While the Soviets were going to a lighter carbine, the West insisted (mainly because of the U.S.) on sticking with a full-power rifle, like this G-3.
THE BIGGEST TACTICAL CHANGES IN small arms came at the end of the 19th century. The armies of the world went from single-shot breechloading rifles (like the British Martini and the American Trapdoor Springfield) to repeating rifles, chambered in cartridges using the new smokeless powder. Inventors had developed two of the three essentials for a reliable self-loading rifle. Of the three, two are major, and must-haves. The third is a refinement and can be gotten around, but lacking it does limit the designs that can be used.
The two major improvements are smokeless power and the self-contained cartridge. While it is possible to construct a self-loading rifle that could run on black powder, it would be such a maintenance hog that it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Scrubbing the black powder fouling out of a barrel is work enough, but doing so to a gas system? Let’s get real. No, until the French chemist Paul Vieille developed Poudre B (Powder Blanche, or white powder, to distinguish it from black powder) the various formulations of gun cotton were too sharp in burning rate and too unstable to be used in firearms. Once the process to tame gun cotton had been developed, the rest was refinement. Burning with more power (greater efficiency, less residue) Poudre B allowed for higher velocities. Which lead to the need for copper or brass-jacketed bullets, which lead to spitzer-point bullets for greater aerodynamics, and finally to the repeating rifle with great range that almost all the world’s best armies were armed with prior to WWI.
The self-contained cartridge was necessary, as there is simply no other way to handle powder, bullet, and ignition source (the primer) in a repeating rifle. Ship’s cannons and the larger artillery pieces used bags of powder and a priming/sealing case head well through WWII for the biggest guns. But such a system for an infantryman is simply absurd.
While the Soviets were going to a lighter carbine, the West insisted (mainly because of the U.S.) on sticking with a full-power rifle, like this G-3.
The AK-74 and the M-4 are roughly the same size and weight. And shoot bullets that are roughly the same.
With the stock folded, the AK (here a ’74) is shorter than an M4 with its stock collapsed.
The last, and refinement part, is the primer. A non-corrosive primer, that is. The earliest priming compounds were quite nasty. The most common was a mixture of fulminate of mercury and ground glass. The fulminate was brisk enough to ignite powder but required the ground glass to provide a source of friction. The mercury also contaminated the brass when fired, making it brittle over time and unsuited for reloading. The great volume of fouling from black powder had so diminished the mercury entering the brass that black powder cartridges ignited by F-M primers had no problem. That, and the habit of shooters to clean their freshly fired brass by dropping each into a jug or water, or water with vinegar. The fouling was dissolved before the mercury in it could have any effect on the brass. Smokeless powder simply drove the mercury into the brass at high pressure and made it unreloadable. This was, however, a concern mostly for us crazy Americans. Which lead to the development of the lead styphnate primer. The L-S primer was (and is) incredibly stable, still working with 100% certainty decades after having been loaded into a cartridge. However, the combustion residue is hygroscopic; it attracts moisture. (I have an ammo can full of .45 ACP manufactured during WWI. Despite their age, none has yet failed to fire when requested. Such is the stability over time of the early priming compounds.)
The FAL uses a stock-contained recoil spring. It wasn’t easy to make a model of the FAL with a folding stock.
Was the M1 Carbine the first “assault rifle?” No, but it did precede the AK-47.
Moisture leads to rust, and rust in the actuating system of a self-loading rifle is bad. The nature of powder manufacturing lead many shooters astray in how they viewed corrosive cartridges. Since acid is used in the manufacture of powder, it was for a long time assumed that the acids of the powder were being driven into the “pores” of the steel. Once there, it obviously rusted the steel. This is wrong. First, steel does not have pores. There may be sub-microscopic joints between the crystalline structure of the steel, but no pores. Second, the acids in the powder have been first washed away in multiple rinsing operations, then any that might be left are counteracted by a mild basic solution and chemical stabilizers.
The “solution” to the “acid in the steel” problem was to scrub the bore repeatedly with lanolin-based bore cleaners. The water in the cleaning solution scrubbed the primer residue out of the bore, and once lightly oiled the bore was fine.
The ejection port on this Springfield marks it as one made for the Pedersen Device.
The complicated rear sight of the Springfield. Marked out to 2,700 yards, the sight is hopelessly optimistic.
Corrosive primers were in use in the West until the mid-1950s, and in Eastern Europe even through the 1990s. Even today, ammunition that is listed as “non-corrosive” from the east is in many cases still mildly corrosive by Western standards.
As anyone who has shopped for ammo for their AK knows, corrosive primers are not a hindrance to the Kalashnikov. But, that is only because of Mikhail’s cleverness, and the ability of the Soviet Union to hard chrome plate various parts. Many other designs floundered on the corrosive primer problem. One of the earliest self-loading rifles was the Remington Model 8, designed by John Moses Browning and first offered for sale by Remington in 1906. The “8” uses a system known as the “long-recoil” action, the same system found in the Auto-5 shotgun. In the long-recoil action, the bolt and barrel are locked together at firing. They recoil together, each compressing its own action spring. At the end of the recoil stroke (the “long” in long-recoil means the travel is more than the length of a loaded cartridge. Short-recoil action is less than the cartridge length) the bolt and barrel unlock, and while the bolt is held back, the barrel is driven forward by its action spring. Just before it travels fully forward, it trips the bolt lock, and the bolt then follows the barrel forward. In all this shuttling, the empty case is removed from the chamber and ejected, the next round fed out or allowed to rise in the magazine, then chambered by the bolt going forward.
One virtue of the post-war AK-47 is compactness. Next to it is a Springfield and a Mosin.
The Mosin-Nagant rear sight, no aperture, but marked out to 2,000 meters. As if.
The big advantage is that the system does not use gas as the means of working the mechanism, so corrosive priming doesn’t matter. It is easy to wash the bore clean, and there’s no gas system to complicate the cleaning. Also, the action works within a broad range of bullet weights and velocities, almost irrelevant to the burning rate of the powder. The disadvantages are greater weight, extra parts, and the need to enclose two powerful action springs. Also, in the context of armed combat in the very early 20th century, it is difficult to mount a bayonet on a Remington Model 8, or any long-recoil firearm. Bayonets were still of extreme importance to the military minds of the first couple of decades of the 20th century.
The AK-74 was supposed to be a great leap forward. It ended up being a good rifle, but not the wonder weapon the Soviets had desired.
As a sporting rifle, the M-8 is fine. As a military rifle, it would not have been robust enough. Still, had someone in military circles seriously approached Browning at that time, I’m sure he would have been able to come up with something better suited to combat.
The next model to show up is the Standard, a self-loading rifle introduced in 1915 that also could be changed to a pump action (shades of the 1980s SPAS-12 shotgun). Gas operated, it suffered from the same two problems that all self-loading rifles would for the next couple of decades: variability in powder burn rate and corrosive primers.
In a bolt-action rifle, as long as the peak pressure of the burning powder does not exceed a certain level, the burn rate of that powder hardly matters. Yes, you’ll have variances in muzzle velocity, but a hundred feet per second one way or the other hardly matters. In a self-loading rifle, burn rate is of vital importance. If the rate is too slow or too fast, the gas pressure at the port will vary. The action can be over- or under-driven. Both are bad. Add to that corrosion caused by the primers, and many designs proved to be balky, unreliable outside of a range or training environment, or simply temperamental. One system that many inventors tried over and over again is the Bang system. There, the muzzle of the rifle has a cup or reversed cone with a hole through which the bullet passes. The muzzle blast hits the cup or cone, driving it forward. A lever transfers the forward jerk of the cone to a rearward thrust to the action, and unlocks the bolt and drives it against its action spring. While the Bang system is much more forgiving of powder burn rates (the pressures of almost all powders will have evened out by the time they reach the muzzle, 24 inches away from the chamber) it is much less forgiving of corrosion. The large area of the cone, and the bearing surface where it slides back and forth, provide much more area for corrosion, and more resistance to movement once corroded.
When the world’s armies gave up low-velocity black powder lead bullets, they went with what seemed like “smallbores” at the time. Left, the .45-70, then 7.92x57, 7.62x54R, .303 and .30-06.
The Federov Avtomat used a short-recoil system, mechanically-driven which, like the Remington Model 8, did not have to worry about corrosive primers.
Another roadblock that hampered self-loading development was the insistence by every military that looked into it that new rifles had to chamber the exact same cartridges of their existing bolt-action rifles. The insistence on a full-power rifle cartridge, while at the same time requiring (in almost every instance) a rifle that was not any longer or heavier than the existing bolt-action, made life impossible for the inventor. The American experience is illustrative; the U.S. Army insisted on a self-loading rifle that used the same .30-06 as the 1903 Springfield. (The various test boards suggested something smaller in caliber, but in the end, it was .30-06.) The 1903 Springfield is a 7.5-pound rifle that is light, trim, handy and well-balanced. The Garand that replaced it, while the same length, was nearly two pounds heavier, not as trim, and not as well-balanced. That it was a reliable and accurate self-loading rifle was the virtue that meant its adoption and later adoration.
The German 98K was pretty much the same as the Springfield. (Indeed, the Springfield was so derivative of the Mauser, and followed it so soon, that Mauser sued and won, collecting royalty checks right up until America joined WWI on the side of the Allies.) Replacement rifles for it were in much the same predicament as the Garand — heavier, not as well-balanced, and whose sole virtue was self-loading. If they lacked somewhat in the reliability department, soldiers solved that problem by having other weapons handy.
The armies initially engaged in WWII were using the same rifles that they had in the earlier war. So let’s go back and see just how they got there. Prior to WWI, an infantry company commander lacked much of what was considered essential by the end of WWII, and without which we cannot conceive of combat operations today. He had no trucks, no radio, and no close air support. Lacking a radio, he could not count on artillery to be “on call” but had to depend on scheduled barrages. Mortars would be reinvented in the trenches of WWI, and the use of rockets had been abandoned after their miserable failures time and time again in the 19th century. Even if he had had mortars or rockets, he could not count on transport, as his units own mules would have been few, dedicated solely to carrying food and water. If he had a machine gun, it posed bigger headaches than advantages. A machine gun in pre-WWI times was heavy and water-cooled. A single Maxim or Vickers ran 75 pounds, plus tripod and condenser can. A single gun, with a useful combat load of belted ammunition, would tip the scales at nearly 300 pounds. All of which he would have carried (sometimes literally) on the backs of his men.
What he had at his disposal were a hundred-or-so men and their rifles. Different armies learned different lessons. Stationed in the wide-open plains of the U.S., the American Army learned the value of long-range shooting. Military promotion boards took into account the rifle scores and ability to estimate range of the candidates before them. Rifle qualifications included firing on moving targets out to 900 yards. The British Army, after being roughly handled by the Boers, learned fast bolt manipulation. The absolute minimum standard, below which you could not serve, was ten aimed shots a minute. Skilled riflemen could easily best that, some even double it.
The Germans wanted additional firepower, so they developed a dual-magazine mag well for their MP-38⁄40 submachine guns.
Rifle texts from the period call for officers and NCOs to closely supervise the firing of their men. For example, an officer would indicate to the Sergeant under him that a particular farmhouse was delivering fire on their position. The Sergeant would detail a group to fire on the farmhouse, assigning windows and corners to men. If a nearby fold of ground was seen to have enemy soldiers, the Sergeant would direct their fire by adjusting their targeting: “Two sight widths left of the farmhouse, 100 yards further away, near the fence. The crease in the pasture. One magazine each.” Each soldier so directed would locate the position, adjust his sight, fire a magazine and await corrections.
Showing the gap between rifles and submachine guns, we have the 9mm, 7.62 French, and 8mm Nambu, ahead of a .30-06.
With good sights, practice, powerful cartridges and open ground, an infantry company could make the terrain for a thousand yards forward of it dangerous for anyone to enter.
Too bad that in the trench warfare of WWI nothing existed for a rifle past 100 yards. To compound the problem, the rifle sights in existence were all regulated for long-range shooting. That is, the sights were set for a man-sized target, in the open, at distance. A “combat sight” or “combat zero” involved aiming at your opponent’s belt buckle and striking him a telling blow out to 400 yards. You need not adjust the sights, provided he was upright. The trajectory of the bullet would rise above the sight (and the belt buckle) and then fall back down. Anywhere from bayonet distance to 400 yards, you would strike a standing man somewhere between the belt buckle, up to the head, and back down to the pelvis. It didn’t take long for everyone to learn: don’t stand upright. A rifle so zeroed, when fired at 100 yards, commonly strikes the target anywhere from six inches to a foot high. You have to wonder how many doughboys survived because all the rifles in use hit high at trench distances.
By WWII, no one stood in the open. Machine guns were common and became a lot more so. Automatic rifles like the BAR and Bren gun added volume of fire. Artillery became responsive, first with field telephones and, later, radio. But still, the authorities insisted on full-power cartridges. The Americans stuck with the .30-06. The British with .303. The Germans with 7.92 Mauser (and Hitler personally) put a stop to the development of “sub-power” rifles, although not for long. The Soviets didn’t, but not because they were so forward-looking. Simply put, you can manufacturer a rack full of submachine guns, or SMGs, for the time, effort, materials, and skilled labor it takes to manufacturer a pair of Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles. The Soviets needed volume, so they made lots and lots of SMGs. As a result, they learned a lot faster the advantages of volume of fire, low recoil, and high capacity.
The British actually veered further away from the concept of an assault rifle cartridge at first, but after they came to their senses they just stuck with the .303. Their idea, in the first decade of the 20th century, was to pump up the .303 British. They wanted what amounts to a 7mm Remington Magnum. The plan was for it to be wrestled into the new P-13 rifle, where it would offer longer range, flatter trajectory and greater striking power than the .303. Having had their butts kicked by the Boers, the British were very interested in not having that happen again. However, the wide open, rolling country that they were in during the Boer War was not to be duplicated for a long time, if ever. In cities and jungles, the chances for a 500-yard plus shot are few and far between. It wasn’t until after WWII that the British decided to get away from the full-power rifle. Then they went to the .280 Enfield, which would have been quite the deal. The .280 Enfield featured a 130-grain bullet of .276-inch diameter, at around 2,400 fps. The sleek bullet would have had a decently flat trajectory and mild recoil.
At the start of the assault rifle development was the MKb42(H). From then on, it was mere detail.
Alas, the Americans insisted on nothing less than the full striking power of the .30-06, in the form of the 7.62/.308, and the British attempt failed. The British ended up doing as the Belgians had, scaling up the FAL to the size needed to handle the “.30-06 Short” or .308⁄7.62x51 cartridge.
Cartridges from during the war, and post-war. On the left, the 7.92x33, then 7.62x39, the Czech 7.62x45, a 7mm FN, and the .308.
When the Soviets decided to improve the AK, they ended up with the 5.45x39 (right). It closely copies the performance of the 5.56 in the middle.
The American experience encompasses three phases: “Before Garand,” “During Garand,” and “After War” periods. John Garand started working on a self-loading rifle in the early 1920s. As the Army was still very much wedded to the .30-06 in that time, he had to make his guns in the most powerful cartridge ever issued in a repeating rifle. His initial efforts used a novel principle: the setback of the primer, blowing partly out of the cartridge case, which acted to unlock the mechanism. At the same time, the Ordnance Department was working on sealing primers into the cases to prevent blowouts that would tie up machine guns. Once the crimped-in primers became accepted, Garand’s design had to be scrapped. Meanwhile, the Army was conducting experiments with existing self-loading rifles. They purchased Remington Model 8s, equipped them with aperture sights, and began conducting live-fire field trials. Now, the M-8 is not at all suited for military use. The long-recoil action isn’t particularly suited to the rigors of mud, dust, dirt, and rain. And the standard M-8 is reloaded from the top, with individual rounds or stripper clips. But, the .30 Remington cartridge could have been something, if only the trials were actually studied for more than just “fire and maneuver.” The .30 Remington is a hunting cartridge, and as such, it has a 170-grain round-nosed bullet at just over 2,000 fps. What if? What if someone had been paying attention? They could have shortened the case neck (you don’t need a long neck except for a 170-grain bullet), decreased the weight and made the round nose a pointed one. They’d have had a .30-caliber rifle launching a 125-grain bullet at 2,300 to 2,400 fps.
If only the Soviets had used a standard case head size, I would have been able to create ammo for our lonely Maadi.
Take the basic M-8 action, fit a box magazine, and swap out the long-recoil action for a piston-driven one. In 1925, the U.S. Army could have had a Sturmgewehr. But they conducted the M-8 trials, and then went on with a replacement for the Springfield.
Modern Soviet and Russian small arms developments have paralleled the West. Here we see an AK-74 with a grenade launcher underneath the barrel. Photo by Gunnery Sgt. Donald E. Preston USMC
When the U.S. did change the .30-06 pre-war, they simply made it a flat-base bullet of 150 grains and called it “Ball, M2.”
The Garand trials had another hitch for John Garand: the .276 Pedersen. The cartridge and the rifle Pedersen developed were to be a new approach to the self-loading rifle. The rifle wasn’t so hot: it was basically a Luger action scaled-up to rifle size. As such, it required waxed cartridges due to its mechanism’s lack of primary extraction. (The rotation of the case when the bolt turns breaks the bond between case and chamber walls.) However, the cartridge showed promise, and the Army conducted tests on pigs. They found that the .276 worked well enough to merit consideration.
Now, instead of submachine guns, the “experts” want a Personal Defense Weapon. That means cartridges like the FN 5.7, instead of (l to r) 9x18, 9mm Parabellum, 5.7, .45 ACP.
The longer a bullet is, the faster the twist must be to keep it stable. Photo by David Fortier
One advantage to the 5.7 is compactness. You can stuff 500 of them into a lunchbox.
John Garand was not dumb. He made two prototypes, one in .276 Pedersen, and one in .30-06. The Army board considering the rifle recommended adoption of the rifle and endorsed it in .276. Then Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur nixed that, citing the warehouses full of .30-06. The army had a rifle, and Garand was famous. The .30-06 of the time was a robust cartridge: launching a 173-grain bullet at 2,700 fps. The later M2 load was a 150-grainer at 2,800 fps.
At the beginning of WWII, we found we needed a different weapon, something better than a pistol, but handier than a rifle. The carbine, in the form of the M1 Carbine, was quickly adopted. Perhaps too quickly. While light and handy, the cartridge wasn’t quite up to what you’d want in a fighting rifle. It launched a 110-grain round-nosed bullet at a nominal 1,900 fps. In both weight and velocity, that’s a step back from the later M-43 Soviet cartridge. But it was certainly a whole lot easier to shoot than the typical rifle cartridge of WWII, typically a 170-grain bullet at something like 2,700 fps. The Carbine was perhaps a bit too fragile, too, something that even six months of testing could have prevented. But it became ubiquitous and the various production plants manufactured six and a half million of them in four years. The M2 Carbine, a select-fire version, came before war’s end.
We almost had a smaller caliber before WWII. But that got axed due to budget constraints.
One of the first and best imports was the FEG SA-85.
Russia used the Maxim gun, chambered in 7.62x54R. Full power, heavy, but worth the weight.
The 5.45 cartridge and a sectioned bullet next to it. Photo by David Fortier
Real military surplus ammo comes in “sardine cans,” two to a crate.
During WWII, the Garand served admirably. However, in Korea, there were doubts about the Garand. Specifically, the recoil made it difficult to fire quickly and accurately enough to deal with the “human wave” attacks the Chinese mounted. And despite its accuracy, students of the war could find no instance of where a moving body of Chinese in the open at distance were discouraged from the attack or driven back by rifle fire alone. At the trench line, the M1 and M2 Carbines served well, provided they hadn’t been over-used prior to the final assault. That and the sub-zero temperatures of Korean winters were hard on them. Long-range rifle fire wasn‘t all it was cracked up to be, and the Carbine was too fragile for general issue. Despite the lessons, the shorter case for the .30-06, made possible by powder developments, became the new cartridge. It was to be everything: light machine gun, rifle, submachine gun, carbine, all-in-one uber-rifle: the M-14. Too bad real life has a way of messing with beautiful plans.
Both sides captured lots of weapons and equipment. This is an MP40 captured on the Eastern Front, and on display in a museum in Murmansk.
This crate has already had the can opener misplaced. Lose the opener, and you’re in for a lot of work.
During WWI, the Germans, no dummies, looked into replacing or improving the Kar 98 rifle. However, switching rifles in the middle of a war is an experiment no one in their right mind wished to entertain, so the idea was dropped. The Germans worked on smaller cartridges between the wars. In the 1930s, both private firms and the Army Weapons Department were working on small arms. What the Army wanted in a machine carbine was something that weighed no more than the standard rifle, and if possible would be lighter. That it be simple, rugged and durable. That it be select-fire, and have a controllable cyclic rate.
A monument in Murmansk, to the defenders in the Great Patriotic War. It is solid concrete, and those are people at the base.
The experiments centered on short cases and bullets in the 7 to 8mm diameters. However, the war changed everyone’s plan. The resulting cartridge, simply to ease production, used the same case head diameter as the existing cartridges, and the same bullet diameter. Why? Think about it. Experimenters could easily obtain small production batches of cartridge cases if the plant only had to make some small changes in the trim lengths and the final shape-sizing dies. To punch out new brass, and form it to a new rim diameter, is not a change that you can do in between regular production runs. Ditto bullets, which simply required adjustments in jacket trim length and core swage weights. Barrels could be made from production blanks hand lifted from the regular production line.
The rest of the experimentation could be done in a small R&D shop “out back” and not interfere with regular production needed for the war effort.
So, the 7.92x33 cartridge was born. And stuffed into the various M-42 prototypes and sent off to the front. By the end of the war, the Stg-44⁄5 was well developed and used as the measure of all post-war R&D efforts.
Rifles using full-power cartridges must be large, heavy and long — and they still have lots of recoil. Here we have a rack of armorer’s FALs, machined to show the interior parts.
A Russian attack sub in drydock in Murmansk. One thing you get used to seeing in Russia is rust.
Colonel Fedorov developed the Avtomat before WWI. Originally intended to use a proprietary cartridge (the standard 7.62x54R Russian cartridge being entirely unsuited for this purpose) he had to switch during the war. The Japanese provided 6.5 Arisaka rifles and ammunition to the Russians, who had found themselves hard pressed to produce what they needed to fight with. So Fedorov changed his design, and the Avtomat was made in 6.5 Arisaka.
It served well — during the war and after — in the struggles that lead to the Bolsheviks coming to power. However, once the revolution was over, the idea of switching to a new idea of rifles was far, far, down the list. When WWII erupted, making more of the rifles they already had consumed Soviet efforts, as it had their Tsarist predecessors.
Not until the development of the M-43 cartridge, then the SKS and finally the AK-47, did the idea of the assault rifle come to fruition in the Soviet Union.
One change in rifles that should have been addressed but wasn’t was sights. If the expected maximum range of engagement was only 300 meters, why did everyone stick with 1,000-meter sights? Or longer? Tradition, and keeping the traditionalists happy.
Which brings us to today. What cartridges will you find for the AK? The superficial gun “expert” will scoff, and say, “There are only two: the 7.62 and the 5.45x39.” Not really. You see, there are a few others. First up in our list is the 5.56x45. That’s right, the good old .223. When American consumers buy something, they want to be able to buy it in the flavors they want. Yes, when the AK first hit our shores in volume, 7.62x39 ammo was cheap. But so was .223. So the .223 chambering is pretty common, and you can find it in a lot of models and countries of origin. The later 5.45x39 is cheaper still but lacks the following of the .223. The idea behind not being so ardent on the 5.45 is that if imports are cut off, then you have an orphan rifle. Even if imports are cut off you’ll still be able to buy 7.62x39 and 5.56, since they are made here.
The MP-44, the penultimate Sturmgewher.
Machine guns rule the terrain. Riflemen maneuver to take advantage of, or eliminate, the threat from machine guns. Here, Iraqi troops learn the basics of the PKM, under the watchful eyes of Marines. Photo by Pfc. Jerry Murphy, USMC
The trick, then, is to make sure imports aren’t cut off.
Other chamberings for the AK include the 7.62x51, 8mm Mauser, and 7.62x54R. The first two come to us courtesy of the Yugoslavians. When Yugoslavia was making rifles for export, they’d make them for anyone who had the money. They scaled the AK action up in length and robustness and produced AK derivatives in both 7.62x51 and 8mm Mauser. While it might be a stretch in some circles to call the SVD and its clones an AK, you’d have to be a real perfectionist to hold to that position for very long.
The action of the MP-44 was nearly identical to the SKS, which was developed just a year or two later. The hook on the upper bar picks up the tail of the bolt, unlocking the bolt before drawing it to the rear.
While the AK platform is adaptable, there are limits. It would be mechanically possible to fit the following into the AK, just not tactically, economically or rationally possible.
I heard of one fellow, Marty Ter Weeme of Teppo Jutsu, who actually undertook the engineering to make an AK in 6.8. Since he’d built many AR-15s in some wild and crazy calibers and had them work just fine, he figured, “What’s the big deal?” He undertook things like a right-sized bolt face, making a barrel (and the concomitant problems of pressing it home and notching it for the cross pin) and then magazines. Oh, the problems with magazines. He finally threw his hands up, and let someone else who was just dying to finish the project buy the parts from him.
What the MP-44 has, and the AK lacks, is a dust cover.
As you can see, the MP-44 is a lot more ergonomic than the AK-47. The safety is the lever, moved by your thumb. The selector is the button above it, pressed here for semi-auto fire.
And what advantage, in terms of terminal ballistics, would he have gained? Gee, he’d have essentially duplicated the 7.62x39. And one of the advantages of the 6.8 R-SPC is the accuracy it provides, an advantage that would be lost in transferring it to an AK. I suspect that if the 6.8 really takes off someone will do the work to build an AK chambered in it for commercial sale. But for now the idea just isn’t doable.
I suppose you could make a 5.56 AK into a .300 Whisper if you really wanted to. After all, the magazines would work, more or less. The bolt face would be right. But you’re back to needing a new barrel, with all the lathe work of fitting it to the receiver, and all the extra parts to the barrel. If you really want a quiet AK, invest the money in a good suppressor (which you’re going to need with the .300 Whisper anyway) and the means of lashing it to your AK in 7.62x39.
The RPK is simply an AKM with a longer, heavier barrel and a 40-round magazine. Here, Iraqi soldiers get some range time. Photo by Pfc. Jerry Murphy, USMC
A rack of PPS-43 submachine guns.
One advantage of submachine guns is, due to their low velocity, they can be suppressed. Here is a Sterling with an integral suppressor.
This has all the problems of the 6.8, in spades. Plus, the greater vigor of the 6.5 means more recoil (it pushes bullets of the same weight or heavier as the 6.8 a couple of hundred feet-per-second faster). As it is also a precision long-range cartridge, the 6.5 Grendel advantage is again lost in the AK translation.
That said, I have had an opportunity to shoot a much-overhauled and rebuilt AK that had been chambered in 6.5 Grendel. It hit what I was shooting at, out to a very respectable distance, but I really don’t think it has much of a chance. Even in the AR, the 6.5 is a niche cartridge (albeit a really, really good one) so in the AK it remains a question mark.
Basically, if you think you have a good idea for a new chambering for the AK, think again. A lot of people have been here ahead of you, and the chances that what you have in mind are a) a real advantage and b) something that will work, are pretty slim. Not that I want to discourage experimentation, but you probably aren’t the first one to think, “Hey, the AK in .35 Remington would be a real deer slayer.” 