Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, I am here today at the Royal Armouries, the National Firearms Centre in Leeds, England,
courtesy of ARES, Armament Research Services.
Today we're taking a look at a gun that is, as I have been told, complete rubbish.
But it got popularised. Someone at some point took some pictures of this from the collection here and posted them on-line,
and it's really made the rounds and it's become quite the, in some circles, well-known gun.
And I figured it would be really cool to take a closer look at it, and see what this thing really is.
So what it looks like is an AK in .303 calibre with a Bren gun magazine.
That's not really the whole story, what's interesting about this is that it is in fact a bolt-action rifle.
Every single component of this is handmade, so this is not, as has been speculated,
something like a P14 Enfield action inside a sheet metal fake receiver to make it look like an AK.
This isn't in fact actually a Bren gun magazine, it is a completely handmade magazine.
And it's just a very odd firearm, so let's go ahead and take a closer look at it.
So the basic elements we have here are of course primarily AK, the folding stock,
the pistol grip here, which is kind of designed after what appears to be a Hungarian AK,
a Bren style or Bren-looking magazine, and then of course a bolt action actual system,
coupled with what looks like an AK front end.
It's interesting to think about what the design intent was for this rifle. Who it was being made for?
The bolt action system suggests maybe it was someone who was used to shooting,
and had experience shooting bolt action rifles, but they wanted something that looked more modern.
It's possible that the gunsmith wasn't able to, or didn't feel confident,
in trying to make a functional self-loading rifle, and so they just went with a bolt action system.
Although given ... clearly the amount of effort that went into making this
it's a little surprising that they wouldn't have at least tried,
and probably could have successfully copied an AK well enough to make it work as well as this does.
At any rate, let's take a closer look at some of the parts.
We'll start with the magazine. It looks very much like a Bren magazine,
but it is very clearly not a factory Bren magazine.
The feed lips are totally non-functional. Those feed lips don't go in nearly far enough to retain a cartridge,
in fact they barely retain the follower.
And of course that follower has been whittled out of brass, bronze, something like that.
The magazine was made in two parts, two shells, and welded together.
You can see the remnants of the seam right there.
It was pressed, but not the world's best pressing there,
and then the rear magazine catch has been kind of tacked in place.
One of the interesting things is one of ... the only markings on this gun is on the floor plate.
That is a fake Russian Izhevsk Arsenal mark. ... I can pretty much guarantee you this is not an Izhevsk
manufactured magazine. But it is marked that way because that was a recognised thing.
Presumably this gun came out of Darra, Afghanistan or Pakistan, somewhere in that region.
If we look at the folding stock you can see that the cross hatching, the checkering, on this button is clearly handmade.
This is not a factory made AK stock that was adapted, it is entirely scratch built.
It does function, it's a very stiff button,
there we go.
And not only does it actually fold, but it does actually clear that magazine.
The bolt action system here is also hand fabricated.
So despite the impressions from some initial pictures, it is not just a re-purposed existing captured bolt action.
And there we go. If we pull the bolt out you can see that.
Look at the actual finish, the gigantic, chattery, handtool marks on the inside of the bolt face there.
This is clearly not a machine produced bolt.
The fact that the locking lugs are not quite parallel with each other is a little bit concerning,
or would be if one planned to actually shoot this.
Note the complete absence of serial numbers, manufacturer's marks, or, of course, proof marks.
If we look up close at the barrel assembly, you'll note that it has been interestingly knurled.
Both the flash hider and the external sections of the barrel here, it's kind of a decorative pattern I assume.
I'm not sure what other purpose there would be to that.
What is in theory the gas block, or the gas block look-alike, clearly handmade.
You'll notice a lot of these angles, these lines, are not parallel with anything.
And then the gas tube is actually one solid piece with the gas block, it's not two separate pieces.
They don't come apart like an AK would.
There are fake vent holes, and then there's this soldered or brazed line
to sort of try and differentiate between the two pieces.
The rear sight is missing, which wouldn't be that big of a deal really considering what the front sight looks like.
Which is to say, very much crooked off to the side.
So the other interesting thing to consider here is what calibre is this thing made for?
There is one other marking on the receiver, it says 7mm.
Not sure exactly what round they might be referring to.
I'm not aware of a 7mm cartridge being reasonably common in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area.
We did try a couple of dummy rounds in the gun, we tried a .303, we tried an 8x57,
which we considered to be the two most likely cartridges that might fit, and neither of them did.
The .303 in fact is too large to go in, which means it can't be 54 rimmed either,
because that's a larger diameter case than the .303, so it's not that either.
What it is I don't know. I will try to ask some folks,
and if I can figure it out I will update the notes on the video. But who knows?
The magazine is not very well made, but interestingly, despite these feed lips looking like they are
totally useless and barely even retaining the follower, it will actually hold cartridges. These are dummy .303s.
You see, it does in fact hold a .303. You can stuff a second one in there as well.
I don't think it's going to stack all that well if we start loading more in there,
so I'm going to stop at this point. But the magazine does work, impressively.
Oh, hang on, try and take the round out ... and it jams up. There we go.
One last cool little feature that I noticed was I decided to take the cleaning rod out to take a look at it.
And, lo and behold, it is a dummy cleaning rod.
Not only is it only half the length of the barrel, and thus completely useless as a cleaning rod,
it doesn't even fit in the barrel.
So I can thread that end in. But if I try and start with the larger diameter end,
which by the way, does not even have a hole for a cleaning patch, it doesn't fit.
So it is a decorative only cleaning rod, which is a bit of an unusual choice.
It makes one wonder if the entire gun is perhaps decorative, or just badly made.
In the past I've looked at a lot of various amateur made, craft built, improvised sorts of firearms,
and I always find them interesting. Because just looking at what one person is able to do to turn
nothing into a firearm I always find interesting, and this is no exception.
It's impressive how much work went into this, despite the fact that it doesn't really actually work.
Oftentimes when you see the guns that are really nicely finished on the outside,
they are usually pretty decent on the inside too, and this is kind of an exception.
At any rate, maybe one day we'll figure out what the exact cartridge that this thing was intended to fire is.
But until then, we at least know more about it than we did before. Thanks for watching.
If you would like to see high res close-up pictures of this, make sure to check out the ARES blog post that
is going up alongside the video. You'll find a link to that in the description text below.
And if you would like to come here and take a look at this gun or the many others in the NFC collection,
contact the Royal Armouries. The collection is not open to the general public, but is available to researchers by appointment.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]