AK-47 vs AK-74: What's The Difference?

so when I woke up naked on the floor of my cheap hotel room I stopped to think for a minute wow I should you get a lot of comments from new subscribers asking the differences between 1847 and 1874 s so as soon as I could peel my face off the holiday and carpet I decided you know what that's exactly what I'm gonna do today because even though this information is widely available anywhere on the Internet Google's heart that and I'm always down to pad a 9 minute runtime there are about a million esoteric differences between the ak-47 in the ak-74 the purposes of this video we're gonna keep it relatively simple just stuff you know cosmetically that you could notice or you know broad strokes here we're just trying to figure out for the average person that is kind of maybe new to guns or at least new to aks what the core differences are between the ak-47s and the ak-74 so this is going to be our ak-47 and this is going to be our ak-74 smile for the thumbnail I know what about 5% of you were thinking right now that's not an ak-47 that is an AKM for 100% right for simplicity's sake in this video this is what most people think of when they think of the ak-47 you're thinking of the stamp Feria this is the most common so the traditional ak-47s were either you know the type one was kind of its own animal then you had type 2 and type 3 s which were entirely milled receivers this one right here is the AKM which was an a pre-designed ak-47 to be built on the much easier to mass-produce stamp receivers so anywhere in the world who seen ak-47 odds are it's going to be an AKM these were by far the most produced rifles on the a que pattern this one itself is a Romanian G kit they could say that because you know they were very creative in their naming process Romanian G this right here has the infamous dong furniture I don't name this but this is actually a kit build that we put together this is one that my my builder Mike took care of so this is built on a Morrissey receiver has the ex tech magazine a LG fire control group because those are just awesome we're right in the middle of tooling up for bigger production to be able to take more and more of this stuff in-house so if you guys are interested we'll do a video when we get to shop fully tooled up for the big production runs that we're looking at doing later on at the end of the year you guys are interested to see that kind of stuff leave a comment down below but we're going to go ahead and move on to the ak-74 for our ak-74 here we are working with actually first rifle that I ever built this is a Bulgarian ak-74 I built this rifle at the rifle dynamics build course a really awesome experience that was kind of what gave me my start into kind of wanted to explore building more and it's a really nice rifle this rifle I probably put I forget how many thousands are out there at a certain point you just stop counting anybody who memorizes their round counts above 10,000 either has really really bad OCD or they're lying to you but yeah other than that this is your basic Bulgarian aks-74 it's got the plum furniture and again I install and a LG because I guess they're just awesome and of course have to match plum with plum plum doesn't mean anything sexual and emoji world does it so the first major difference this is like the difference between the two is the caliber so the AKM is traditionally chambered in 7 62 by 39 whereas the ak-74 is chambered in 5 4 5 by 39 the a case stayed chambered in 76 2 by 39 for most of its life until about of course the mid 70s when a ak74 rolled around everybody was kind of moving to more like the five five six directions so Russia moved to the five four five which I guess is kind of their indirect direct answer to be 556 it was a slightly smaller diameter but a faster bullet and much better long-range as well than the 760 by 39 big bullet a lot of energy the ak-74 took a little bit of a different approach to that and the seven and six the surplus stuff that's kind of famous for being the poison bullet for ballistically the way to pull it tumbles after it hits its target because of a hollow nose there and also steel core armor piercing so really cool around you can't tell them a little bit of a fanboy for the ak-74 I wish it was a little bit more common but you know seven six two by 39 is just so cheap in this country but I'm getting ahead of myself I'll talked about I'll talk about that a little bit later let's go ahead and move on to some of the key physical differences that you could observe between the ak-47 in 1874 so these are some of the characteristics of the guns that you'll be able to if you're just looking at an a cane you're not sure is it an ak-47 or is an ak-74 these are some of the things that might be able to help you out the first thing is the magazine now because of the different calibers their magazines are a little bit different in terms of angle so the 760 by 39 has the traditional banana clip and an ax mag a little curved - it's pretty extreme curved because the taper of the cartridge and so if you see a magazine like this you know 762 by 39 right off the bat this right here is an ex tech magazine so it may look a little different than a lot of the typical steel magazines you might see but notice the curve now on the ak-74 you notice it's a lot straighter it still has a curve to it but it's about half that of the 47 when you compare them side-by-side it's definitely less of a curve 5 5 6 8 K mags or even less so so if you see a kind of a straighter mag you know sure that that is either 5 4 5 or 5 5 6 most likely a 5 for 5 X Tech is one to take the banana magazine thing kind of literal extreme so the next thing is the muzzle device or you know the thread pitch so a lot of your akms or ak-47s are going to be threaded in 14 by 1 left hand they're also going to have the traditional slant break a lot of people are like oh my break is sideways now it's not quite correct these were made to mitigate the a case-specific recoil of kind of a lopsided operating system with the bolt carrier at all so it's specifically made to kind of push the gun in correct or you know pull a lot of fire and things like that so kind of neat really easy to mass-produce very basic break but if you thread this off it'll expose the threads here which are and you know the little plunger detent that's on most aks they're kind of cool lets you swap your muzzle brake really easy without needing tools or anything like that you have your threads which are directly threaded onto the barrel and these are 14 by 1 left hand now onto the ak74 you'll see the traditional 74 style brake this one is a little bit different you see it's longer it's got that nice little blast chamber in here including vent holes on the top and a nice little vent here to port the gases act a little bit like a better muzzle break so taking this one off these are going to be 24 by 1.5 right-hand threads and you still have the plunger system but this is actually the threads on this barrel are not actually on the barrel themselves the threads are attached to the front sight block which gets really interesting when you start talking about things like suppressors that can get a little wonky but this is kind of an interesting concept so if your muzzle brake really gets super stuck you can always just press off and replace your front sight block that's a joke next one up and this one is not necessarily true well kind of like the threads this is not necessarily true for some of the modern guns that are coming out from Arsenal and things like that they have a lot of 760 by 39 guns that have some of the features of the 1874 it's just kind of updating stuff like the 24 millimeter front sight blocks and gas block which is what we're going to talk about next a big feature of the ak-47 traditionally is that 45-degree gas block these may or may not also have a 45-degree gas port those were later abandoned in favor of the 90-degree ports but a lot of the AKM still have that 45 degree slant there so that's just the method of getting gas from the barrel bleeding out into the gas system to actually operate the firearm now on the ak-74 they move to the 90-degree gas ports and the 90-degree gas blocks so you see this one has a lot less of a contour there and it just gashed shoots straight up straight back and again operates the firearm like I said a lot of those features were also included on the Arsenal's as well regardless of caliber so it's it's a good rule of thumb but there are a couple exceptions kind of like the hot crazy rule it's good rule couple exceptions moving on to the next thing this is gonna be kind of you know along with magazine and everything but obviously the ak-47s are going to have a wider mag well to accompany the wire magazine I don't really feel like the need to shoot both of them it's just it's wider for this next difference we're gonna have to pop the hood on the ak-47 or AKM bolt carriers a lot of the time now there are a million a cave variants out there so don't take this as gospel for every single one of them but on your typical ak-47 akm your bolt carrier looks very plain Jane there's just one little groove that goes on the side groove that goes on that side there's not a lot of crazy cuts or anything like that just very very standard however on the ak-74 on the opposite side there you can see that there is a groove cut this lightens up the bolt carrier a little bit I don't know how well you see that okay are you doing there's a groove that's cut right here and that's usually if you're going through a bin of parts that's a dead giveaway that that is an ak-74 both carrier so yeah those are just about the major differences between the ak-47 and 1874 hopefully this wasn't too boring for you a que veterans out there that you know been there done that you guys know all this info hopefully I was able to add a little bit of entertainment value for you but hopefully I just wanted to make this video because I do know that there's a lot of people coming in that don't actually know the differences you know they know that they're different and they might know the caliber thing but there's a couple of different things that you know maybe this is new information for them so I get the comment enough and it's really easy video to do so I figured I would go ahead and make it for you guys so you guys have looked at that information becomes a little bit easier for you guys to get to as for what I prefer between seven six two and five four five wow that's a bit like choosing between your children it's just not a good thing to do so I hope you liked the video and don't forget about the AKG notification squad I see you guys we're gonna be giving away a lot of t-shirts coming up soon so I guess that wraps everything up for today I appreciate it guys as always see you sexy [ __ ] on Thursday gunmen review it's coming that worked so there are about a million esoteric different differences Jesus really so when I woke up naked on the floor of my cheap hotel carpet that wouldn't be a cheap hotel room yeah okay so when I woke up naked on my cheap cheap hotel the the floor woke up I'm on the floor okay

Channel: Brandon Herrera

Views: 1,950,021

Rating: 4.8839293 out of 5

Keywords: Brandon Herrera, The AK Guy, ak-47, guns, gun, ak-74, 7.62, 5.45, head to head, comparison, side by side, rifle, caliber

Id: v8CFBH0JQQU

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019