Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look
at this quite rare CZ-2000 rifle.
Now this originates with the story of the CZ 58
or Vz.58 or rather CZ Vz.58, which of course
was adopted by Czechoslovakia as its military rifle
in 1958, was used through the '60s,
and into the '70s, and afterwards as well.
But once they got into the 1970s they realised that, well, this design was getting a little obsolete,
the Soviets had changed from 7.62x39, which is what the Model 58 used,
to the new 5.45 cartridge, and the Czechs were looking at this and thought,
"You know, that 5.45 cartridge kind of looks like the way to go,
and maybe they should develop a rifle to use it."
So in 1977 they set about developing a domestically designed and produced
basically AK in 5.45mm, and that was this.
The codename for the project was LADA, that's a Slovakian woman's name,
and that was the name assigned to ... both the rifles and the overall project.
And they spent a remarkable amount of time working on this program,
because it wasn't until like ... 1984 ... that the design was really finally completed.
And ... I'm not sure exactly what was going on there, because that's 7 years
to basically make an AK with a few external changes to it.
Now I suppose I can't be too hard on them, the US took 12 years
to put a box magazine in the M1 Garand, but I digress.
In 1984 the design was ... green-lit and they had the design down.
And they started to put them into production, had some prototypes ready in 1986.
And they started putting those through actual military trials.
And there were some problems with the gun, it ended up spending a couple of years in trials.
And they went through three generations of design
before they got one that really worked to their satisfaction.
And by the time ... the testing was done, it had come through, it worked well,
it was November of 1989.
And, well, if you're not up on your Czechoslovakian history,
the other thing that happened in November of 1989 was the Velvet Revolution.
This was the end of Czechoslovakia.
Basically it was a popular uprising in Czechoslovakia, kicked out the Soviets,
kicked out the Communists, the country became its own independent nation.
And as part of this, well of course the Army budget kind of went down.
The new state didn't have the money to spend in the way that the
previously existing communist state had,
and so the whole rifle program got totally derailed.
... As far as I'm aware, there hadn't been any real development of
domestically produced 5.45 ammunition in Czechoslovakia to support the rifle.
Presumably they were going to get that going once the rifles were in production.
So once the country split with the Soviet Bloc
(and then of course very quickly the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell apart),
all of a sudden a new 5.45 rifle doesn't really make much sense.
So instead the natural thing to do, and this especially came back up in the early '90s
when Czechoslovakia, or rather the Czech Republic at that point,
started to look towards NATO for possible NATO membership, 5.56 was the natural calibre.
So they rebuilt the rifle in 5.56, which wasn't all that difficult of a thing to do.
And that is what we have here.
In 1994, when NATO membership started to look like a possibility,
they started to get more serious about a 5.56 rifle.
And this was CZ's entry into the competition at first,
they basically just dusted this thing back off and went,
"Hey, we still have these 5.56 AKs, I mean LADAs, because they're not just AKs."
But in order to make them sound a bit more modern they had to come up with a
newer more futuristic name, so they came up with CZ-2000.
And that's where the name of this rifle came from. ...
Let's go ahead and take a closer look at this, we'll pull it apart, I can show you the insides.
Like I said the closer you get to this, the deeper you get inside it, the more of an AK it really is.
So we'll start on the left side here. Most of the things that are not
standard AK on this rifle are visible from the outside.
So first off, our serial number here is S003.
That "94" is the year of manufacture, manufactured 1994.
They didn't make many of these, and they certainly only made a couple before this one.
Now the selector switch back here is thumb accessible.
Kind of like - well, not really like a Galil.
So a Galil has the selector coming out the bottom here.
They put the selector in the side of the receiver.
As much as this ... is mechanically an AK, parts don't interchange on it.
So the selector here is interesting in that ... we have a safe position here,
semi-auto is back, full-auto is forward with a three round burst ratchet,
or complete dump-the-mag 30 round full-auto.
We have a dust-cover mounted rear sight here.
It is an aperture sight, which is pretty cool, on a tangent leaf.
It goes out to 800 metres, we can stretch that up like so.
And it's got a couple of reasonably thick wire protectors there.
So if you drop the rifle on the top, you won't actually hit the sight.
You can see the aperture right there,
and then there is also the night vision version when you flip it up.
... It's like a big open pistol style of notch sight.
Originally there would have been some radioactive paint in those two circles
so the thing luminesced at night.
That is used in conjunction with this hooded round-post front sight.
And if I rotate that around, that is the ... luminous radioactive front sight.
It locks down and in place when you're not using it, like so.
In order to make the gun more compact it does have a folding stock.
So we pull this little nub button down, and then the stock folds into the side.
That's just a big ol' latch right there to keep it locked in place.
On the front end, we have this little lanyard-loop style of thing there, and a hook on the stock.
So that locks it in place. Push that in and you can unfold the stock.
Unlike the other AK variants that have left-side safety levers,
the Czechs just decided to get rid of the whole big dust-cover safety lever entirely on the right.
So there is a little bit of an opening in the action here, which maybe isn't a great thing.
But they ... apparently just didn't like that whole big lever safety and ditched it.
As for magazines, the original 5.45 magazines were steel.
By the time they got to the CZ-2000 project,
they'd started making transparent polymer magazines.
And what's interesting about this is ... the original 5.45 magazines
are completely interchangeable with Soviet 5.45 AK magazines.
Which makes a lot of sense, ... if you were going to ... have serious military ties
with the Soviet Union, well hey, make your ammunition
and your magazines compatible with them. That's exactly what NATO has done.
However, what's kind of cool is when they went to the 5.56 mags,
they left the top of the magazine identical.
So a standard 5.45 mag will lock into the CZ-2000 just fine.
These mags, ... the curvature is a little bit different for 5.45 and 5.56.
And you can see that if I line them up like this,
you can see there's a little more curvature to the 5.45 mag in the back.
So this mag is a 5.56 magazine, I've loaded it up with 30 rounds,
nothing gets wonky, they all sit nice and square.
The follower works, the feed lips are set up just right.
In fact you can see the feed lips are just a little bit different.
So if you look at this section right here compared to that,
and the angle of the feed lips on the inside at the back.
This is a legitimate 5.56 magazine,
but the locking surfaces are identical in dimension to 5.45.
Anyway, I'm going on a bit at length about that, but it's kind of a cool choice in features that they made.
At the front end we have really a very sort of Czech-like muzzle brake there.
Bayonet lug, not sure if this is interchangeable with a Vz.58 bayonet,
but it certainly was set up to have a bayonet.
In total they actually had three different versions of the ... CZ-2000,
which were basically synonymous with the AK-74U, the AK-74, and the RPK-74.
So they had a little submachine gun version with about a 7 inch barrel,
they had this, the rifle version, with a 15 inch barrel,
and then they had an RPK light machine gun version with ... just over 22 inch barrel and a bipod.
People are going to ask why this has a blue upper handguard, the answer is: I have no idea.
I suspect it's a replacement part that someone made at some point,
because these guns are totally unobtainium in the United States.
But ultimately I don't know the explanation behind that blue handguard.
Anyway, cycling it is just like an AK. Disassembly is rather different.
Disassembly is basically all contained in this pin.
It is a rather Vz.58 looking pin, which makes sense.
Push that through, it's captive so I can pull it out to there.
And then at this point I can take the dust cover and slide it backwards and off.
I can then take the recoil spring, push it forward to unlock, just like an AK there,
pull it out. You'll notice it has a two-part guide rod, just like an AK.
I can then pull the bolt carrier and bolt out, just like an AK.
And then I have a gas tube, just like an AK.
This a long-stroke gas-piston rotating-bolt gun, because it is just like an AK.
You can notice there's a bulged front trunnion here, just like an AK.
There's the trunnion itself, the top of the trunnion here is a little bit different
to have ... this mounting point on it.
But once you start looking inside the receiver, this is very much an AK receiver.
The rear trunnion is also a little different in design
to accommodate this different folding stock.
But the fire control group is like an AK,
but with the addition of a 3 round burst ratchet right down there, right in there.
You have a pair of rails welded into the receiver, here and here, that support the bolt.
We have our hardened ejector ... blade right there.
This thing, it's interesting how much work went into this
given that it literally is mechanically an AK.
And you can certainly see that in the bolt and bolt carrier here as well.
So there's the bolt carrier.
There's the bolt, it's a little grimy, but that is - no doubt - an AK bolt.
Even the gas piston is very much like an AK.
It's got that little bit of wobble in it, like an AK should.
Roll pin basically holding it in place there, front end is AK.
So what they've done on the dust cover to allow stable mounting of sights
is add a reinforced section here that has a little lip on it.
You can see that right down there.
And then that slides into two little grooves under these lugs, you can just see them right there.
So when the top cover is all the way forward it's locked in place pretty effectively.
It's not like on most typical AKs where it's just sort of sheet metal tension holding it in place.
This actually has locking grooves and guide rails to hold it in place.
So there you have a CZ-2000 completely field-stripped.
Not a whole lot to it, once you understand the AK you certainly understand this rifle.
Eventually the CZ-2000 would be dropped entirely by CZ,
and it was replaced with what we know today as the 805 BREN.
(Which is still a gun in development, it still has a few issues to work out.)
But these guys, these CZ-2000s, never went into all that much production,
and they are fairly rare guns, and it's really cool to get a chance to take a look at this one today.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. If you do enjoy seeing this sort of thing on the net
please do consider checking out my Patreon account.
It is the folks there at a buck a month who really make it possible for me to travel about,
find awesome rifles like this one, and bring them to you guys.
Thanks for watching.