later use.
The process is simple, I heat them up with a torch to dull to medium orange, which comes out to around 1500-1600F. Some guys use magnets and stop the heathing when magnetism is lost, some use marker/applied heat indicators – there are many ways to do it. I tend to use my sheet metal/jewelers oxy-acetelene torch. It is known as a Meco Midget and the thing is awesome for sheet metal work. I’ve had mine for over 10 years and never had a problem. I have a giant Journeyman II set but find it too big and cumbersome for stuff like this.
Tin Man Technologies (TM Tech), who I got mine from years ago and you will need to search around for it or find what some call a jeweler’s torch
Next, quench the parts in room temperature used engine oil. It works great for me. I have an old navy fuse can with a lid glued to a piece of wood that I use for this purpose.
After that, I anneal them by putting them in a flat pan, pouring in some brake fluid with some paper towel exposed, lighting the towel and then letting it all burn it off, which is about 500. It’s messy and you want to do it outdoors for sure – I let it all burn off and then air cool. Some guys put them in a toaster oven at 500F for 5-10 minutes and let them slowly cool down by turning the oven off. That works too.
Here the rails right after the brake fluid is finished burning off – you can see some of the soot that is generated:
When you weld the rails in with a spot welder, just be careful not to ruin the heat treat by letting a tong get up against the ejector tip and heating up. I’ve done it twice over the years. One time I didn’t notice and had to repair a peened over ejector and the other time I saw the discoloring of the tip and did a spot hardening of the ejector tip while it was in the receiver.
At any rate, I’d then oil everything and put them in a ziploc bag for future use. I would sand the backs of the rails prior to installation to get good spot welds.
While I use OA for a lot of my work, MAPP works just fine too.
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I heat treat the lower rails before I install them. The best way I found to align the lower rails in a flat so they were both parallel with the upper rail and aligned with the trunnion was to use a drill bits of the proper size to locate the lower rail and I would then clamp the lower rail in place prior to spot welding. This is one of those things where you want to check and double-check prior to and after each weld to make sure nothing shifted on you.
I use a Harbor Freight #45689 115 Volt spot welder with AK-Builder upper replacement tong and also tips. It’s lasted me through quite a few builds over the years and is still going strong. The tong makes it way easier to reach in and make the weld and the tips make the spot weld look a lot more like the real ones. I have had to replace the tips once so far, just FYI. You need to keep them clean to be most effective.
For beginners, there is no way to tell you how long to clamp and trigger the current for – many factors can affect how long it takes to heat the steel up enough for the two pieces of sheet metal to weld together. You need to practice and you’ll notice the color, sound of the welder. the amount of time it takes to get a good weld and especially the feel of the clamps as they come together during the weld. With practice you’ll feel when you have a good weld especially but it all adds up but you need to actually do it to learn.
Get scrap metal of about the same thickness to practice with. AKM receivers are 1mm thick. 18 gauge is 1.02mm so it is good to practice with and old scrap receiver stubs are another. With your first practice weld, go long and let the pieces really melt together so you can see. You want to burn a hole to understand how long it takes, the sound and the feel of the tongs. Then practice with less amounts of time until you find the sweet spot. These welds should be pretty strong and not pull apart easy. I do more spot welds than most and some guys look at photos of the rifle they are building and try to approximate the count and location, which is just fine. One thing, if you do heat treat your rails before hand like I do, be careful you do not get the tongs up against the ejector and ruin the heat treat. I’ve done it and the tell tale sign is that the ejector will be discolored from the heat. If you do make this mistake you will need to heat treat the tip while it is in the receiver or else it will definitely peen over and be deformed in its softened state. By the way, the steel should be relatively clean also and not have tons of grease or other contaminants on it either that might inhibit a good weld.
Just double check alignment very carefully before you spot weld and also that your welder’s tong does not get against the ejector and ruin the heat treat – assuming you did that before installation.
I hope this helps you out!
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