Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's with a gun that's not perhaps quite so exotic and forgotten as some, but still I think very interesting. And that is a Daewoo K2. This is very much a hybrid of AK and AR, and that's what makes it kind of cool. So South Korea ... since the Korean War had been equipped largely with surplus US weaponry. And they wanted their own domestic rifles. So through the '60s and into
the 1970s South Korea was experimenting with a
number of prototype designs. And they were really focused
on 7.62mm NATO, interestingly. Especially in the 1960s, there wasn't a lot
of economic development in South Korea, there wasn't an arms
industry to speak of, there wasn't a lot of
heavy industry to speak of. And so this was pretty much just
experimenting and prototyping. And what South Korea ended up with for a
weapon was in 1974 they got a licence to produce the M16A1, well, under licence from Colt. And that's not a bad choice. It gives
them some compatibility with the US in case they're going to get logistical
aid from the US again. It's a good rifle. And ... the economy is starting to
develop and speed up in South Korea, and the Daewoo Company (which is this huge industrial conglomerate
now that builds ... like everything), they're able to tool up with a
technical package from Colt and some engineering assistance,
and put the M16A1 into production. And that's great, but it's not quite
going to fulfil all of South Korea's needs. The problem is they're allowed to make a lot of rifles under licence,
but not as many as they'd actually like. What ... South Korea wants to do is build
enough rifles to put away a stockpile sufficient to arm an entire
mobilisation of their military reserves. They want more than a million rifles, and they
don't have the licensing to do that from Colt. And frankly, you'd want more
than a million rifles too I suspect if your next door
neighbour was North Korea. So they continue experimenting
with their own designs, and change over from 7.62 NATO to now
looking at 5.56 to function alongside M16s. They have this XB series of prototypes,
so XB1 through 5 are all in 7.62. 1976, 1977, they have the XB6 prototype that
comes around, and that's their first 5.56 gun. It is further developed into
the XB7 which is completed, goes through all the last
of its trials in 1982 or 1983, and is then adopted as the K2 pattern rifle. So in South Korean service "K" is the letter
designate for all of their military equipment. And they have just a whole
series of different guns, ... well, K1 is a submachine gun
(which we'll talk about in a minute), which is actually a compact 5.56 rifle. This is the K2, there's a K3, a K4, etc. So, what they have done is
deviate from the M16 pattern. They've kept elements of it, they've
basically kept the fire control group, they've kept the magazine,
they've kept the lower receiver. But the South Korean Army
wanted a folding stock. And the M16 has a recoil spring in the stock, and so they need to move the
recoil spring out of the stock. Which they do by moving
it up ... above the barrel, and they decide to go with a ... long-stroke
gas piston instead of direct gas impingement. So, let's take a closer look
at what they actually built. So fundamentally what we have here is a
rifle with a long-stroke gas piston system, a rotating multi-lug bolt,
it uses detachable magazines. It actually uses the exact
same magazine as the AR-15, which makes sense in South Korean military
service since they already have the AR. Controls are basically
identical to the AR platform. We have a bolt release here, but notice
that they have shrouded the bolt lock. So on an AR you can push the bottom
of this to manually lock the bolt open, you cannot do that on a Daewoo. We have a selector lever here, which
will only work when the gun is cocked. So we have safe and semi, in military
service that would have been full-auto. Marked "Made in Korea". This is designated an AR-100, because
this is one of the semi-auto versions that was imported commercially into the
United States prior to the Assault Weapons Ban. After the ban there would be a couple
of more versions of the rifle that came in without the various regulated features,
so no bayonet lug, no flash hider, and a thumb-hole stock instead of the really
excellent folding stock that these have. I should also point out it's marked
Daewoo Precision Industries, because of course they manufactured it. The folding stock is patterned very much
after the FAL with this big chunky lug there. So you pull the stock down and it will
fold over like so, folds over to the side. In theory you can still shoot this with
the stock folded, for whatever reason. There's our US import mark on the
other side of the magazine well. Magazine release, just like the M16. No dust cover on these. And they do have a reciprocating
charging handle on the side. We have some basic stuff up
here, bayonet lug of course, these take a standard
M16 pattern bayonet. It has a birdcage-style flash suppressor. Note that ... there are
only three vents in there, so it only ... vents upwards,
nothing coming down. And it is indexed slightly to the right to prevent the gun from climbing
to the side when fired right-handed. We have adjustable gas port size. There is an "O", which is for off or
would be rifle grenades in military service. And then we have "L", "M", and "S",
for large, medium and small. And all you do to adjust
that is push this button in. It's a little tricky with a finger, it would
normally be done with a cartridge. Once it's all the way in, you can rotate
this around to the various positions. So the one facing upward towards the front
sight is the one that is currently engaged, so it's currently on the
medium gas port setting. There is a pin connecting the upper and
lower receivers at the front like the M16, but there is no such pin at the back. Instead, disassembly is done
using the recoil spring guide rod. There's a little capture lever here, so
you first have to pull that lever back, then you can push this whole thing forward. That capture lever was added as
an afterthought, circa 1986 or '87, to prevent the guns from ... disassembling
unexpectedly or unintentionally. Oh, I should also point out while we're here, we have windage and elevation settings
on the side of the rear sight wings. We have elevation here, so
250, 400, 500 and 600 metres. The rear sight itself is just a simple aperture. And you have your very M16A1-like
windage adjustment there. These screws are just threaded
into blind holes, and they are there for mounting a scope rail should
you want to put optics on the gun. Alright, back to disassembly. Now that that
lever is rearward we can pull this whole thing back, and then pivot the upper and lower apart. So that's going to open up, and I can
pull out the recoil spring, which is captive. Flip the rifle over, and pull the
charging handle back to here, at which point the handle itself comes out. This is one potentially fragile part of the
gun, you can see it's fairly thin there. That occasionally will break off, that's probably
the only real weak point that I'm aware of. Then we can pull this out. There is our bolt and
bolt carrier, very AR like. And a long-stroke gas
piston, very AK like. I can take off the hand guard here just by pulling out a single screw, and then these slide
forward and come off. There's a little metal heat shield in there. Nothing of particular interest under the
handguard, so it's just a barrel and gas tube. A few little differences here
in the fire control group. Instead of having a plunger ejector
in the bolt face like the AR, we have a spring-loaded blade
ejector here built into the lower. The fire control parts are very much like
an AR-15, but not exactly AR-15 parts. There is a little buffer spring at
the back end of the lower receiver to absorb any residual movement of
the bolt as it's cycling back and forth. And there is storage
built into the pistol grip. Pop that spring, and you have a little bottle that
stores a cleaning pull through and some oil. I really do get a kick out of just how perfect of a hybrid this is between
the AR and the AK platforms. ... Even down to the rivet and the
slight wobble in the gas piston. Which is, by the way, an
important element for reliability. And the recoil spring assembly
inside the bolt carrier. But then here, instead
of a gas port coming out, we have just a lug that
attaches to the bolt carrier. We've got our cam pin, we've
got our AR-style bolt there. ... Cotter pin here, take that out, can take
what is very clearly an AR-style firing pin out. Cam pin and bolt. Even down to the fact that it's
still shaped like an AR bolt here, just without the stuff at the back
because this isn't acting as a gas piston. Once it went into service, the K2 proved
to be a very satisfactory and reliable rifle. Over a million K1 and K2s put together
would be manufactured by Daewoo. That gave them enough,
together with their M16s, to have that reserve supply
for a full military mobilisation should they need it,
which so far they have not. But, just an interesting point, the K1
is the short-barrelled version of this, except that it's not quite because
it doesn't use a gas piston, it is a direct gas impingement gun. And there's often this question of, "Why would they do that? Why not
make them both the same system?" And the reason is during the development
of this rifle, that XB6 - XB7 period, the Army came to them with a much more
immediate request for submachine guns (or carbines as we would think of them), and they didn't have
... the engineering in place to know exactly how best
to do a short gas piston. But they had Colt CAR-15s,
and they could look at that and basically just copy the gas system
for an equivalent barrel length gun. And so that's why they went with
direct gas impingement for the K1. They needed something short
barrelled, and they needed it right now. And rather than take the
time to develop this further, they just used a different existing system, so. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
