Here are a few of the RPK’s assembled and ready for test fire. Once we test fire all of them and make sure the full auto trips are working they will be disassembled and blued.
We disassembled all the RPK’s after test firing and organized them in buckets:
Receivers are all blued, and a few RPD’s are blued in the bottom of the picture:
An employee, let’s just call him, came by the shop today and saw we were assembling RPK’s. He immediately wanted to help assemble. Maybe I should give some background on this guy first. He’s been in combat, trained forces in the Middle East, continues to train police in the States, done things with the military he can’t talk about, worked on people with legs blown off from IED’s, has shot just about every gun under the sun extensively, and has some pretty amazing stories. So he wanted to help assemble. He put the gas tube on, handguard on and then came the trigger and immediately gave up. It was like I was asking him to the most impossible thing in the world. The AK trigger is pretty simple. Yes, it’s a pain to install but you learn some tricks after installing 20 or so in a few days. I tried to insist that these aren’t hard to install. I walked him through the process starting with the full auto trip and then to the hammer. But he didn’t get past the trip. He got the spring for the full auto trip tangled in the hammer spring so the hammer wouldn’t fall smoothly. He told me that he never messes with AR-15 triggers or AK triggers but will take a Glock and 1911 apart completely. In my opinion those two handguns are so much more difficult than the rifles. I guess the point of this story is that if a knucklehead like me can install the trigger on one of these AK/RPK’s, anyone certainly can! This isn’t hard stuff. Just takes time to learn. Repetition.
I fire blued the screws on two of the bipods….
This:
Also, this is so true:
Click here to view the embedded video.
I’m liking your stippling PHLster…