Krink, Krinkov, Kalashnikov: The Story of an Icon

hey guys welcome to the episode on tfbtv we really want to thank Ventura munitions for helping to sponsor some of these episodes and helping you get the kinds of equipment and stuff that we need to keep it going today we're gonna be talking about the crink this wasn't a quantum leap in small-arms design this didn't you know change the battlefield this didn't this didn't win a war this didn't this didn't really it honestly didn't have any very big tangible difference on anything in the world military history wise or small arms design either it is a little bit monumental because it was the first 8-inch barrel a K in that was mass-produced and you know this led to later stuff down the line where we see a lot of short barreled a case today throughout the world this was the first one you know did it inspire it maybe not who cares that stuff was probably gonna come along anyways everything that is wrapped around this thing the name the culture of the use of it today and sure to me the biggest thing is some of the misconceptions around it and some of the stuff that just gets was completely changed out I mean everything from the very name itself crank crank off and we'll go over that in a second two things like you know had this like crazy briefcase that was kind of like the Soviet version of the mp5 great place that was used where you could actually put the thing in it how this thing came about is this is where sort of the misconceptions begin in that everyone that the colonists conception is that this was you know a commando rifle it was meant for commandos it was meant for Spetsnaz to belt for specimens and all this other stuff and no it wasn't this came out in the mid 1970s there's an earlier project that actually came out before it which was chambered in a different caliber which was sort of actually a handheld submachine gun slash rifle thing that came out and the inspiration for in the 1970s a trial for the aks-74u was sort of that earlier project net this was their there's a pre project a hat well that came along but what this was originally for the the stipulations for the operational requirements for the aks-74u was after the ak-74 came out so it had to be chambered in I for five but this was meant as a rifle for soldiers whose primary job occupation having a rifle would hinder them so when I talk about that I mean RPG Gunners I mean vehicle crewmen I mean radio operators this was not for Special Operations to begin with it wasn't for it whatsoever later on down the line that got tacked on but this was not for this was not specifically made for Spetsnaz there was actually a bunch of different contestants that came in and narrowed down to about four or five a number of different ones some of them were actually really neat to look at it's like man why didn't that stuff work Kalashnikov came up with one I think Draganov came up with another a couple others came with one there's even a bulb up one that was invented um it entered field trials in 77 78 in what is currently Azerbaijan outside of the capital Baku Emile's field trial there for a while is adopted in 79 Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979 and that's when things really kick off with this thing in that there were bits and pieces of this that were made for Spetsnaz use right and this is where I have this 20 round magazine to show you for comparison and that you see sometimes see this guy especially in the artillery Museum in st. Petersburg it's outfitted with you know PBS one suppressor it's outfitted with scope a night optic outfitted with a grenade launcher and all this other stuff and it has a 20 round magazine um to be honest the Soviets never really used 20 rounders ever they never really mass-produced these things other countries did but the Soviets didn't so Afghanistan war rolls around right Soviets are fighting the Mujahideen over the computer over the next decade the thing is Spetsnaz guys did take a look at it and they did take a look at fielding it and there might have been some isolated use here and there but for the most part Spezza has wanted nothing to do with this thing the reason why is because the combat engagement distances in the soviet-afghan war we're over 300 meters they're over long distances this is a 100 200 meter problem-solver this is not a 300 405 hundred-meter you know Marine Corps rifle Cady range hitting targets out to 500 so this is didn't want it they wanted ak74 so who did want to go well sort of the rank and file a lot of the rank-and-file soldiers didn't want to either because a lot of their problems we're four hundred five hundred six hundred meter problems this does nothing for you this does nothing for you at that range who got it instead and we see a lot of photographs of it doing the war is we see a lot of vehicle guys getting it we see hind crewmen we see tank crewmen we see BMP crewmen often carrying these things and what they would want this for and what you'd often see them with is you've often see them with either thirty rounders you don't tape together like this so you have two thirty rounders right there or you even see examples of cranks with forty five forty five round magazine but the reason for this remember what I said this is a 100 200 meter problem-solver right as a tank crewman or as a hind crewman if your vehicle is out of action you're shot down or you're surrounded by Mujahideen and they're running all up on over you you want something that you can easily get out of the confined space you know even if we have say a 45 rounder in here you want something you can easily get out of a confined space of a tank or of a hind you know pop over the side of it like this and just go to town because that's what this excelled that it was small and it was short in fact the Soviets for the hind pilots they even designed a special system to use it so hind pilots were actually carrying this thing on their thigh with a specially designed holster and they even had a magazine pouch on their on their vest with a holster with a holster for magazine for a 30-round magazine in it which by the way a lot of the helicopter pilots from what we've read in our primary sources is that a lot of the pilots didn't actually like it at all it wasn't very it wasn't very long-lived and it was quickly discarded and you don't see pilots with it towards the end of the war it's beginning the war you do but this leads to where we get the name cranked off and this is what I love about it because with the stuff I study with looking at stuff in pashto stuff in Farsi stuff in Arabic cream cough we see comes from Afghan mujahideen in the eastern part of Afghanistan tour in the beginning of the war how do we know this so here's the other things that crink we see a resurgence of the we see a resurgence of the weapon system in the 1990s in the united states and it really starts taking off in the nineteen in that 2000s the first big thing we see of the aks-74u is a guy named paul Mahoney who owned a shop named crinks in the mid 90s in florida from what we know of his rifles really weren't the best quality in the world but guess what he was the only he was one of the only guys who was building American a case out of parts kits in the US and he made short bowel variants and he called his shop cranks later on we see this explode to the point where we come up across this guy named blue Jack alright so just to backtrack a little bit Creek barrels aks74u barrels eight and a half inch barrels have a special twist rate because fit to stabilize the five four five round an eight and a half inch barrel for shooting it out of target a standard ak74 twist rate is not going to work the bullets are starting to be key holing so a lot of guys who are building creeks builds as either pistols or SP ours we're finding out that if they just chop to seventy four barrels stuck it in here and made it work the rounds would keyhole wouldn't be accurate interestingly enough there's a guy who was in New York and has a four had a guy was in New York and he had an account that was based out of West Virginia and contracted with a company in Montana and contracted with them to make barrels and you have this these blue jack barrels he stopped in about 2014 2013 production kind of stopped but when that was going on a lot of American gun owners were buying blue Jack barrels and you had different versions like a blue jack the one blue Jack v2 blue Jack V 3 B 4 or 5 or something like that and as you know as the versions got higher you know each barrel run got better because they were making them to better spec right now it's almost impossible to find a blue jack barrel especially one that is in the white hasn't been used and is a version bowel is very difficult to find but the reason why you need to find these barrels is because a lot of the parts kits that came into the states the tulip hearts kids some of them came in without barrels some so we see more Bulgarian parts kits that come in melv the Bulgarian variant of the aks-74u with barrels that's another different story and Bulgarian barrels will work in a Russian 74 the difference between the Bulgarian and then the Russian safe is 74 pattern is that the Bulgarian copies a Post 86 crank the so in Soviet Union you had pre 86 which you could easily identify by having two holes in two vents in the hand guard post 86 friends don't have those holes they took them away so we have crank as an American term but then we have crank off the first point so people will say like oh maybe like the name came from like maybe they captured it from a Russian officer and his name was crinkled ah wrong the name crank off doesn't exist in Russian nor did any Soviet soldiers ever call this a crank off in fact they called this akosua or Casilla or something which was essentially like a little [ __ ] because it was like a thing you know it's a little [ __ ] what can I say but what happens is where we first hear of it is in the soldier of fortune issue of July 1984 and in it we have soft exclusive akr by David is be soft scoop CIA scoop CIA field-test mysterious crank off right so he goes in it which by the way this not num occur the akr as you can see a kr we see in the earlier part of the war and we see it being used by mostly Western / NATO conglomerate countries in the Intel community and we see it as they care 74 you being referred to as day kr this designation a kr goes on until like the mid 90s or something like that and then just kind of fades away just kind of you look at Jane's reference manuals and books and stuff like that just kind of goes away we think one idea for the a kr might have come from this guy a guy named Victor Suvarov who that's not actually his real name's actually a pseudonym he's a Soviet defector he entered in Android in the Western Europe at the beginning of the Afghan war and we see references to him and a kr so that is a possible explanation of the word a kr came from but regardless we have this a kr thing it's being referred to as a kr it does not get referred to as a kr after the 1990s where it comes from it might have came from this guy and might have said yeah this is a new Soviet you know submachine gun rifle combo like this is our new a kr but in this article that we talked about the crink we have several names we have he mentions the a K our destination is uncertain and passed by a variety of nicknames cranked off chenkov and shish cough so that's interesting because recently when I was in Kabul I know when I'm ever meeting Afghans I always like to show them a picture of a crank and I said what you call this gun so recently in Kabul I showed this to this private security guard and I showed this picture of a crank and I was like what you call this gun and he specifically said this is a shrink off now and he I asked him like no no no like a crank off and he looked at me like no I don't know what you're talking about like this is a shrink off right here and I'm like okay so there's some people who actually call it shrink off so we have this sort of division where we have crank off and shrink off as well the majority of Afghans in Pakistan is especially those in KPK Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where a lot of these are made in Daraa we'll call them crinkles right so the majority name crinkle is sort of taking over and we have Pakistanis and we have we have mostly people mostly Pashtuns who you know never watch any sort of like you know never been don't relinquish to haven't been in endued with any sort of western firearms literature whatsoever and they're calling this thing cranked off alright and that's very very good another name that we see is calico this is not a calico within Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Afghanistan Cal akov will be in reference to a full stock ak-74 this is not a calico this is a crank off or a shrink off and we see that there so the name we know for sure wasn't used by 1984 to bring this sort of in circle and a circle here we know that a lot of the vehicle guys had this a lot of the hind guys had this a lot of the tank guys had that's a lot of the BMP guys had this so why it became special within Afghanistan and afterwards one conclusion that we've come up with is that if you're you know if you're Abdullah Mujahid and you know you shoot down a hind with your stinger or something and you run up to that high to the to the wreckage and dadada and if you're able to pull one of these bad boys out of there you can show this to all your buddies and be like look dude I've got a crank off and the only way one of the only ways you could get this of course we know there's a lot of diversion during the soviet-afghan war there's a lot of corrupt Afghan army officers there's issues with Soviet stockpiles being diverted which I've been buying them this that another so of course there were ways that people could get this you know um nefariously however if you did get it out of the helicopter crash you showed it to your buds and you're like look dude I got this crank they would all know like Wow the old one of the only ways you can get that thing's if you pulled it out of a smouldering kind helicopter or smolder and BMP so it's sort of like a trophy at that point the other aspect of this is that it's a short broad rifle and short-barreled rifles in any connotation in any place are usually always valued especially by folks who are always on the move moving here moving there you know it's it's lightweight it's short you know it doesn't take up much space but yet you still have all this firepower that you had at the time it's like you could lug around an aka and they cam or ak-47 at the time or you could lug around this which is weighs almost nothing compared to other other weapon systems right now this is where we sort of see this colt leadership thing developed around this guy and we see this we see this during the war we have we have pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud you know firing this thing and it was very specific that he had it we've got other pictures of Afghan mujahideen leaders that also carried it and they carried it very specifically we even have pictures going into this day of Afghan leaders today that are still carrying this thing as a status symbol so a recent example was Rashid Dostum he was a former Vice President of Afghanistan there's there's pictures of his sons walking around with it his bodyguards have it there's another there's this Afghan warlord who ran into Kabul you know there's a big brouhaha over at bla bla bla but he had it and he was pictured with it and then outside of Afghanistan we see this emulation of the crink starting to push all over the place example number the biggest example you've probably seen is Osama bin Laden Osama bin Laden would always be pictured with things there's an article on TFB that you can actually read about Osama bin Laden's crinks where we kind of go through back and forth and see what he had and it looks like he actually had to and he would actually rotate between them and you can look at the kinds of hand guards on there and it looked like he just held them aside and like okay yeah get me one of the cranks on because in one picture you see that he has them you see pictures of Osama bin Laden like with his crank like off to the side of this and you know his public speech or you know is in his propaganda videos that was very deliberate that was absolutely a hundred percent deliberate because people would see the crink maybe they wouldn't understand what he's talking about but especially people understood this they see it as a power item as status to only beg okay Wow he's got the crink on there he must be someone important we even see the crank as far west as Lebanon where we see a bodyguard of a prominent mullah specifically using cranks in Yemen for example we even have examples of cranks being sold for sale and they're known as the Jeffrey but if you look on your many social media and you'll see stuff like hey Jeffrey for sale you know fifty thousand Saudi Riyals and they're talking about the crank we also see it referred to as the Osama gun or the saleh bin Laden gun and a lot these other places [Music] [Music]

Channel: TFB TV

Views: 187,551

Keywords: tfb, tfb tv, tfbtv, the firearm blog, firearm, 2A, gun

Id: h76bJ3BEcJg

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/some_kid6]

Vid is pretty in depth with lots of quotes, pics, and stories. I'd recommend giving it a watch but for those who aren't interested in history:

tl;dw

• Made for troops who didn't need a full rifle like arty/tank/pilots, was not intended for spec ops stuff
• troops didn't like it, spetznas tried to get rid of it for the AKS74 due to range and accuracy issues (context, issued in Afghanistan)
  • complaints of it not being useful past 200m
• Wasn't issued with 20 rd mags but they look neat so show up in museums and pics sometimes
• Long mix of potential reasons for how the krink name came to being
  • not a soviet word
  • used to be called AKR in the US
  • might be persian (?) since its very similar to a pronunciation of a word in the local language
  • could have gotten popular in the US since there was a guy who made kit builds who was named Krink
  • it's a status symbol in the middle east since it meant you took out a vehicle