The Arex AKB-15 is truly a modern forgotten weapon.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today in Slovenia
at the Arex factory taking a look at their AKB-15.
This is a perfect example of a modern forgotten weapon.
This is an attempt that didn't actually ever go into mass production.
So, what is the AKB-15?
First off, the name comes from AK, Avtomat Kalashnikov,
"B" is actually the initial of the designer's last name,
and then 15 refers to the date when the design was put together, 2015.
This was originally based on a request from a country to upgrade
its existing stock of AKs to be basically modern and tactical and modular.
The idea being, "We want to add all the sort of the normal modern stuff.
A Picatinny rail, be able to mount optics on top of the rifle,
an adjustable length buttstock, M-LOK slots, modernised safety, that sort of thing."
This is a country, and Arex is very tight-lipped about exactly what country it was,
(or possibly two countries, "they were").
But the idea was they were looking to improve their stock of infantry weapons.
And maybe as an alternative to having a full-blown competition,
and writing tenders, and doing a ton of testing on new rifles,
well, if you just update the existing rifles this can be a much simpler, cheaper and easier process.
And so Arex put together this pattern as a proposal for them.
And essentially what this is is taking off the dust cover, removing the rear sight block,
and creating a single monolithic aluminium upper assembly.
It pins securely to the receiver and the barrel, that gives you a stable platform for optics.
And also allows you to have a nice solid
platform for lasers, lights, whatever you want on the front end.
... You avoid using the original rear trunnion and instead attach your new stock,
an adjustable AR-type stock, to that monolithic upper.
And in the process, put a new barrel in the rifle as well.
So that was the concept, let's take a look at how exactly this goes together,
and what they came up with. Then we'll talk about why this rifle isn't actually on the market.
The main marking is on the left side of this rear monolithic upper.
It is "ReX AKB-15", at the time that this was being made in 2015
Rex was the civilian brand name and Arex was the military brand name.
Since then the two brands have been consolidated together, and so now everything is Arex.
But back then, ReX AKB-15, 7.62x39mm.
The AK receiver is here with all the lower components, the trunnions.
Basically the standard AK fundamental part
for these civilian guns was manufactured in Korea.
And these were purchased by Arex as ... the basis for their development of the rifle.
It would have eventually used receivers that were mass produced somewhere specifically for Arex.
Now going from the back of the rifle to the front.
We have an AR-type adjustable length buttstock.
You can see that the buttstock here is attached to this monolithic upper
rather than trying to remake the AK rear trunnion to fit an AR buffer tube.
Arex does all of their own plastic injection moulding,
so they just made their own pistol grips for the guns.
There is a full length Picatinny rail, this one has some iron sights mounted on it.
There's a little bit of an interruption here so that there can be a pin
... locking the upper down to the barrel there. We've got our front sight.
These are M-LOK slots, so you have some accessory compatibility there.
Arex made new gas blocks for the rifles, 90 degree gas blocks that went on.
And of course they were putting new barrels on the guns.
For these initial civilian ones they were of course making them from scratch,
so they put in their own barrels.
With the planned military contract this would have been part of the upgrade program
is replacing the barrels with good quality new barrels, and their own design of flash hider.
The controls remain exactly the same as a standard AK.
So they use standard 7.62x39 AK magazines.
The safety is sort of the modified improved style of AK safety
with a cutout to hold the bolt open, and an extended finger tab
for operating the safety with your trigger finger as a right hander.
Which sort of works, but kind of sort of doesn't.
Of course you can lock the bolt open with it like so.
And all of the mechanical operating parts are standard AK.
So disassembly requires removing three pins,
these two at the back and this one up at the front.
The original military contract was going to use ... an ACR-style buttstock
that actually they had plans for three holes in it to hold the assembly pins when not in use.
To remove the upper now that I've got the pins out,
we're going to pull it back that way and then lift the front end up.
So that's going to come back just about that far.
That lifts up, and we can pull this off.
Initial production prototypes of this were made from aluminium billet,
but the production plan was to actually go to aluminium extrusion.
So if you look at this from a manufacturing perspective,
you can see that this is all the same basic profile.
If you take the cross section it remains the same all the way down, except where it's been cut away.
So you can extrude that as one long manufactured shape,
and have very nice efficient manufacturing.
There are two hooks here at the front that lock into
the front handguard attachment to hold this down.
Here are your pin attachment points.
These go through the new rear sight block and then screw into the side of the rail.
You've got the ejection port cut away and then reinforced here.
And then this block locks into the modified rear trunnion.
The rear trunnion now has this opening cut in the back for this lug,
and then two pin holes to hold it in place.
The recoil spring is totally standard.
The bolt and carrier are totally standard AK.
The [front] trunnion is standard,
but the rear sight block has been replaced by an Arex manufactured part.
Of course with the continuous Picatinny rail you don't need a rear iron sight.
You don't actually have a way to include one.
Instead this block now acts as the link to lock
(via pin) the upper assembly to the barrel down here.
The gas tube is also slightly different in construction now.
Without the original rear sight block there's no assembly/disassembly lever,
because with the monolithic upper on there the gas tube can't go anywhere anyway.
So now it just lifts out.
And you can see up here the screw connection to lock
the lower handguard onto the barrel so that this will retain zero
for your M-LOK slots, whatever you want to mount on there, lights, lasers, etc.
Beyond that, the rest of this receiver is totally stock, standard and normal.
Since I'm sure someone will notice it here, this is the personal rifle of the former owner of Arex.
He retired, and the company gave him this, signed, as a retirement gift.
So that's why it's got that extra marking on the bottom there.
So Arex actually made about 100 AKB-15s in military configuration
for trials by this potential client country.
Sent the rifles over and the decision came back, "Well, we decided not to do it."
They're a little tight-lipped about whether it was an issue with the rifle,
or just a decision to buy something new.
But ultimately the military program didn't go anywhere.
So with that ... off the table,
Arex had simultaneously been working on developing this for civilian release as well
because kind of the classic rifle manufacturing or pistol manufacturing thing.
You can pay for the tooling costs with a military contract,
and then you can continue to sell the rifles or pistols on the civilian market.
The problem was, well, they didn't have the initial contract
to cover those development costs.
And when they went looking for AK receivers, they had trouble finding anyone who could
be a good supply of civilian semi-auto AK receivers.
That's not a product that Arex makes, it wasn't something they were set up to make,
and they didn't ... see the market potential
to justify investing and making their own AK receiver and internal parts tooling.
So they went looking to sort of the usual suspects in Europe:
FB Radom, Hungary, Bulgaria.
And at the time all of these factories were really quite busy with other work,
and weren't particularly interested in supplying Arex with new AK ... receivers for this project.
And that kind of left the whole thing in the lurch
without a military contract to pay for it, without a good source for AKs to build the rifles on.
This isn't really that good of a rifle as just a conversion kit,
because you do have to do permanent modifications to the rear trunnion,
significant modifications (basically replacement)
of the ... rear sight block, ... which requires pulling the barrel.
It's not suited to a DIY sort of conversion kit.
It has to be a standalone rifle, and at this point a standalone rifle just wasn't in the cards.
So before we take leave of the AKB-15, let's head over to the range real quick
and see what it's actually like to shoot one because I probably
won't ever have ... another chance to do that.
So essentially of course we have a standard AK, standard mags, but a nice solid top rail
so we can get full length radius on iron sights. Let's see how it actually shoots.
It's not bad, honestly it shoots very much like an AK.
A little bit of extra weight helps tame it perhaps a bit.
No, not a whole lot actually, it's pretty much just like shooting an AK.
The ... novel rail system on the top is certainly a good thing
for getting proper modern optics onto the gun though.
And, thanks to Yugo mags, it locks open when empty.
This gun is awful for right handers, why do you guys shoot this right handed?
Well, a big thanks to Arex for giving me access to this.
I said they did 100 military ones, they only actually did 15 of the civilian rifles.
Those rifles were all sold off inside Slovenia, and so now they're all gone.
And it's ... I think, a really cool example of a collectible forgotten weapon.
The chances of this ever actually coming to the market at this point, I suspect, are essentially zero.
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the video,
got a chance to take a look at an interesting AK conversion.
Thanks for watching.