Arsenal SAM5 Rifle: My 6 Reasons For Buying This 5.56 Milled AK Import

hi misha here and this is definitely an impromptu video and this will be an unboxing video something we don't typically do here but this is a little bit of a different gun a special gun for me you know what it is based on the title but this i guess will be a story time episode and we'll take a look at the just released and limited production arsenal sam5 milled ak and 5.56 nato 223 built in bulgaria so yeah here is the box just off the uh i think it was actually fedex it's kind of funny because msr ships ups but it looks like kvar uses fedex and i had to buy this from kvar because they are not selling these direct to dealers and you better believe that means no dealer pricing so with that let's just uh get a cutty thing and open this bad boy up i'm going to have to do some of this off camera because unlike maybe some of you i'm not as skilled at doing multiple things with one hand so yeah add our cardboard sleeve in our arsenal box and it's good they put it down to sleep because this is a return to the crappy arsenal box made out of essentially tissue paper in the sam7sf video we did in september we talked about how those were in slightly better looking boxes but uh now we're back to the tissue paper which honestly i don't care about it's just an excuse to throw the box away which i would have done anyway but the only time i keep boxes is if they're hard cases they're maybe fitted with foam lining let's get rid of this so here we are one 20 round mag why not 30 well the truth is most 762-39 arsenal's actually come with a little five round mag so i'm just happy to get a 20. cleaning kit oiler sling perfectly good ak sling manual so so far the pretty typical arsenal thing and we are plastic has these little end cappy deals and a little corrugated thing for the buttstock it comes in a plastic thing pretty well oiled and it has this rubber thing on the charging handle which is good because without it it would definitely poke through the box let's get out of here so here it is out of the plastic like i said it's relatively well we got this yeah it's funny when i have ian take pictures for gumbrook or elsewhere i usually leave these on at least for most of the pictures to show people look it is definitely new but every time someone always asks what's that on the charging handle what's that that's it they used to be smaller but i think they went to the wider boot style just to make sure it wouldn't punch through so here we are out of the box bonus cardboard flipping it over right out of the box it looks uh identical to the arsenal s a m7r but whereas that gun is in 762 by 39 this is in 5.56 by 45. we have an intermediate-length buttstock here which i believe is actually bulgarian made because it doesn't have the us stamping in the usual place i could be wrong it does have a trapdoor for the cleaning kit modern side mount for the sling made of kind of a real military feeling polymer our hand guards are us-made same styling heat shield inside our pistol grip is us-made pretty standard this has the quote-unquote enhanced trigger in it whereas most of your original sa m7rs had the double hook style we'll check an emergency if it's double hook side scope rail smooth top cover standard rear sight cleaning rod under the barrel 90 degree gas block cold hammer forged chrome lined medium lightweight barrel so like ak 74 looking style and a standard different sight with read you know detent pen simple muzzle nut threaded 14 by one left hand and of course it's on the pretty famous thanks to in large part to their marketing department and their their pr department but very high quality bulgarian milled receiver that they say takes five and a half hours hot die forged and they say they purchased over at arsenal 80 in bulgaria modern tooling from steyer about 20 years ago so presumably made with relatively modern techniques very similar to the original t3 receiver top tang with one screw bottom tang with two screws but it has the modern pressed and pinned in barrel like an akm but to be fair so did the chinese polytech legend flipping it over let's take our safety off no chamber flag but it's all right i'll try the trigger in a minute no surprises on this side either yeah no surprises this is your basic milled arsenal and the mag went in easily with no real play so why did i want this so much reason number one and probably the most personal i have a very long history with arsenal's and 223 556 nano because my first arsenal was almost this gun so i said this is the first time these have ever been on the market that's also true it's a little bit confusing but uh but yeah i first saw the machined milled arsenal guns around 2000 to 2003 in stores and believe it or not back then 650 bucks seemed high to nearly everyone for an ak it wasn't just that romanians were 400 even 300 it was also just we got paid a lot less back then it just you know and i was younger and poorer and in grad school so yeah i did save up though and as soon as the assault weapons ban came off september october 2004 i uh put a pre-order in for what they called the s a space m 5 r which was essentially this gun and i wanted it after the band so i could have evil features like the bayonet lug and removable muzzle device and i took delivery of it in january of 2005. now it was this gun here but this is a true import it's brought over as a sporter meaning it has a thumb hole stock and typically what they do for the sporters where the bayonet lug will go this area is simply not machined out it's just a square block and then they usually have a muzzle device tack welded onto covel cover the threads and they do something with the mag well so it can't take standard capacity 20 30 round mags sometimes they'll do the single stack like you know on a wasser other times they'll do more of the whole bullet guide approach which is what you most commonly see on things like peppers and sega's also sometimes they'll change up the mag catch a bit so for imports they will come in complying as a supporter under the terms of the 1989 restrictions brought to you by former president george bush senior and then once here they can neuter them or deneuter them rather pull off the thumb hole put on a regular stocking grip machine out the bail lug and have threads on the barrel thanks to the fact that the assault weapons ban sunset in 2004 if that hadn't happened these would still be not allowed the only caveat is they have to have no more than 10 u.s parts on our list of 20 potential parts a bit of good news because a machine to mild ak doesn't have trunnions this only has 15 parts on that list so a milled ak only needs five parts so typically arsenal will go with and it looks like on this one they went with pistol grip trigger group and handguards that's a total of five alternatively and you can still use foreign mags alternatively if you wanted to put on original hand guards or a pistol grip or original trigger group you could put on a us stock use a us muzzle device or frankly just not give a damn but anyway the one i bought in 2004 2005 was assembled here and uh let me show you an example of what i'm talking about here is my sa space rpk-5 this is the lmg version very similar to my 2004 gun they even both had the windage rear sight it's been a top cover side rail the only difference the furniture and the fact that this has a longer heavier barrel and this was actually the muzzle device that the 2004 guns came with this kind of shark gill style so why don't i have my 2004 well it's pretty simple i paid 600 bucks for it new in 2005 and then in 2010 as i was still within the first year of operating the ozark bear arms someone offered me a thousand dollars for the sa m5 used and i needed that that helped so i probably took that money and invested it in something and flipped it so i don't even regret to this day selling my original gun but i had been looking to replace it get another essay m-file for the last few years but the problem is arsenal never really made that many they never sold too many of the 5.56 guns the ones assembled here in the usa because everyone was buying the uh 76239 but when i say made in the usa what they were doing back then they were bringing over receive sorry as i was saying before my camera battery died sometimes being blind sucks i can't tell when it's getting low so apologies anyway they brought over essentially a block of steel and had it machined out in the usa making the receivers technically usa made but they assembled them using a bulgarian barrel and other virgin bulgarian parts unfortunately in 2005 president bush jr well the atf under him however it was decided to ban essentially the imported barrels so it became much harder to get barrels in so that's why you started to see more imports coming in so yeah these these older guns honestly were very nicely built by arsenal back in their younger days but they weren't true imports they were technically us parts kids guns so after the barrel band change they started to import a new series of guns but somewhat uniquely for arsenal they were actually stamped receiver reason 2 most euro arsenals available today are stamped receiver guns like this this is my slr 106 cr in 223 because i enjoyed shooting and my friends enjoyed shooting the sam 5 so much when these came out and i decided i wanted one because they were true imports and they had this left side folding stock which might not seem such a big deal to you today but back in 2006 this was a very cool and new design we knew it existed in russia but this was really the first commercially available gun series to have this as a standard feature so even though it was on a 1.0 stamped receiver i wanted to get one and i thought well heck i've already got a 556 arsenal let's get a 223 to go with and i thought i've already got a full size 16 inch barrel gun let's um let's get one of the shorties now as these were imported they had 16 inch barrels but this one i had it chopped down to 12 and then permanently attached an extension from cnc warrior and honestly not only does it look cooler it really actually helps with reliability and recoil so if you were thinking about doing that yourself like a chopping pin i greatly encourage it these are good guns early on there was a bit of controversy about this and that but the truth is they worked they worked well and this one's been a good good shooter as has this one i picked this one up only a couple of years ago trying to kind of fill that sam5 hole in my heart and while it definitely got into my heart and the gun i really like it was different you know how much i like rpks so i had these two and i've had both of these for a while and they're both great shooters in fact here's some range footage just to liven this video up a bit slr 106 crm [Applause] slr 106 cr sa rpk [Applause] 106 cr last mag of the day [Applause] so what do you think i like it yeah these are a lot of fun which kind of leads me to number three i was slow to to want or be convinced by an ak in this caliber like a lot of you i was kind of much happy with 76239 and 545 by 39 thinking you know an ak needs a communist caliber and a lot of the crappy galil builds out there didn't help another thing that did not help was there wasn't really a standard with the other but the x39 calibers here's a standard mag to some extent standard bolt what have you but with the 223 guns because they were pretty much developed independently some based on the akm some based on the ak-74 some based on someone's fever dream a lot of parts don't interchange but bulgaria kind of took a very similar attack to russia especially with their magazines so that's why i kind of figured if i'm going to have 223 aks we will uh kind of stick with the bulgarian russian pattern and luckily the polish bureau the polish archer takes pretty much the same mags too so that's why i don't really have chinese or zastava five five sixes this is kind of where i've settled on and i did toy with the idea of selling this gun or this gun over the years especially during one panic or another but the fact is they're just too fun to shoot and with being imports who knows how long they'll be available quick peek inside we can see we have a machined guide rod for the spring not the wire type i i played around with this trigger a bit during the video it does have a bit of an alg feel especially the bow it is single hook it's not as nice as an alg but it's it's not a bad trigger and we do have a spring-loaded firing pin pretty standard insides and the feed ramp looks good and all that good stuff of course we have the standard ak side scope rail number four buy imports and this gun here is an excellent example of just that this is my sam 7r which is virtually the same exact gun but in the 762 by 39 caliber now i have put ar m9 furniture on mine as you know and i've also replaced the standard front sight as you see here on this one with the 24 mil and bulgarian egg beater flash hider and hey bonus bulgarian mag pouch because i had to get it out for the mac even the mags look the same just different shape for the caliber anyway this is a mantra i will repeat over and over on this channel if you are at all interested in an import and if you can afford it don't take out loans to do it but if you have the money and you're interested get it imports will go away it's not a matter of if will and many things can happen to block an import but they will end eventually like i said this is a great example i had the sa m7sf and i had the pistol and so at first when the sam7r came out with the fixed stock i didn't keep one but eventually after the third or fourth batch i thought these are nice guns why not the price was fair for a machined gun machined receiver not a machine gun sorry hot takes video guy so i thought maybe i can have some fun with it put on this furniture dressed up a bit figuring hey they won't be around forever and surely enough that's what happened we've seen small batches over the last five years but you know they've been harder to get in some instances people want them more than the the folders either under folding or side folding and i'm really glad i picked this one up i really like this furniture and it's a lot of fun to shoot as jay and i both said in videos the sa m7sf probably looks cooler but as far as shooting comfort and everything the sam7r beats it out in fact take a look at some more old range footage sam 7r okay sim 7r same seminar by the way barring the idea that you overpay if you pay the current rate for what imports are going for you're not going to lose out just you know even if you want to just wait until the imports dry up and then put it on the market and you'll do just fine either money or trading father and that goes for any of these arsenals milled or stamped you you just don't know the future is so uncertain especially here at the end of 2020 number five good timing and just honestly my my gut said go for it it just felt right something similar happened back two years ago with this gun these have been available for a long time over at arsenal kvr msr and i'd even ordered a few in for customers thinking it'd be nice to pick one up well finally it was christmas and i thought i'm gonna buy myself a gift shooter on the channel dress it up a bit have some fun and then sell it well i'm glad i did that in a certain sense because it was so much fun it's still here today and also these have pretty much disappeared from the market after being on it for so very long same thing goes with these kept one of these one of the crs and i'm glad that i did because it doesn't seem like they're going to be doing mini 556 guns in fact i was really i was hopeful when the sam 7 r sf ufks came out they would eventually do a 556 version but i wasn't sure because arsenal's track record selling these has not been great the original guns didn't sell very well the the imports here and with the stamped receivers languished and even the rpk versions while the 762 by 39 and the handful of 545s they did sold out immediately the 556 ones were very much the last to go so i think that's why this has been a limited release again this has been recorded at the beginning of november exactly two weeks after this gun hit the market and this gun is at this time a kvar exclusive news of it popped two weeks ago on a thursday and i was a little surprised i didn't hear about it too much before there have been rumors and rumblings of something being released in november and you know you can read between the lines so i was hopeful this is what it was but i was kind of surprised my sales rep at msr didn't call me because we had just spoken a couple of days before even if you just said hey i can't tell you what's coming on but uh give me a call this date and i'll fill you in so i called him that friday morning saying hey i'm gonna surprise i didn't hear from you on this and he really didn't even know much about it either turns out msr the distributor the dealer end did not get any of these this is literally a k bar exclusive which means like everyone else i paid the 1499.95 plus shipping price point but i was actually okay with doing that for one thing even though my rep at msr couldn't sell me one he arranged it even getting my ffl over for me decay bar and hooking me up with the sales rep so all i had to do was call an extension pay for it and it was on the way took him a little time to ship but i'm not complaining ordered it that friday it came in yesterday wednesday took them about 10 days to get here but considering how busy things have been i'm not right with that so yeah given all the reasons already i figured yeah might as well get one really it was a no-brainer because used sa m-5s made back in the day have been fetching two grand then up on gunbroker and that was even before the would panic so i thought well 1500 for a brand new one and unlike the one up here which is a very great gun but it's still like i said technically a kit gun built in the usa it's more like this gun where yeah they have to be modified a bit to make them compliant but the thing is they come over as working guns so the mods on this gun are extremely minor different um pistol grip different hand guards bayonet lug had to be cut out but the thing is the receiver on the stamp gun the trunnion 2 the barrel all of these parts are not only made in bulgaria they're assembled and tested in bulgaria so i really don't find the whole 922r thing especially with the mill gun where it's only five parts it's a six on a stamped gun by the way i don't find those to be intrusive it's uh it's an important totally legit and it completes my family i had short i had long and i have the middle size which is perhaps just right and on to the final point number six the history i wouldn't say this is what would make me buy or not buy a gun in and of itself but because it is me it really is kind of icing on the cake i really like it when a gun even in a certainly altered form has actually been issued by military now obviously the military guns would be select fire so not the same gun but these are built in the same factory and really the mods to make a gun like this semi-only or very minor two pins instead of three a few minor changes to the trigger group a few changes to the bolt carrier and you're in business so not literally the gun used but same factory same thing it's like comparing say a colt sp1 to a vietnam era m16 m16a1 good enough same quality control same standards the bulgarian military has been using both 556 and 762x39 for the past 20 or so years as they've been working more and more with nato the one caliber they have not been using is 545x39 they dropped that like a hot rancid potato as quick as they could as as did many former warsaw pact countries because that caliber has really bad connotations of dominance by mother russia would that make russia a dominatrix maybe anyway i digress so they use a mix of both and that's why i have this gun here set up in a very modern configuration 762x39 and i might leave this one pretty classic maybe a different muzzle device because i've used these known as the ar m1 for a long time they have under folders they have a short 12-inch barrel version they've used several configurations another benefit of buying a gun even if you don't really care about the history but that's built with the same parts and in the same factory as for military militaries have pretty stringent testing to begin with and the guns go out in the field so if something were wrong they would know about it if there was a problem with cracking or whatnot for example the original translucent smoke mags had some spider web cracking which they had to fix because militaries were using them not just civilians it just seems like parts built for military go through more rigorous testing quality controls at the factory and that makes me very confident in any of these guns here like the mild receiver is not going to fail any decade soon the hammer forged barrel is not going to wear out after just you know 10 15 000 rounds and of course above all the gun is going to be reliable so i i have great expectations that this will be reliable worked for a long time and it won't break parts and luckily again since militaries are using it if it were to break parts it's not using some weird non-standard bolt or or what have you firing pin with militaries using them those parts those components that eventually surplus stuff will be available so yeah just yeah even if thing in of course magazines even though this takes its own mag real mags will fit archer mags and several of the russian mags can be made to fit with little to no mods and these are good mags they always have been this one fits very tight because it's a new mag and a new gun they are modern polymer the waffling normally looks cool and gives a better grip it also gives reinforcement there's a metal frame or skeleton we have a metal floor plate stainless steel spring we have a metal locking lug in the front and a metal locking lug in the back and finally we have metal feed lips but the only thing these don't have are little cutouts or stripper clips so good mags especially the black ones but even the modern smoke ones are fine [Music] and these are like i said a limited thing right now through k bar and i got one and i paid full price but if these come in as a mass import and the price drops to 1100 i still be happy i grab this now it's around the holidays also around my birthday it's a good little thing gift to myself something i've kind of been wanting glad i didn't buy used one on gunbroker but i love to see imports i just don't know if between maybe new laws next year or just the 556 guns may not take off there's too many ifs so i just wanted to grab the sure thing and so far first inspection after having this out for about an hour i like it and i can't wait to take it to the range i'm expecting it'll run great but you never know till you know so we will do a range update video very soon so with that i think i'm think i'm done today i think i'm talked out what do you think feel free to comment below and as always if you could like share and subscribe oh and just as a final note this is the first video i've recorded since we crossed over 40 000 subscribers took us nine and a half years but we're happy about it especially all your support because jay and i do this for fun this is not a job we don't try to make money in fact running this channel costs us money although support from patreon help supporters the support as patreons on patreon really helps take the edge off it went from being something that cost us you know thousands of dollars to just hundreds of dollars and greatly obliged and in return we've tried to up our video coverage and get new guns like this to show you so we'll continue to hopefully bring you interesting content in the future and again we'll have a range video for this very soon this is misha and also on behalf of jay we will both catch you very soon next time s a rpk trigger's pretty good i'm gonna see if it'll bump it will slr 106 head credit hammer collar my bad problem with these arsenal trigger groups the new ones anyway they're so good that if you try to bump them they have hammer followed yeah and that one i've polished a little bit yeah slr 106 cr again this time i'm not going to try bum firing it i'll shoot it like a human [Music] being [Applause] you

Channel: Mishaco

Views: 14,416

Rating: 4.9027777 out of 5

Keywords: Educational Historical Documentary Historic History Preservation Documentation, Misha, Mishaco, Ozark Bear Arms, OBA, plinking101, MishacoOBA

Id: PT3I3mFsJtE

Length: 37min 27sec (2247 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020