Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com, I'm Ian McCollum.
And today we're taking a look at a Kalashnikov USA
KP-9 pistol, or in this case short barrelled rifle.
I don't normally look at brand new production commercial firearms,
unless there's some particularly interesting aspect to them.
And in this case what makes this very interesting to me is that it is
almost a perfect copy in semi-auto of the Russian Vityaz submachine gun.
And I think there's a very interesting story behind the Vityaz.
So it began in the early 1990s, when the Russian Interior Ministry,
some of the Russian law enforcement agencies,
specifically requested basically a pistol calibre submachine gun.
Something that would be very light, very handy, and deliver a
high volume of firepower for close-range law-enforcement type use.
And they requested this from the Izhmash factory, which was basically the evolution of the Izhevsk Arsenal.
And Izhmash spent a couple years really making a proper design for a pistol calibre version of an AK.
This isn't something that was just thrown together with parts, this had a lot of very deliberate design work go into it.
In fact, interestingly, the design team included Victor Kalashnikov, son of Mikhail Kalashnikov who developed the AK in the first place.
And also Alexei Dragunov, son of Yevgeny Dragunov who developed the SVD, so
a couple of ... second-generation significant names went into the design of this.
And ... their first version was introduced in 1996 and it was the Bizon, or bison in Russian.
And it was a gun much like this one except it was chambered for the 9x18mm cartridge,
which makes sense as that was the same cartridge that the Makarov pistol used.
And what was really cool about it is it used this helical 64 round drum magazine that hung underneath the barrel.
It's a gun that's super-cool in concept
and didn't really work out all that well.
As is fairly typical of drum magazines, it just wasn't quite reliable enough in large scale.
It was very expensive to produce. The drums, as one might predict, were a little bit finicky.
You tended to kind of have to pick one drum and tweak it to work just right with one specific gun.
And you couldn't really interchange them with full confidence that they would work in between guns.
This is kind of a typical problem of drum magazines that I've touched on before.
So in the early 2000s they kind of went back to the drawing board and they reassessed, like,
"Alright, the gun itself is good, the feeding device was the weak point.
Let's go back to basics and come up with a more standardised, more reliable feeding mechanism."
And this was done over the development of the Bizon. They ended up manufacturing it in a couple different cartridges,
also 7.62 Tokarev and 9mm Parabellum.
And ... basically the revised, newer, better version, the PP-19-01 (where the Bizon was the PP-19),
this, the Vityaz, was offered in 9mm Parabellum using a 30 round double-stack, double-feed, very traditional box magazine.
And, lo and behold, it works very well.
So what we have here today is an American made copy of the semi-auto,
... what Izhmash calls the Saiga-9, which is their semi-auto version of the Vityaz.
And this is functionally exactly the same thing. So
let's take a look inside it, and let me show you the things that make this different from just an AK in 9mm.
So where to start on this? This looks like an AK. This is deliberately intended to mimic
or to duplicate the handling and the operational characteristics of the AK.
That was kind of the whole point in the first place.
It shares about a 70% parts commonality in terms of manufacturing with the standard AK-74.
So that's a nice benefit for Izhmash.
Now the gun itself is simple blowback, there is no gas system to it.
But in the interest of that parts compatibility and maintaining the same sort of handling and disassembly characteristics,
we still have what appears to be a gas block, the upper handguard over what would appear to be a gas tube.
There is no actual gas port in the barrel.
This is used just as a housing for some additional weight on the bolt carrier,
which we'll pull out in just a moment.
But all of these features have been copied from the standard AK.
To accommodate 9mm Parabellum cartridges they designed a new magazine. This is proprietary.
Which makes sense in the context of the Russian military designing it for themselves,
or Russian law enforcement wanting it for themselves.
This is a 30 round, double-stack, double-feed magazine. ... Double-stack double-feed is the way to go.
This certainly harkens back to magazines like the PPS-43. It's reliable, it's easy to load, it's a good magazine.
This is all polymer, the floor plate attaches just the same way as an AK-74 mag.
The controls are exactly the same as a standard AK.
We have a selector lever. It of course has two positions on it,
safe and fire, it doesn't have a centre full-auto position. Make sense, this is the semi-auto copy.
There is a magazine adapter that was developed to go on this, of course to fit the smaller new magazine.
And they fitted that with an AK-style paddle mag release.
That is probably not quite as fast to use as a push-button release,
but this is one of those places where training compatibility with the standard AK is carried over.
If you're used to using a mag release like this, and you train on AKs a lot, well, it makes sense
do the same thing on your submachine gun or carbine.
The rear sight has been recalibrated for 9mm and it only goes out to 200 metres,
so 50, 100, 150 and 200. But it works the same way as the normal standard AK rear sight.
Now there were two versions of the Vityaz made, one has Picatinny rail on the top cover, which is this model.
The other pattern had an AK pattern side rail mount on the receiver. So
Kalashnikov USA, in making these for the American commercial market, have gone with the Picatinny mount on the dust cover.
Which I think is definitely the better idea.
The stock, point out here, ... operates the exact same way as a standard AK pattern folding stock.
Push the button in, stock folds over. This uses a 5.5mm pin, which is ... standard AK.
Stock drops in, that was very easy to do, which was nice.
However, this is where we start getting to some significant differences.
This stock is the same as an AK-74 stock, same length of pull, you'll notice it comes out here to the hand guard.
On the AK-74 this stock is retained by a little spring-loaded hook
located approximately here in front of the magazine well.
That doesn't fit, that's because the receiver has been substantially shortened.
So on the Vityaz and the KP-9 we actually have a pin here,
that has a little groove cut in it.
The stock has this added feature on it that has a ledge.
And the stock locks in place by snapping over
that pin like so. Now that pin is actually the extension of the barrel pin.
Here's the other side of it. The way this is assembled is the barrel is pressed into the front trunnion,
head spaced, and then this hole is drilled and a ... cross pin put in place to prevent the barrel from moving.
Because
geometrically the stock catch doesn't fit any more, they moved the stock attachment mechanism to that pin.
That's kind of a clever, cool modification.
Now for comparison's sake here is a standard AK-74, this is a parts kit build,
but that is a standard AK-74 receiver and if we compare our KP-9/Vityaz to it
by lining up the rear of the receiver here,
you'll see the front of the receiver is over an inch shorter than on this 9mm version.
And you can also see that the front trunnion rivets are quite clearly spaced differently.
So let's take a look at the inside of this.
Disassembly is just like any other AK, push that in.
Now the top cover is pinned in place up here,
which is important, that gives it an extra point of stability so that this rail does not lose zero.
It doesn't have the flexibility that a standard AK top cover that is just kind of wedged in position does.
Now on the AKS-74U, the so-called "Krinkov",
there was a different rear sight block here that had a plunger spring
that put a lot of pressure on the top cover to lift it open when it was disassembled like this.
This guy has a little coil spring in there, but with the weight of this red dot on there, it doesn't do a whole lot.
So I do have to be careful that that doesn't fall down backwards.
Once we've got the top cover open, we can take out our recoil spring.
Note that there is a little bit of a spacer on that recoil spring, it's not quite identical to a regular AK recoil spring.
And then we just pull the bolt carrier out.
And presto, there is no gas piston at the front of this, because it doesn't need one,
What would be the gas piston is really just extra mass.
So in some ways this is like one of the early telescoping style submachine gun bolts,
where the chamber's here, but you've got some of the mass operating forward to allow you to have a shorter receiver.
It kind of does the same thing here.
Now on a normal AK this would be a bolt carrier, and we would have a separate bolt that fits into it.
On the KP-9 or the Vityaz this is one single unit. The bolt has been integrated into the carrier
because there is no locking mechanism. So this is simple blowback.
It's just the mass of this ... component that holds the gun in battery until pressure has dropped enough that it's safe to open.
So we have an extractor built in there. We have our ejector cut coming along the back here.
One thing that has also been added is this plunger. This is an out of battery safety.
So it's pretty simple, it's spring-loaded pushing this direction.
And as long as it's pushed up, the firing pin can't go forward enough to actually detonate a cartridge.
It can move a little bit, but it can't actually come clear of the bolt face.
When this gets pushed in
(which is a little difficult to do here), then the firing pin can fully protrude. And that is pushed in by the ejector.
We have a fixed ejector that is, just like on any other AK, welded into the receiver.
It doubles as a bolt guide rail. And there's the ejector itself, that is going to slide back in
this slot right here. And when the bolt's fully in battery, the ejector pushes that plunger up,
deactivates the safety, and makes it able to fire.
Now the rear of the firing pin is exposed here because this is still a hammer-fired gun.
The fire control group itself is standard AK.
This one of course is semi-auto. But if you're familiar with the AK internals, you'll recognise all of those bits.
The front trunnion however, which if I recall is actually how we got into this disassembly,
the front trunnion is much shorter.
So on a regular AK we actually have wings that come back off the front trunnion,
because you have to have lugs for the bolt to lock into.
Just to refresh your memory a little bit, here is a standard AK-74.
Note that we have these lugs up in here that the bolt is actually going to lock into.
On a blowback 9mm version none of that is necessary, so that's part of the reason that the receiver has been shortened.
You don't need all of that space. So the front trunnion is completely different than a standard one.
And this is one of those areas where the development time that went into the Vityaz really shows.
Instead of having extra space, extra mass, and unused elements in the receiver or in the trunnion,
they were able to cut it down to what's actually necessary.
We can open up the front end here as well just to show you.This has the same basic construction as the original AK.
but of course this is just a tube for the mass coming off the top of the bolt, instead of actually being a gas piston.
And looking in there, you can see that the front of what would be the gas tube is just solid. It's a dead end.
This is the exact muzzle brake that was used on the Vityaz.
You can see there's also one little segment of Picatinny rail there
on the bottom of the front sight block for attaching a flashlight or something.
The one difference you have between the American and Russian versions of the gun is that the Russians had a metric thread,
the KP-9 is, I believe, 1/2"x28, kind of a standard thread rate for attaching a suppressor, which you can do.
... Push that in and
so, there you go. Threaded muzzle on there if you want to attach a suppressor.
Now as for this being an American-made gun, it's really quite remarkable just how similar it is to the actual Vityaz.
Kalashnikov USA must have gotten some or all of the technical data package to build this.
And I think it really shows, it's a fantastically well put together firearm.
It's not a kludged 9mm conversion, as are so many if not most of the other 9mm AKs that have popped up on the market
as the 9mm pistol calibre carbine thing has become very popular here. So,
pretty cool that they're making this. Honestly, I was really surprised by just how close it is to the actual Vityaz.
Now these are sold as either rifles with 16 inch barrels (and by the way, they do the same thing in Russia,
the Saiga-9 is sold with I think a 14.5 inch barrel to meet with Russian overall length requirements),
at any rate, they sell it as a carbine with a folding stock or as a pistol with a ... properly short barrel like this,
and just a blank end plate that you can clip a sling into.
I went through the process of actually registering this as a short-barrelled rifle,
and dropping the stock on is an extremely easy process.
And then I think that gives it the form that I really want to show it to you in,
which is its original submachine gun style, short-barrelled rifle, Vityaz form.
Anyway, we're going to go out and do some shooting with this tomorrow to see how it actually handles.
I'm excited for that, you should definitely check back in tomorrow and we'll take a look at that.
In the meantime thanks to Kalashnikov USA for providing this gun for video,
and thanks to you for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]