Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction House
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming December of 2017 Premiere auction. And today
we're taking a look at one of the cooler AK variants that's out there.
This is a Valmet M62/S. And the 'S' means semi-automatic.
This is the civilian imported version of one of the very early patterns of the Finnish military Valmet,
or, well, what they called the RK62.
Now after World War Two the Finnish Defence Forces obviously realised that they needed
to replace their long line of Mosin-Nagant rifles with something a bit more modern, something
semi-automatic. And so in the early 1950s they did a bunch of testing.
And tested pretty much everything that was out there. They tested the AR-10,
they tested the SIG AM55 (which would go on to be the Sturmgewehr 57 in Swiss service),
they tested a number of, well, one interesting rifle design from the Danish Madsen company,
the LAR, the Light Automatic Rifle, and of course they tested AKs.
They actually got their first batch of AKs from the Russians in about 1954,
which is really rather remarkably early, actually.
Finland had made it's peace with the Russians after the Winter War and the Continuation War,
and would be somewhat cooperative with them in armament terms for a long time afterwards.
The Finns would use a lot of Russian armour and, of course, they ended up copying the Russian AK.
So the two major arms companies in Finland, Sako and Valmet, which had previously been VKT,
they started experimenting on these AKs in 1957. In 1960 they kind of formally decided
on the Type 3, milled pattern AK for the basis of the next Finnish Defence Forces rifle.
It was formally adopted in 1962 as the RK62, and production really began in 1965.
So it took them a little bit of time to build up the tooling and the production lines.
Unlike Mosin-Nagants, the Finns actually built these Valmet rifles, or these Model 62 rifles,
completely from scratch. So they set up production lines for everything,
from the forged receiver, or milled receiver, all the way up to all the little ancillary parts.
While the operating mechanism here is identical to the AK, there are a bunch of external
changes that the Finns chose to make. And so let's take a closer look at those.
A couple markings of note. We have the actual model number here on the side,
M62/S. The '/S' is semi-auto, and of course these were imported by Interarms.
Importation of rifles like this stopped in 1989, when the US implemented
... an importation ban on what were considered assault weapons.
On the other side of the back of the receiver we have Valmet's logo.
Of course 'Made in Finland'. And then there are a couple serial numbers.
We have one on the rear sight, which is permanently affixed to the top cover,
we'll get to that in a moment. And we have a serial number up here on the receiver.
Now the most substantial change that the Finns decided to make to the AK
was moving the rear sight to the back of the top cover here, and replacing
the notch sight with an aperture. This is an excellent sight,
it is probably the best style of sight you will find on any AK pattern rifle.
It is fully zeroable for windage and elevation. You do elevation at the back.
We have an adjustment screw there on the side of the leaf.
and you can see the adjustment, the lines, right there,
for keeping track of where you've got the sight, so that's your elevation adjustment.
Note that the sight itself goes out to 600 metres, which is rather
less insanely optimistic than the typical 1,000 that you'll find on AK sights.
And it does actually start at 100, with an additional battle sight zero for 150.
So in the expected Finnish tradition, these are some
... pretty sensible sight settings.
The front sight is a round post inside that hood.
Here on the side we have windage adjustment screws.
And then ... if I can get at it,
Then we also have a flip-up front night sight there.
So that would be a luminous material, which is thoroughly dead now,
but they also had a add-on rear night sight as well.
The Finns stuck their own style of flash hider out there, along with a bayonet lug.
They had a Puukko style of bayonet, so very much ... a utility knife
that you could also snap onto the end of the rifle. Those bayonets are
relatively rare here in the US and worth a fair amount of money just themselves.
In what is again something we would expect from the Finns, they decided to
definitely go with interchangeability with Russian hardware,
so Finnish M62 magazines are identical and interchangeable with Russian AK mags,
in fact basically all other standard pattern 7.62x39mm AK mags.
They did add a guard down here to the magazine release,
so you don't bump it unintentionally. They did also ...
at the same time they also added a wider bit here, so that you can get to it around the side of the guard.
The one distinctive element on Finnish AK mags is this lanyard loop on the bottom.
Traditionally the Finns didn't often have a lot in the way of magazine pouches.
Certainly you'd see this in, like, the Winter War,
so they would just lanyard tie magazines to a service belt.
And I guess they decided to keep those lanyard rings on the magazines, even into RK62 production.
Now obviously we have to say something about this furniture.
This is colloquially in the US called a bicycle style grip. It is a steel tube with a corrugated rubber
overlay on it. And well, that's there to give you a good solid grip with mittens, presumably.
It looks pretty clumsy, it looks very crude, but it's actually a perfectly comfortable grip. It works just fine.
They would replace this relatively quickly with a more traditional looking pistol grip,
and it's fairly uncommon to find ones with this old style of corrugated grip.
Same thing goes for the front hand grip.
This is colloquially, traditionally called a 'cheesegrater' grip.
Because of, well, the pattern, the holes and the ribs on there.
Also intended to give you a good grip in the cold in the snow with gloves on.
Really the only downside to this is that it does not cover the gas tube, and it would
also be replaced by a later version that did cover the gas tube as well as the barrel.
And lastly the stock. This is a tubular style, a very simple stock.
It does have a plastic overlay on it back here, so that you're not putting your face on
bare metal in the Finnish winter. That's a nice thought there.
In the US you will often see these, or sometimes see them, with side folding stocks.
The military pattern of the gun actually did not have a folding stock. It just had this fixed stock.
That's simpler, it's more reliable, there's nothing to go wrong in it.
Note that this is a milled receiver, the original RK62s were all milled receivers.
They did start producing stamped receivers later on, but again
if you want the true Finnish military pattern, the milled receiver is what it would have.
Now because they've mounted the rear sight on the dust cover back here, the receiver cover,
they did need to get a very nice tight, repeatable fit on the dust cover into the receiver.
So there is this reinforcing bracket that has been added. And they pulled this off properly,
you'll see aftermarket AK top covers with scope mounts or sights mounted to them, and they typically
have a lot of play in their mounting, and they're not very accurate. The RK62s are just fine,
they don't suffer from that problem because they have a nice tight, repeatable fit here.
That said, it does disassemble just like an AK, so I'm going to push this in and
pop the top cover off. There's that. You can see the welds there where they've attached the rear sight block.
The spring is just like a normal AK spring.
Once the top cover's off we can also remove the gas tube, and
the bolt carrier and bolt. This is mechanically identical to an AK,
and so are the internals of the milled receiver. It's a standard AK fire control group. Like I said,
this is based on the AK, the Russian milled receiver. And they didn't really change anything
mechanical about it, just the outside elements like the sights and the furniture.
A bit more of a view of the Valmet ... combination gas block and front sight block.
Overall the design of the Valmet was good enough (or the design of the RK62, I keep calling it a Valmet,
Valmet was the commercial manufacturer. In Finnish service it was the RK62.
Calling it a Valmet is kind of like calling a US rifle a Winchester or a Springfield,
sometimes appropriate, but not always enough information to be definitive). At any rate,
it was a good enough design that it would actually form the basis for the Israeli Galil.
When they decided to also build an AK pattern rifle, the RK62 here is what they chose to use as a base.
Alright, last mechanical bit, I'll show you how the gas tube attaches.
There are two little rails on the tube itself here and
here, and they fit into a pair of slots on the front end of the receiver.
This is a system pretty much unique to the Valmet.
And then (with a little bit of fiddling,
maybe, come on,
there we go),
those slide right in there,
and the front end slides over the end of the gas block,
and they're in place. So as long as you have the gas piston in there,
this will stay in position and you don't need to worry about it.
So what we have here is the closest thing that's available in the US to a true
Finnish military RK62. There were a bunch of other versions of the gun that were
manufactured by Valmet specifically for commercial export, and we have a bunch
of those here in the US as well. We have these milled guns. We then have
M71s which are (well a lot of these are available both as milled or stamped receivers),
the M71 is available in 7.62 calibre, or 5.56 calibre. It has the rear sight back here,
where a traditional AK would have it, instead of on the top cover.
We have the M76 which is generally (although they did make some milled ones),
that's the stamped receiver version. It's available most commonly with a fixed wood stock,
and most commonly in 5.56 calibre, although they did import a small number of them in 7.62.
... Some of them have tube stocks, some of them have folding tube stocks.
There's the M78, which was the RPK version, so the longer heavy barrel.
That was made in 5.56, and 7.62, and also 7.62 NATO.
Like I said, there are a whole bunch of different commercial versions,
but this is the early military pattern rifle.
And so this is the really cool one that I wanted to show you guys.
If you'd be interested in having it yourself, of course it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island.
So if you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link to Rock Island's
catalogue page on it. And you can see their pictures, and description, and
price estimate, all that sort of stuff. Place a bid on-line if you're interested.
Thanks for watching.