I really think it is particularly cute with a little 20 round magazine in it.
[ Ian's Customs: Krinkov ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at
another one of my "Ian's Customs",
interesting, and in this case,
totally ludicrous, goofy and horrible firearms.
This is my Krinkov. Now "Krinkov" is not a term that's historically accurate
for the original short-barrelled "submachine gun" type AKs.
That would originally have been the AKS-74U.
But I think Krinkov is in fact a perfect term,
either that or "Suchka", for this terrible little thing.
So the backstory on this is maybe 10 years ago or so, if I remember correctly,
we were really in the height of the golden age of AK parts kits.
You could get all sorts of cool AK kits here,
and you could still at that point get them with their original barrels.
So for 90 to 100 bucks. You could pick up all manner of Romanian kits, Yugoslav kits,
Hungarian kits, there were AMD-63s, AMD-65s, Yugo M70s, Yugo M92s.
Romanian standard AKMs, Romanian G kits, which is what this is, which we'll talk about in a moment.
And then a bunch of Soviet and Bulgarian stuff as well,
although that was even at that point scarcer and more expensive.
So I was having a great time dabbling in AK kits and AK manufacture,
and I decided that I wanted a short barrelled rifle.
I essentially wanted an AKS-74U,
but I couldn't afford one of those kits, they were really pretty expensive.
And I thought about it and decided proactively I would rather have a 7.62x39mm gun than 5.45.
If I'm going to have a goofily short barrel,
I'd rather have the heavy bullet going slower than have the light bullet going slower.
So kind of the obvious solution would be to get one of the Yugo M92s.
That was the Yugoslav sort of version of the AKS-74U in 7.62x39.
But I didn't want one of those, in part the kits were expensive,
but also they were all set up for underfolding stocks, and I didn't want an underfolder stock.
They are also a little bit longer barrelled, and I at the time was thinking
that I wanted maximum compactness, make the thing as small as possible.
And I wanted to be able to actually shoot it, so I want a stock that's reasonably good.
And I should point out here, this is long before the age of pistol braces, that simply wasn't a thing.
So I was going to go ahead and SBR this, I filed a Form 1 to manufacture it, got the tax stamp.
And then I had to decide how to put it together.
So I have a NoDak Spud receiver. They were, and I think still are,
the best manufacturer of stamped [AK] receivers out there, ... they make a wide variety.
They did receivers for the Tantals, they did all sorts of cool unique stuff.
I have just a very plain, generic AKM receiver here.
And then I used a ... Romanian G model parts kit,
and that's something that's kind of faded from memory at this point.
But it's got a big ol' "G" on the side of the rear sight block that you'll see in a moment.
I then went ahead and we shortened the whole front end.
So I actually found a guy online who is offering this shortening service.
And so we have actually a new barrel that has been cut down to 9.5 inches.
This may look like it's actually shorter than that,
but I think it's partially an optical illusion from the really short upper handguard,
which we'll also touch on in a moment.
But the barrel's 9.5 inches overall, he gave it a brand new gas piston
(an American gas piston), because it had to be short.
And because of the way the gas pistons are styled, you can't really just cut them down.
And by the way, ... because there were so many kits and receivers out there,
922 compliance parts were easy to get, so I was able to make use of that.
And just as a side note, this thing does in fact comply with 922(r).
There's been some back and forth about whether that actually applies
to short barrelled rifles that are registered as such.
In a predominance of caution I opted to make this 922(r) compliant.
And so between the receiver, the new barrel, the new gas piston and the fire control parts,
this is in fact 922(r) compliant, even though it uses imported magazines.
Anyway, we're getting outside the scope of the fun and cool.
... No one wants to delve into 922 nerdiness.
Anyway, the big question that I ended up with was: what am I going to do for a stock?
So let's take a closer look, and delve into some of those questions.
I'll pull the mag out. Just for fun because this is such a hybrid bastardised build,
I like keeping this magazine in it.
This is actually a Chinese Type 63 magazine,
which is not an AK mag, but it is interchangeable with AK mags.
And it's a 20 round capacity. So we'll take that out for the moment.
So I said "Romy G", and that was Romanian kits
that had this big letter G engraved into the rear sight block.
And also had a black ... stripe painted on the buttstocks.
And these were ... Romanian Civil Guard,
which allegedly had actually been issued out to the Romanian Civil Guard as semi-auto only rifles.
... Mechanically they were originally built as full-auto, but they left out the auto-sear.
And issued them out to these guys that they didn't really necessarily trust with full-auto
as semi-auto guns.
Now of course because they were full-auto receivers they ... had to be cut up,
they were treated like machine guns by US law.
But there were a lot of these parts kits coming in at the time,
and I think people have kind of forgotten about those.
So we've got our Romanian arsenal mark here, Cugir, 1978 manufacture, and its serial number.
This gun has not been treated so well, we've got some bits of rust on it here and there.
I did the riveting myself, which is not super high quality,
But you know what, they've all stayed together, so good enough.
OK, those are even worse.
No one show Brandon Herrera this, it'll show up as one of his cursed guns.
Definitely the most unusual part on this whole thing is the stock here.
So when I was looking at stocks, like I said I wanted a folding stock,
I didn't want an underfolder, forget that.
The next most commonly available, and really the easiest solution
would have been a Romanian, or East German, or Polish side-folding stock.
Those are the ones that have a single strut coming out, and then a triangular
butt pad/plate/assembly at the end.
And those are nice because they screw right into the exact same rear trunnion
as the standard wood stock, which is the rear trunnion
that this parts kit had that I put into the gun.
The problem is those stocks suck.
They're just really uncomfortable to shoot, they give a really lousy cheek weld.
There were also Hungarian side-folding stocks available at the time.
Those are even worse, they don't have the triangular butt plate,
they just have like a strut and a pad. It's pretty much the Sten of AK stocks.
Didn't want one of those either.
The fancy Gucci best option at the time was the Russian triangular side folder,
or a Bulgarian triangular side folder.
However, I was lazy and I wanted to make this as simple of a build as possible,
and those triangle side folders (actually I think it's on this side)
require you to cut a little notch, and rivet in place a catch to hold the side folder open.
And I didn't want to deal with that.
I hadn't ever built one of those, and I didn't want to start with this gun.
So that left me with only one option, that being the Chinese Type 56 side-folding stock.
Now the problem at the time was those were extremely rare,
and they actually still are extremely rare, difficult to find.
And like at that time I think I found one for like $650 for the trunnion and rear stock.
Which was insanely expensive, like that's still ridiculously expensive for a stock.
At the time that would have cost more than the entire rest of the gun, including the tax stamp.
Instead what I stumbled across was a Chinese single-shot pump air rifle
that was being sold like cheaper than dirt for I think it was like $54.
And they appear to have taken Type 56 side-folding stocks out of some surplus bin.
And maybe ... they made these stocks for these air guns
because they've got Phillips head screws, which I wouldn't expect to see on
an actual Chinese military AK.
But at any rate, unfortunately I looked for a picture of one of these things,
I can't find one anywhere, they are lost to the depths of the internet.
Maybe someone out there will have one of the original advertising pictures of them.
But it was essentially just a single-shot BB gun that you pump up,
that had an AK side-folding stock on it.
And so I bought one of those and I proceeded to destroy the receiver,
and rip the stock and trunnion out of it. And presto, there's my stock for my little Suchka.
And it's got a sling swivel on the back which I'm using here,
I threw a Chinese generic sling on it.
And it's got a push-button locking assembly which is nice and solid,
and ... folds over just like that.
It still operates if you want it to with the stock folded.
And the whole locking mechanism is built into the trunnion here,
so I don't need to do any modification to the front of the gun.
Presto, perfect solution.
The only problem was the trunnion in that air gun was not exactly the same as an AK trunnion.
So if we pull this apart.
And by the way, my build quality was poor enough on this that despite a good NoDak receiver,
it set up such that the bolt carrier would jump out of the rails a little bit.
I think that's because of what I ended up doing with the rear trunnion here.
So I put a recoil buffer in this exclusively
to prevent the bolt carrier from coming that last little bit of travel back.
I don't recommend these things, they're generally a terrible idea.
But in this case it has sort of an unanticipated function
of keeping the bolt carrier from falling out of the gun when you use it.
Now in order to make that totally non-AK stock fit, what I did was actually
take the standard Romanian rear trunnion, I chopped the rear tang off of it.
There'd normally be a tang here where you could attach the wood stock.
And then I kind of butted the air-gun stock in and welded it in place.
And you can see one of the welds right there.
It may not be a particularly good job, but I seem to have lined it up pretty much square,
and heck it's been like 10 years now, the thing's still nice and solid.
The stock doesn't have any appreciable wobble to it and works just fine.
It got a totally generic, I think it's a Tapco G2, fire control set
which was super cheap and available at the time.
Alright, then we have the whole front end of the gun here. ...
The barrel length was essentially dictated by
what we need in order to stack all these parts together.
So we have to have space for the rear sight block, this is the original rear sight block.
Still has a 1,000 metre rear sight on it, not exactly practical, but whatever.
The whole gun is not exactly practical.
Pretty much the minimum length handguard that you could have
and still actually fit your hand on the gun.
The gas tube up here has been cut down to match the length of the overall handguard.
Those of course are new hand guards there.
If you want to see it, there's our little baby gas piston.
And then basically the length we have here, you then add what's necessary
for the original gas block and then the original front sight block.
Both of them jammed on one right up against the other.
And then the muzzle has been threaded for standard 14x1 AK-style muzzle accessories.
So early on with this thing I actually had a Hungarian AMD-65 brake on it.
That was quite a remarkable concussion generator,
and I've mellowed a bit since then and put on just a plain unadorned muzzle nut.
It doesn't do anything to help anything, but it also doesn't make anything worse.
You can still see the remnants of the spot weld there.
When I took this to ... the first Red Oktober, Karl and I got it zeroed
and then spot welded the front sight drum in place so that it wouldn't shift under recoil.
Although I think that weld has actually broken (or it wasn't very good in the first place),
so it's probably still adjustable at this point.
But it hasn't come unzeroed, so that's something.
And so there you have it, that is my personal little Krinkov.
It is super tiny when all folded up. It has actually been basically totally reliable.
Every once in a while, especially if you get a wonky magazine perhaps,
although that's unusual with original AK military magazines.
But the thing actually shoots just fine, it runs reliably, the sights are terrible.
It really ... would have been better probably with an optics mount
to let me put some sort of red dot on because this sight radius is very short,
and rather difficult to use.
The handguard is very short, you do have to be careful that you don't fry your hand
on the barrel if you shoot it more than a little bit.
But you know what? It's really fun, and it has a little bit of a sentimental place to me
because I built it myself.
It is my first NFA weapon ever, because I Form 1-ed it myself.
And, well, you know what? Let's take it out to the range right now and put some more rounds through it.
Hold onto your EarPro because this thing is loud and concussive.
Sometimes even hits.
It is a horrible, horrible, terrible little gun, but it is oh so much fun to shoot.
And it's just so adorable.
Even in broad daylight in the desert like this I can see the muzzle flash,
the gigantic fireball that this thing is creating.
The downside to cute 20 round mags is they run out quickly.
But, ... it will take all manner of 30s.
So, my initial decision on the stock I am still very happy with.
I have had years of use of this gun, and despite the fact that this stock
came off a $60 single-shot Chinese air gun, I have never had any issues with the stock.
It still locks, it's still nice and totally solid in the extended position.
The length of pull is a little bit short, which kind of fits the overall package.
The cheek weld is actually fairly good because of these little pads.
I feel totally vindicated in this.
I wouldn't feel bad with one of the triangle folders, but as I said,
this required no modification to the front end of the gun, it was just easier to build.
And frankly, ripping it out of a $60 air gun was a lot cheaper.
Whoo! I think that's actually worse for people around me than it is for me right behind the gun.
I should say, early on I actually had a Hungarian AMD-63 brake on this thing,
and that made it truly ... intolerable for people around me.
So we got rid of that, and replaced it with just a simple little muzzle nut.
Let's go ahead and finish off this magazine.
There you go: my horrible, horrible, adorable little Krinkov.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.