I don't own one so I can't say I know, but from what I've seen the AK seems like a really simple design that's kind of hard to fuck up. The parts are larger and looser.
SO if the ching chong chinese could make a decent and extremely reliable AK in the 1950s, why the fuck can't american companies make a decent reliable AK? Hell My shitty AR runs just fine. why am I hearing all these stories about PSA AKs and other AKs made in America jamming and breaking?
why can't one company just figure it out and make a good one.
Because the Chinese made a large investment early in production to properly produce them. They were being made by the state for the state and not a company trying to cut corners.
Levi Hughes
american companies generally try to cheap out and cut corners on Aks, not all of them but a lot of them try and do this
William Morales
Scale of manufacturing.
The Chinese made them for their military. That means they invested in massive factories and proper large scale machinery. Machinery which they were allowed to copy extensively from the Soviet diagrams.
American AKs are not made on a large scale. That means corners being cut on everything and a lot more hand pressing and fitting.
Also loose clearances =/= loose tolerances.
Gabriel Barnes
The (stamped) AK design is optimal for churning millions of the fucking things out of a gigantic Soviet factory so they can be distributed en masse everywhere from Angola to Zimbabwe. Of course the Chinese are good at it too.
The American market doesn't have enough volume to allow Century to produce reliable stampings. For low-volume production you're going to get better results with a milled part, like, I dunno, an AR receiver.
Eli Cooper
Part of me thinks American AKs suck on purpose, to keep ARs at its unquestionable first place position of popularity. And to keep those companies that churn out garbage AKs alive, we eliminate foreign competition, so it's tough to get a non garbage rifle.
Jace Ward
Because foreign AKs are made on what was once state of the art machinery paid for by the state and have been pumping out rifles for decades. If an American manufacturer was going to try to produce the same kind of guns of the same quality they'd price themselves out of the market. A cold hammer forging machine today costs around one million US dollars, all these foreign manufacturing companies making AKs have multiple of these machines that were paid for by the state. If an American manufacturer wanted to get the same kind of tools to match the quality of proper foreign made AKs they're not going to sell for the same money as those foreign made AKs in the US, so itd be stupid for them to go that route when the consumer will just buy a WASR for less money and probably still have a better rifle. Plus, American manufacturers are more concerned about making a profit which means sub par manufacturing and corners cut.
Brayden Ortiz
How well the ARs made by the companies who make shitty AKs run is up for debate.
Camden Butler
>Plus, American manufacturers are more concerned about making a profit which means sub par manufacturing and corners cut. And to think, "American Made" used to be globally recognized as being a sign of great quality. Now it means nothing, if not absolute shit.
Leo Hall
>cutting corners on a design that’s a fucking circle the russians already cut all the corners, no wonder american designers are doing shit
Blake Wood
How much capital would it take to make a ak manufacturing business in the US?
Ryan Adams
It's almost as if communism is better than capitalism
Pretty sure the tactical beards from Basspro break into the AK factories and fuck with the CNC settings so their Daniel Defense and BCM ARs are infinitely more reliable by comparison.
Gabriel Long
>and looser. Stop this meme, AK's have just as tight of tolerances as any other fucking gun, the parts are just designed to not have a fucking micron of space between then so it can clear dirt and other fouling.
Fit=/=individual part tolerances
Owen Gray
>communism is good
It has never worked. Once. Just leave
Colton Fisher
>wasn’t real socialism
Gabriel Sanders
>Pretty sure the tactical beards from Basspro break into the AK factories and fuck with the CNC settings Hey man, I didn't say my conspiracy-tier theory made any sense. I understand how complicated manufacturing can be, having worked in manufacturing before (which is why I'm sympathetic to HMG for taking so fucking long to get their STG lookalike to function reliably), but the AK is very well established: there's little that needs to be reengineered, so it doesn't make sense that we have to accept garbage ass pot metal guns.
Cooper Foster
>so it doesn't make sense that we have to accept garbage ass pot metal guns. When people are willing to pay $1200 for a AK is when you will get a decent American AK.
Jose Thompson
The funny part is that's a bit more than the Bulgarian Arsenals cost.
David Sullivan
Well, I'm fairly sure labor costs in Bulgaria are a bit lower than in the US. Even so, that doesn't excuse our shitty materials and bad QC.
Ayden Turner
Don't have any experience with one, but aren't the Gen2 PSA AK's supposed to be pretty good?
Jackson Butler
The forged ones are supposedly good, the cast ones are shit.
Cooper Davis
Did Faxon's weirdo Stoner '63 gun that was supposed to shoot both 5.56 and 7.62x39 with a barrel and BCG swap ever work out?
Colton Fisher
Why do you assume Chinese made AK’s were faultless in the fifties?
Nolan Price
Leave you boot licking summer fag. Most of Jow Forums is ancap because freedom is the most important virtue of society
Jacob Morris
>everywhere from Angola to Zimbabwe
Angola and Zimbabwe are less than 200 miles away from each other
Nolan Gomez
so do you want freedom. liberty and not gulags, or do you want better guns?
the choice is yours
Cameron Lewis
Freedom and liberty. That way I get to choose the shitty guns I buy.
David Nguyen
I own a century arms, it’s held out really good. I haven’t reached 1000 rounds through it yet, so...
Caleb Jackson
It's pretty easy to fuck up an AK. They had a hell of a time when they first started manufacturing them, forcing them to switch to milled receivers until they had better stamping technology.
The problem with american AKs is that americans don't have the heat treatment information and quality control to manufacture them correctly.
Colton Torres
god your ass must hurt from pulling all this shit from it
Kayden Barnes
But they are A to Z
Anthony Hughes
The first thing he said is completely verifiably true.
Brody Peterson
As long as you almost never shoot it and keep your standards low, you'll never hit that like 5k round count where things supposedly get pretty dicey with those.
Elijah Hill
The first generation AK-47 was actually shit though. He's completely right about that. The AKM ironed out the kinks which is why nearly every "AK-47" out in the wild is an AKM while the real AK-47's are museum pieces.
Dominic Peterson
better at making weapons to kill people, not much else though
Michael Lee
>when people are willing to pay $1200 for an AK
They already do though.
Jason Reyes
The AK is a simple, rugged design for the end user, but it isn't simple to manufacture, its an elegant design well adapted to mass production but manufacturing mistakes, poor QC and corner cutting will fuck it up massively
Foreign companies that are producing AK's nearly all set up their production lines to service the needs of national militaries and have therefore put in enormous amounts of time and money in setting them up properly, training up large labour forces and bringing on expert engineering staff to deliver a high quality product
American companies setting up to produce guns for the mass market simply can't compete with the quality/cost ratio those foreign weapons can achieve, as they are aiming for a relatively small number of people with limited funds, they aren't tooling up to produce millions of the things, meaning economy of scale isn't on their side, so in order to keep costs low, they have to cut corners
Short and simple answer we had to reverse engineer it to make it in America, BUUUUUUTTTTTTT they never learned the proper metallurgy and procedures to make it correctly.
Isaac Baker
Well, the AK manufacturing method doesn't require much training.
They accomplish this by having GIGANTIC factories, with each individual on a line doing 1 simple operation each. Every individual gets quite good at installing 1 rivet, and doesn't need to know how to build a firearm.
This is how the gun was designed to be manufactured.
Charles Morris
unsustainable minimum wage means the product is either prohibitively expensive or low quality
Also the materials that US companies are using are shit ie cast trunnions
Asher Lopez
It's simply the Comparative Advantage that they teach you in high school econ. The demand for AKs in the US simply isn't high enough for US companies to justify the huge tooling costs required if they want to build them properly. The US could easily build a proper AK but it would cost probably $1600 and that's only if people would buy them en mass, which they won't. And who's going to buy that when the few that actually buy AKs would go with an Arsenal for $1000. The former Com Bloc countries have the TDP, tooling, setup, expertise & experience, and cheaper labor. Until the imports get cut off completely and the AK demand increases drastically, there will never be a good US AK that isn't milled.
A lot more than you'll ever get back in a reasonable time frame. Compared to fucking militarizes and other actors in medium-large scale conflicts the us market really isn't that big.
Thomas Lopez
If you can get a decent machine AR-15 for $600, why can't you get a decent machined AK for $600?e What parts are more complicated or costly to make? I don't understand it.
Camden Bennett
We have to make the tooling ourselves. That's the problem. It took the soviets quite a while to perfect their tooling and we don't have those tools or the schematics to make them.
Mason Collins
I don't buy that answer. The AK was introduced over 70 years ago.
Jonathan Price
If we make AKs like we make ARs (milling) we do a decent job at it. Not great but decent.
If we make AKs like the rest of the world makes AKs (stamping), we suck at it because that process requires very large very specific hardware that simply doesn't exist in the west on an industrial scale.
Why do you figure all the good AKs come from Combloc countries? Because the Soviets set all that shit up and it's been running for ~50 years. We're almost totally starting from scratch and the Bulgarians or whoever aren't going to give us any help.
Lucas Morales
you're retarded
Jaxson Smith
Yes the gen 2s, which are perpetually sold out
Jose Smith
Really an AK is actually pretty sophisticated. Open bolt pistol caliber weapons are the sphere of modern weapons design. You can literally make it with almost no firearms manufacturing experience or specifically firearms tools.
Juan Young
You know though, what really counts as working anyway? The era of the constitution is over, the founder's would probably all commit suicide if they had seen the morals and culture of the America they produced. The miscegenation and universal suffrage alone would get most of them.
The way we've torpedoed the international rifle market, I don't know. So much is out of place, and it isn't going to be fixed peacefully. I just hope the collapse of this system will allow me to die with some greater dignity that just living and continuing to collect my favorite guns out of spite.
>The American market doesn't have enough volume to allow Century to produce reliable stampings. It's not the stamped recievers. It's the trunnions and bolts that Century fucks up on.
Leo Young
The chinks were using Russian machines and taught in Russian factory schools
Jaxson Turner
It's not the tooling. It's the metallurgy involved in building the trunnions and bolts. Century has all the tooling to build an AK that looks like a Soviet AK. They are producing crucial parts that are too soft.
Isaiah Allen
Better guns to take freedom and liberty by force
David Wood
The era of the constitution was over long before the AK-47 was invented. It ended when the feds started using the Commerce Clause to penalize farmers for growing too much crops and to force businesses to serve people they did not want to. America isn't a free country and nobody is doing anything about it.
Bentley Lee
How is it that people in 2018 can still unironically believe that the AK platform is better than the AR platform? Making an argument for x39 over 5.56 is one thing, but I still hear stuff about ARs being "questionably unreliable" and seemingly AKs can do no wrong in that regard.
Xavier Howard
>SO if the ching chong chinese could make a decent and extremely reliable AK in the 1950s, why the fuck can't american companies make a decent reliable AK?
Capitalism
Michael Martin
>AK >Cut corners
AKMs are streamlined for mass production, sure, but they've all got chromed, hammer forged barrels, chrome everywhere else relevant, and steel forgings for all the stress bearing parts. It's quite possible to cheap out on AK production and make an inferior, possibly dangerously so, product.
Christopher Lee
I mean, direct impingement as the ar-15 does has its inate design flaws that only get solved at the low end by overgasing, and everywhere else by just using specific ammo that won't vomit so much dirt and carbon that your AR becomes bolt action after 300-500 rounds. This happened on my m-4 several times in service, but never on my extremely shitty Yugo pap firing Russian steelshit gutterrounds, but I don't like that so much moves around in the AK.
But I know I got issued an old as fuck m-4. And I've seen basic bitch palmetto clones go through more rounds with less hiccups, which made me give ARs a second chance. But if you're only experience is government issue, you've seen the limits of the system.
Justin Sullivan
I read somewhere that the main difference between the AR and the AK from an industrial perspective is that the AK is meant for mass production at huge specialized factories while the AR can be made in smaller less specialized ones.
Gabriel Carter
I can see that being fairly true especially after the AWB sunsetted and seemingly hundreds of small AR manufacturers (of widely varying quality) popped up to fill the demand. When the main forges that produced the receiver forgings were unable to keep up with the demand, some companies started making billet receivers which were functionally just as good.
It seems like a huge advantage to me because if there was ever a need to churn out a fuck ton of ARs and the main plants were taken out for whatever reason, you could contract out the parts and any competent machine shop could make them. They're so simple to assemble as well with basic tools. You're not dependent on a large centralized industrial estate.
Bentley Nguyen
Exactly. And the article suggested it actually reflected American strategic thinking on some level. Stoner probably considered the industrial aspect when designing the AR. Not that the Soviet didn't but they obviously preferred centralized mass production for max efficiency.
