Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and it's Sunday today,
so we are going to take a look at a new product on the market that has some historical flavour to it.
And today we have a PSA (Palmetto State Armoury) "Spiker".
This is a [semi-auto] AK that they are making ... that is a clone, or a reproduction
of the Chinese Type 56. Specifically the Type 56 with a fixed underfolding bayonet.
This is a pattern of rifle that is extremely common across the world today.
China made them in just mind-bogglingly huge numbers,
and exported them to a huge variety of different countries over the course of a couple of decades.
And they are AKs, they are very durable,
they continue to persist in conflict zones everywhere to this day.
Now, what makes this particular example interesting to me
is that we haven't really been able to get Type 56s into the United States for a very long time.
There's a tiny number of parts kits, but they've never really been imported in quantity as parts kits.
These were last commercially available in the mid to late-1980s,
before the various ... import and then temporary domestic production assault weapons bans took place.
Essentially Chinese manufacturers had to stop making things
like the underfolding bayonet model in order to meet US import requirements.
They then had to do things like thumb-hole stocks and other modifications to the guns.
Which means the existing original Chinese semi-auto commercial versions of this gun,
... they're not hugely scarce today, but there's a huge premium on them
because they are no longer available, they haven't been imported for 30 years.
And they're extremely expensive, you are talking $3,000, $2,500 and up to get an original one.
And it's a pattern of rifle that if you are interested in historical
conflict, ... combat, warfare, it's a significant and important model.
And so it's really cool to me that PSA is actually reproducing this pattern.
So let's take a quick look up close at it,
and let me show you what they did right, and what they did wrong.
Spoiler though: they did a lot more right than they did wrong, this is a very nice rifle.
Alright, first things first. PSA ships these with Magpul magazines.
The first thing you do is take this and chuck that out of the way,
and replace it with a proper Chinese-made stamped (aka flatback, they don't have the ridge back here)
replace that with a Chinese magazine and now you've got the proper look.
I get why Magpuls are included with the guns, they are a new production. These are not.
But really, if you're going to spend the money and get a reproduction of a rifle with this thing,
you really need to have the proper magazine with it too.
But anyway, on to the significant issues.
You might wonder, is it just the underfolding spike bayonet that makes this different?
And the answer is no, the Chinese actually made a ... fairly significantly distinct AK from the Russians.
Now initially when the AK is the Type 3, the ... mass production milled receiver guns,
China and ... the Soviet Union are on friendly terms, they are sharing technology.
And the Soviet Union helps China ... tool up and produce milled receiver AKs.
However, by the time the AKM is out and the Soviet Union is considering sharing that technology,
well, relations between China and the Soviet Union have degraded significantly.
And the Russians are no longer super-excited about giving the Chinese military aid.
In fact it's got to the point even that there are border skirmishes going on between the two countries.
So China captures a couple of these fancy new Russian stamped AKMs,
and then goes about reverse engineering the receiver on their own.
And what they come up with is actually sort of a hybrid gun
that is part stamped AKM, and still has ... significant elements from the milled AKs.
Most visually distinctively the stock.
Just to show you very clearly, this is ... a kit build,
but it's a Romanian AK with a Russian pattern of stock.
And if we drop this on top you can see that the Chinese stock
has a much more significant downward cant to the stock.
And the reason for that is that this is how the original milled AKs were,
and the Chinese just kept the stock profile.
Same goes for the grip, the pistol grip is wood, it does have a metal ferrule up at the top here,
and it's just a subtly different shape than a typical wooden AKM grip.
Again, the Chinese basically kept the original milled AK pattern.
The Chinese used a 1.5mm [thick] stamped receiver,
where the Russians and the Russian ... aid production guns tend to use 1mm.
The early Chinese Type 56s actually don't have these magazine well dimples,
they are just in there to help stabilise the magazine.
Later on they did add them, so this is appropriate, correct to have on the gun.
If we look at the rivet pattern here, you can see that the rivets are offset.
If we compare that to this Romanian designed one, we've got two rivets in a line
and a third one offset downward, so ... this is the Russian style of AKM rivet pattern,
this is Chinese. And PSA went to the effort of doing the proper Chinese pattern.
Out here at the front of course are where the really substantial changes happen.
And it's worth pointing out that PSA made several of these parts specifically brand-new for the Spiker.
So they did a fantastic job of copying the original Chinese pattern.
There are some things here that are distinctive, the fully-hooded front sight is distinctively Chinese.
We have this trapezoidal hole in the front sight block,
where the Russian pattern guns have ... oval holes.
I realise these are very subtle issues, but it's a replica,
so how good did they do making it a replica?
There is a slot in the underside of the handguard to hold the bayonet in place.
And then we can pull this back and ...
fold it out like so, it locks in place just like it should.
It bugs me a little bit that this doesn't actually snap quite all the way back in.
But remember it's being held back here and it is held up here.
I don't know if this is a quality control, tolerance stacking sort of thing and others do snap all the way in.
But it works fine, so tiny room for improvement right there.
The place we will see some differences between the original guns and the PSA Spiker
are largely around the receiver and the trunnions.
And that's because the receivers ... are taken from existing AK production tooling.
There was no existing front bayonet mount
that they could adapt and reuse for this because nobody else does this.
However, when it comes to things like the front trunnion
the profile here is a little bit different than an original Chinese.
Like I said, they did get the rivet pattern right which is really cool.
They have a little bit of a flare on their top cover that the Chinese didn't have.
The Chinese have just a flat surface here instead of a recess cut.
Some of those little elements that really ... they are totally non-practical issues,
and they're only pretty subtle visual issues
if you're that concerned about the exact replication of these little details.
And I get it, they're doing that because they need to make this affordable
or else ... you might as well just go buy an original one
for the expensive price if the repros are going to be close to the same price.
So they reused a lot of the mechanical parts in order to keep the price down.
But still did a pretty darn good job, I think, copying significant Chinese elements.
The selector markings are another example of that.
In fact, this is a place where the Spiker is a better reproduction than the original Chinese imports,
because the original Chinese imports had a tall selector stop here.
The Spiker actually has three selector settings: safe, semi and full.
It is only semi-auto, it runs semi-auto in either of these positions.
But this small selector stop is exactly how the actual full-auto Chinese guns look.
The selector markings here are Chinese characters, they are correct, they are the right characters.
This is what was generally used on the domestic military versions of these guns made in China.
The guns that were made for [military] export were marked "L" and "D",
which are the first letters in the Chinese words for safe and fire
but they're marked "L" and "D" in Latin characters.
Oh, worth pointing out we have two trigger guard rivets here,
which is again correct to the Chinese version of milled AK.
The Russian, like this Romanian gun I have here, have 4 trigger guard rivets.
They also went ahead and [made it look like they] hard chromed the bolt carrier and bolt,
which is what the Chinese originally did, so that's also really cool.
The single element that makes me the most sad about this gun
is the lack of a cleaning kit trap in the buttstock.
So they just have a flat metal butt plate. It would have been really cool
if they had the recess and the trapdoor.
But I suppose if you're really serious about that you could just drill a hole in the stock
and replace that [butt plate] with an original part.
Or even probably a Russian part might fit, to be honest I haven't tried that.
Oh, with the cosmetics they even got to the point of adding these.
These are actually fake spot welding marks that they put on.
... On the original Chinese guns these are the welds that hold the interior rails.
PSA has their own process for doing it, and they just added these spots
to make the guns look correct, which is really cool. ... Props to them for doing that.
In addition to all of the cosmetic features,
the other thing that's really nice about the PSA here is they've actually built it properly.
For a very long time American-made AKs had a well-deserved
and very unfortunate stigma of being unreliable.
Being essentially fragile, parts would break, bolt lugs would shear off.
I actually watched someone had an American-made AK bolt shear a locking lug at a match.
Like I'm there holding a broken off locking lug in my hand, like that's not good.
There's this misperception that AKs are cheap and easy to make and really simple
because they came into the US so inexpensively for so long, especially parts kits.
It's hard to recognise, to wrap your head around the actual
complexity and cost of building a firearm
when you are holding a parts kit for it in your hand that cost you $69 or $79.
Which is what they used to go for when they were being imported in bulk.
And that was with the intact barrel too. Anyway, now I'm just dating myself.
The thing with AKs is the countries that set up factories to build them
did so with lots of government military money.
They did spend the significant amount of money that was required
on tooling and processes and R&D and quality control to make really good, durable rifles.
And that's why the AK has such a good reputation overall.
When ... people are trying to make them in the US,
they're competing with parts kits that have already been long since paid for
and are now being sold essentially as commodity scrap metal.
And it's really hard to make all the parts correctly,
this most importantly is going to be bolts, bolt carriers and trunnions.
They need to be forged, like you can't just take random soft metal,
cut it to the right shape and expect it to work long term.
... Forged is best, they certainly have to be milled and heat treated correctly.
You could probably do them cast, but nobody in the US ever
actually put in the effort to do them properly cast.
And so you had parts that would break a lot, you had guns with a really bad reputation.
Well, PSA is actually forging these important parts,
they're making these guns the way that they are supposed to be made.
They have the volume of sales necessary to justify
the expenditure in proper tooling, proper manufacturing process for these guns.
A very cool new product as a replica if you're looking for
historically relevant and interesting variations on the Kalashnikov.
The Chinese Type 56 is a very important one, and now PSA has them.
Price on these (I looked it up just before filming) is typically $1,100.
They do also offer a Type 56 without the underfolding bayonet, that's 100 bucks cheaper.
That's also a very common rifle to find worldwide.
... Absolutely not as visually interesting as the one with the underfolders.
The Chinese are the only people who did underfolders.
The Chinese and the people that the Chinese helped to make AKs.
So anyway, PSA sent me this rifle to film for you guys, full disclosure there.
I expect I will be doing some shooting with it,
we'll probably take it to a two gun match at some point here because it's a really nice gun.
It's fun to shoot, it's reliable, it's durable and it looks really neat.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.