Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian. I'm here today at the James Julia auction house
taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming October of 2016 firearms auction.
And today we're looking at something that is probably
going to be very familiar to almost everyone who's watching.
This is a Kalashnikov, it is an AK rifle.
One of, if not the most, common self-loading rifle in the world today.
Now this particular one has some really cool history to it
and it's really an iconic example of a particular type of AK.
This is a Chinese made Type 56 AK, has a fixed butt-stock
as opposed to a folding one, which the Chinese also made,
it has a spike bayonet fitted under the barrel,
permanently attached, flips in and out.
And this is the predominant type of AK that was supplied by the Chinese to the North Vietnamese,
the Vietcong, as well as the North Vietnamese Army.
So this is the iconic enemy weapon, from the United States point of view, of the Vietnam War.
And in fact this particular example was brought back after, or during, the Vietnam War by a
US veteran who ... what he said was he actually saw a North Vietnamese medic with this
rifle shooting at Americans. And medics by international standard aren't supposed to be combatants,
and when he saw the guy shooting at Americans with this thing, he said "Oh, well that guy's fair game",
shot him, took his AK and brought it home as a trophy.
So that's how this thing ended up in the United States.
This was registered. It is fully transferable, which is really cool. AKs are modern enough guns
that there aren't necessarily a whole lot of transferable ones around, so this really ...
And it's in fantastic condition still.
This is a very cool example of a classic Vietnam War North Vietnamese NVA rifle.
Now to get a little bit more into the mechanical details of this, of course it operates
like every other AK. One of the interesting things about the AK is for all of the millions upon millions,
if not hundreds of millions that have been made, they're all basically the same,
and all the major types of AKs have in fact, like, totally interchangeable parts.
And this stems from a policy by Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union in the '50s and '60s of
sharing military technology with like-minded nations.
So the Soviet Union was willing to take its technology, its weapons, specifically,
primarily the AK and the SKS, and they would share the
technical specifications and the design and manufacture packages
with other countries that shared their ideology.
And that is how the Chinese were able to manufacture
and produce AKs, as well as a great many other countries.
The Chinese in fact produced somewhere between 10,000,000
and 15,000,000 of this pattern of rifle, the Type 56.
It is so named because they adopted it in 1956,
now interestingly they also adopted the SKS in 1956
taken from the Russians, and both rifles are named Type 56.
In fact this is also a milled receiver AK.
This is the early pattern. The Russians were developing these,
or making these while they were trying to develop their stamping
technology to be able to make a stamped receiver for the AK.
And that would take them several more years to do.
In the meantime, take a solid block of steel and cut a
receiver out of it, that'll work. A little heavier than a stamped gun,
but made a very reliable and very durable firearm.
So the Chinese would eventually also adopt the stamped receiver guns, and ...
to make things a little more confusing they started making those and still used the
designation Type 56, so that applies to kind of everything.
Now there were also, as I mentioned, folding stock models. There was an under-folding stock,
a wire frame under-folder that was called the Type 56-1,
there was also a side-folding stock which was the Type 56-2.
This bayonet was standard on the fixed stock guns.
My understanding is they typically left them off of the folding stock guns because they
were trying to reduce the weight a bit. Folding stock guns had a lug for a normal blade bayonet if
you wanted that. But this is very similar to the Chinese SKS bayonets as well.
The spike is crude, simple and very effective, kind of like the AK itself.
In the hands of the North Vietnamese the AK was a fantastically well-suited rifle.
This was a gun that, they're simple to operate, they are very durable,
they require basically no maintenance.
You don't really have to care about this rifle, you put ammo in it,
you pull the trigger and it'll fire. When you're out of ammo
you can just kind of put it away until you have
more ammo, and shoot it some more.
A lot of the other more modern firearms, they may be very reliable as well, but they often require
at least a little bit of preventative maintenance, or more understanding of specific details.
On an AR-15 you have things like gas rings that, you know, just little elements that you
need to pay attention to. And on the AK there's pretty much none of that. It is a perfect weapon
for a guerrilla army, as evidenced by the fact that it has been the weapon of choice
for pretty much every guerrilla army since it was invented.
I think we ought to take this out to the range, and we ought to do some shooting with it
so you can get an impression for what this is actually like
in live-fire, hear it run and see what it's like.
So it wouldn't be a proper AK video if we didn't do some shooting, right?
So you'll notice I did all that shooting in the full-auto setting.
There is a semi-auto selector setting to this, of course.
Run the selector all the way down, it's in semi-auto, the middle position is full-auto.
Semi-automatic on the AK is there for people who are very competent with it.
If you take the time and ... you have the understanding to line up the sights and make good
precise shots: trigger control, follow-through, sight picture, all the fundamentals
of marksmanship, an AK can shoot extremely well for you.
However that's not really the design intent. The rifle is there ...
Tactically it was designed as a submachine gun. It is to provide high volume of fire
at close range, highly mobile, and that's how it was most often used by guerrilla forces.
And that's what it really excels at, so that's how I was doing all the shooting.
Overall impressions are, of course, that the AK is a fantastic rifle. There's good reason
why it is the most heavily produced military rifle of the 20th century. It just works and gets the job done.
It does have some downsides, everything does,
but for what this was designed for it really is a fantastic weapon.
If you'd like to have this one yourself you
... will be hard-pressed to find a better example of a Vietnam bring-back
Vietcong AK, and this one is fully transferable, and it's available.
The consignor is actually the guy who brought it back from Vietnam.
So you would be the the number three owner after him and after the guy that left it for him in Vietnam.
... Interested in that, take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link there to the
Julia catalogue page on this rifle, where you can see their detailed photos, read their description
and place a bid for it either over the phone or here live at the auction in person.
Thanks for watching.