Some Unfinished Business

It occurred to me today that I have a bit of unfinished business with you. Some time ago, before we moved away from Texas, I wrote a series of posts regarding my AK47 build project. That series of posts is lacking one final post so this will finally be it.

What is this missing final post you ask? Why the range report of course.

You see making the first range report had to wait until the first firing and the first firing had to wait until we finally moved up here. I'm sure you are wondering why that is. To be honest I fully subscribe to the "better safe than sorry" mentality. I wanted to buckle this gun into a gun vise and fire it remotely for the first few rounds to ensure that it did not present a hazard. Remotely firing a gun is not something that they will allow you to do at any controlled range and that is all I could find down in the part of Texas I used to live in. There just weren't any wide open areas where a guy could test fire his AK47 to be found. Here, test firing was as simple as walking out my back door. So the first shots were fired out my finished AK47 almost as soon as we got here! I just forgot to tell you about it... My bad!

My AK47 performed flawlessly on its first outing. A pretty standard procedure for testing a homebuilt semi-auto fire arm is as follows:

First a single cartridge is chambered and remotely fired with no magazine in the magazine well. The purpose of this simple test is to ascertain that the firearm will safely stand up to the pressures of firing a round without posing a hazard to life and limb.

Next a magazine loaded with two rounds is loaded into the magazine well and the first round is then chambered. The firearm's trigger is then remotely cycled twice. The purpose of this test is to ensure that the firearm strips & loads rounds from the magazine properly and that it doesn't slam fire or otherwise malfunction in an unsafe manner.

Well I've been happily plinking away with this rifle ever since. It is remarkably accurate for a weapon that is supposedly renowned for inaccuracy. As a case in point I took a standard 1 gallon milk jug out today and placed it at a range of 100 yards. )A standard milk jug makes a handy target because it is analogous to the size of a human head.) I then fired a standard 30 round magazine filled with inexpensive Russian made Brown Bear 123 Grain FMJ ammunition at the milk jug. Here is the result:

All thirty rounds struck the target as you can see. If I can pump thirty rounds through something the size of a human head at 100 yards with the stock iron sights, I think the inaccurate moniker can be dropped for this particular example of Mikhail Kalashnikov's engineering. Any arguments?

All in all the AK build was not a difficult project. Pretty much anyone can do it as long as they take their time, mind their attention to detail and possess basic home shop skills. It is something every gun enthusiast should consider trying because in the end you will gain a lot from the experience. You will gain an intimate understanding of the inner workings of a modern semiautomatic firearm. You will earn a great deal of personal satisfaction. You will also be saving hundreds of dollars on a valuable firearm. Lastly and most importantly however, you will place one more gun into private ownership that scares the living bejeesus out of your run-of-the-mill liberal!

You may want to hurry to buy your AK parts kit however as supplies are starting to rapidly dry up.