Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
with a gun that's not perhaps quite so
exotic and forgotten as some, but still I think
very interesting. And that is a Daewoo K2.
This is very much a hybrid of AK and AR,
and that's what makes it kind of cool.
So South Korea ... since the Korean War had been
equipped largely with surplus US weaponry.
And they wanted their own domestic rifles.
So through the '60s and into the 1970s South Korea was
experimenting with a number of prototype designs.
And they were really focused on 7.62mm NATO, interestingly.
Especially in the 1960s, there wasn't a lot of economic development in South Korea,
there wasn't an arms industry to speak of,
there wasn't a lot of heavy industry to speak of.
And so this was pretty much just experimenting and prototyping.
And what South Korea ended up with for a weapon was in 1974 they got a licence to produce
the M16A1, well, under licence from Colt.
And that's not a bad choice. It gives them some compatibility with the US
in case they're going to get logistical aid from the US again. It's a good rifle.
And ... the economy is starting to develop and speed up in South Korea,
and the Daewoo Company
(which is this huge industrial conglomerate now that builds ... like everything),
they're able to tool up with a technical package from Colt
and some engineering assistance, and put the M16A1 into production.
And that's great, but it's not quite going to fulfil all of South Korea's needs.
The problem is they're allowed
to make a lot of rifles under licence, but not as many as they'd actually like.
What ... South Korea wants to do is build enough rifles to put away a stockpile
sufficient to arm an entire mobilisation of their military reserves.
They want more than a million rifles, and they don't have the licensing to do that from Colt.
And frankly, you'd want more than a million rifles too I suspect
if your next door neighbour was North Korea.
So they continue experimenting with their own designs,
and change over from 7.62 NATO to now looking at 5.56 to function alongside M16s.
They have this XB series of prototypes, so XB1 through 5 are all in 7.62.
1976, 1977, they have the XB6 prototype that comes around, and that's their first 5.56 gun.
It is further developed into the XB7 which is completed,
goes through all the last of its trials in 1982 or 1983,
and is then adopted as the K2 pattern rifle.
So in South Korean service "K" is the letter designate for all of their military equipment.
And they have just a whole series of different guns,
... well, K1 is a submachine gun (which we'll talk about in a minute),
which is actually a compact 5.56 rifle.
This is the K2, there's a K3, a K4, etc.
So, what they have done is deviate from the M16 pattern.
They've kept elements of it, they've basically kept the fire control group,
they've kept the magazine, they've kept the lower receiver.
But the South Korean Army wanted a folding stock.
And the M16 has a recoil spring in the stock,
and so they need to move the recoil spring out of the stock.
Which they do by moving it up ... above the barrel,
and they decide to go with a ... long-stroke gas piston instead of direct gas impingement.
So, let's take a closer look at what they actually built.
So fundamentally what we have here is a rifle with a long-stroke gas piston system,
a rotating multi-lug bolt, it uses detachable magazines.
It actually uses the exact same magazine as the AR-15,
which makes sense in South Korean military service since they already have the AR.
Controls are basically identical to the AR platform.
We have a bolt release here, but notice that they have shrouded the bolt lock.
So on an AR you can push the bottom of this to manually lock the bolt open,
you cannot do that on a Daewoo.
We have a selector lever here, which will only work when the gun is cocked.
So we have safe and semi, in military service that would have been full-auto.
Marked "Made in Korea".
This is designated an AR-100, because this is one of the semi-auto versions
that was imported commercially into the United States prior to the Assault Weapons Ban.
After the ban there would be a couple of more versions of the rifle that came in
without the various regulated features, so no bayonet lug, no flash hider,
and a thumb-hole stock instead of the really excellent folding stock that these have.
I should also point out it's marked Daewoo Precision Industries,
because of course they manufactured it.
The folding stock is patterned very much after the FAL with this big chunky lug there.
So you pull the stock down and it will fold over like so, folds over to the side.
In theory you can still shoot this with the stock folded, for whatever reason.
There's our US import mark on the other side of the magazine well.
Magazine release, just like the M16.
No dust cover on these.
And they do have a reciprocating charging handle on the side.
We have some basic stuff up here, bayonet lug of course,
these take a standard M16 pattern bayonet.
It has a birdcage-style flash suppressor.
Note that ... there are only three vents in there,
so it only ... vents upwards, nothing coming down.
And it is indexed slightly to the right
to prevent the gun from climbing to the side when fired right-handed.
We have adjustable gas port size.
There is an "O", which is for off or would be rifle grenades in military service.
And then we have "L", "M", and "S", for large, medium and small.
And all you do to adjust that is push this button in.
It's a little tricky with a finger, it would normally be done with a cartridge.
Once it's all the way in, you can rotate this around to the various positions.
So the one facing upward towards the front sight is the one that is currently engaged,
so it's currently on the medium gas port setting.
There is a pin connecting the upper and lower receivers at the front like the M16,
but there is no such pin at the back.
Instead, disassembly is done using the recoil spring guide rod.
There's a little capture lever here, so you first have to pull that lever back,
then you can push this whole thing forward.
That capture lever was added as an afterthought, circa 1986 or '87,
to prevent the guns from ... disassembling unexpectedly or unintentionally.
Oh, I should also point out while we're here,
we have windage and elevation settings on the side of the rear sight wings.
We have elevation here, so 250, 400, 500 and 600 metres.
The rear sight itself is just a simple aperture.
And you have your very M16A1-like windage adjustment there.
These screws are just threaded into blind holes, and they are there
for mounting a scope rail should you want to put optics on the gun.
Alright, back to disassembly. Now that that lever is rearward we can pull this whole thing
back, and then pivot the upper and lower apart.
So that's going to open up, and I can pull out the recoil spring, which is captive.
Flip the rifle over, and pull the charging handle back to here,
at which point the handle itself comes out.
This is one potentially fragile part of the gun, you can see it's fairly thin there.
That occasionally will break off, that's probably the only real weak point that I'm aware of.
Then we can pull this out.
There is our bolt and bolt carrier, very AR like.
And a long-stroke gas piston, very AK like.
I can take off the hand guard here
just by pulling out a single screw,
and then these slide forward and come off.
There's a little metal heat shield in there.
Nothing of particular interest under the handguard, so it's just a barrel and gas tube.
A few little differences here in the fire control group.
Instead of having a plunger ejector in the bolt face like the AR,
we have a spring-loaded blade ejector here built into the lower.
The fire control parts are very much like an AR-15, but not exactly AR-15 parts.
There is a little buffer spring at the back end of the lower receiver
to absorb any residual movement of the bolt as it's cycling back and forth.
And there is storage built into the pistol grip.
Pop that spring, and you have a little bottle that stores a cleaning pull through and some oil.
I really do get a kick out of just how perfect
of a hybrid this is between the AR and the AK platforms.
... Even down to the rivet and the slight wobble in the gas piston.
Which is, by the way, an important element for reliability.
And the recoil spring assembly inside the bolt carrier.
But then here, instead of a gas port coming out,
we have just a lug that attaches to the bolt carrier.
We've got our cam pin, we've got our AR-style bolt there.
... Cotter pin here, take that out, can take what is very clearly an AR-style firing pin out.
Cam pin and bolt.
Even down to the fact that it's still shaped like an AR bolt here,
just without the stuff at the back because this isn't acting as a gas piston.
Once it went into service, the K2 proved to be a very satisfactory and reliable rifle.
Over a million K1 and K2s put together would be manufactured by Daewoo.
That gave them enough, together with their M16s,
to have that reserve supply for a full military mobilisation
should they need it, which so far they have not.
But, just an interesting point, the K1 is the short-barrelled version of this,
except that it's not quite because it doesn't use a gas piston,
it is a direct gas impingement gun.
And there's often this question of,
"Why would they do that? Why not make them both the same system?"
And the reason is during the development of this rifle, that XB6 - XB7 period,
the Army came to them with a much more immediate request for submachine guns
(or carbines as we would think of them),
and they didn't have ... the engineering in place
to know exactly how best to do a short gas piston.
But they had Colt CAR-15s, and they could look at that
and basically just copy the gas system for an equivalent barrel length gun.
And so that's why they went with direct gas impingement for the K1.
They needed something short barrelled, and they needed it right now.
And rather than take the time to develop this further,
they just used a different existing system, so.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.