If you are among the devoted, and have drunk the Kool-Aid, you’ll believe that the AK-47 is so durable, so utterly indestructible, that after the nuclear holocaust, and the inevitable cockroach evolution, that those future Blattodeids will be able to arm themselves with AKs they pull out of the rubble. Puh-leeze. And even if they do, those AKs won’t be any more ergonomic for them, than they were for us.
Yes, the AK is durable, but no more so than other firearms. Some designs are fragile, and some don’t last long, but typically, a military organization attempts to issue tools to the troops that will stand up to use. Remember that not all types of abuse are the same.
I had an illustration of this recently. I was out walking the dogs, and saw something shiny on the sidewalk ahead. Of course, the dogs had to investigate. It was a busted smartphone. I’m not up enough on smartphones to know what model it was, short of doing an autopsy. But what I can tell you is that it was busted. Thrown, dropped, stomped, whatever, it had given up the ghost. In normal use, it would have served its owner well until the battery finally died. But this abuse it could not withstand. Every object has its limits.
So, if you see in the news that someone recovered an AK in Afghanistan, one that had the markings to indicate it was made in, oh, let’s say 1950, what can you learn? Proof of the utter durability of the AK-47? Uh, no. With any product, you will have a small sample that will survive anything. I mean, we’re finding dinosaur bones from dead critters that expired 100, even 200 million years ago. AKs won’t last nearly that long, even when kept stored properly. (Mostly because the building they are stored in will have crumbled after a few tens of thousands of years.)
So, how long will your AK-47, AK-74, or SKS last? That depends.
Let’s consider the thickness of your stamped receiver AK. The common measurement or standard for the shell is a 1mm thick sheet of steel. How thick is that? Well, the U.S. Treasury Department tells us that a dollar bill is made of cloth (actually a kind of a cloth/paper hybrid) that is .0043 inches thick. And we know that 1mm equals 0.0393 inches. So, nine crisp, new, $1-dollar bills, pressed into a flat stack, is about the same thickness as your stamped AK receiver shell. Hmm, not so thick now that you think about it, eh? The upside is that steel is incredibly strong. That’s why we went to the trouble of developing it, after all. And, the shell of the AK receiver is a self-supporting structure. Internal forces work in the directions of its shape-strength, and it is not stressed in the direction of its weakness.
One weakness it does have is lateral crush resistance. Empty, you could just about crush it with your hands. But, it isn’t empty except when it is, and when it is assembled, the internal parts and the internal brace act to support the shell from lateral stresses.
Those internal parts also act as struts to support it when it is stressed from firing. When you fire a round, the load of the chamber pressure is borne by the bolt lugs and the locking recesses of the front trunnion. The receiver doesn’t take any of that load, not in a real sense. The load the receiver takes is the transmitted recoil. As the bullet is hurled forward, the rifle as a whole is thrust backward. Your shoulder stops that, and the impact is taken by the rivets on the rear trunnion for the most part. The front rivets also take some stress, from the mass of the barrel and the rest of the rifle, forward of those rivets.
If or when the bolt carrier bottoms out in the rear of the recoil stroke, the impact is again taken by the rear rivets, with nothing upon which the front trunnion and rivets must bear.
So, between the front and the rear trunnion, the rear takes most of the work, and if you are building an AK you should pay extra attention to the rear rivets. Be sure they are firmly seated and riveted tight. And, it is worth pointing out, however obvious it may seem, that the milled receivers do not have this potential problem. There are no riveted trunnions on a milled receiver AK, the front and rear of the receiver are integral parts of the milled block of steel.
Even in the AK-using parts of the world, there is a hierarchy of perceived value. Finland is a great example. Having adopted the AK (the Valmet is a Finnish-made AK, with improvements the Finns felt they needed) they have been happy with it. A while back they bought a metric buttload of 7.62x39 AKs, East German and Chinese, for emergency use and training. The idea was, in an emergency, they’d need warehouses full of AKs to issue. (When you share a border and a long and sometimes fractious history with Russia, you tend to think of these things.) Rather than spend the big bucks to make warehouses full of Finnish-quality Valmets, they wrote checks to buy up surplus East German AKs, and newly-made Chinese type 56s.
They also used the cheap imports for training. Training in Finland, in fact any country or organization that takes training seriously, is not like an afternoon at the gun club. Rifles are subjected to a lot of wear and tear, even if they are not fired. (The U.S. military uses what are called “rubber ducks,” which are synthetic, non-firing clones of M16/M4s, for just this purpose.)
Back in 2012, Finland was looking to sell off the unused inventory, as they were reducing their reservist strength from 350,000 to 250,000. Given the recent saber-rattling that has been going on, and the Russian activities, I imagine they are reactivating some of those reservists, and are glad they didn’t manage to broom out all that “excess” inventory.
If you scour the Internet (and it won’t take much scouring) you’ll find photos of cheerful AK enthusiasts showing off in a peculiar Soviet fashion. They are doing push-ups on their AKs. Hold the AK horizontally, magazine in place, crossways to your body. Kneel down, press the magazine into the dirt, and start doing pushups on the rifle, balancing on the magazine. As a macho show off, it is impressive not because the rifle withstands it. If you can do pushups while balancing on one point, that’s not bad. The rifle? OK, so an AR magazine won’t withstand that. So what? Slap in an all-steel magazine, and it will. Heck, I’ve driven over ARs with cars and trucks. So big deal, I say.
As far as service life is concerned, that’s a matter of barrel life. The AR has a barrel design that is easy to change. The AK, not so much. The AR has been made with the best barrel steel to be had. I mean, AR shooters will complain about “inferior” steel in a particular barrel made “only” of 4140 steel. As if the steel used to make their grandfather’s Garand was inferior. AKs? I’m sure the Soviets made them of the best steel they could, but you don’t make tens of millions of a nearly disposable rifle out of the finest chrome-moly Vanadium steel. Especially if you are hard-chroming the bore for corrosion resistance and wear. Combined with the common bi-metal bullets used in imported or surplus ammo, an AK barrel will not last as long as an AR barrel. So, realistically speaking, when your AK has lost its accuracy, when the bore is terminally worn, then that’s it, the rifle is done. You can retire it, pry off the useable parts (the parts that remain unbroken for use on your other AKs) and move on.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, you can replace an AK barrel. But it isn’t nearly as easy as with an AR — it takes a real-deal gunsmith, and only time will tell if there is a sufficient demand for that service to warrant gunsmiths offering it. Look at it this way: you or your buddy have spent $450-500 on a plain-Jane imported AK of less than stellar quality. You’ve hosed five cases of import ammo through it, and now it won’t keep its shots on the target board at 100 yards. A new rifle is now $600. The gunsmith quote on replacing the barrel is half that. (Currently, the cheapest replacement barrel is $150 or so. The labor to fit, drill the gas port, cut the trunnion pin recess, fit the gas block and front sight, and we’re simply ball-parking at another $150.) Which is it? Replace the barrel on a tired, worn, unrefined AK, or buy another one that probably has had a bit more refinement done to it since the first purchase.
Not all rifles would be in a similar situation. If you’ve sprung for the bucks to buy, for example, an IWI Ace, at $1,700 – 1,800, then a $300 replacement barrel is not a problem. Also, the rifle itself is a lot more refined than the vanilla import in the first example. A lot of shooters just might go for a replacement in that instance.
In other words, we’ll see. 
Iraqi soldiers practice urban warfare tactics at an advanced training course in Mosul, led by soldiers from 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. Photo by Spc. Christa Martin