The Chinese Type 56 SKS & AK47 Story + Semi-Auto Rifles Overview

hi misha here and it's time for another collection video though this one's going to be a little different because it only has five members in it but we will take a look at chinese type 56 guns chambered for 762 by 39 all of them of course these are type 56 carbines skss and these are derivatives based on the type 56 assault rifle kind of known as the aks or or 56s as a samado and the only reason i have five of these is is i've kind of gone more as a collector in the quality over quantity with chinese guns there are so many flavors there are entire collectors who dedicate to chinese and that's just not my taste but i wanted to have representative pieces of the military guns they were actually used by the chinese people's liberation army say hi hobo and so these are the ones i've picked so in the video i'll talk about the military service and i will also talk about some of the samato import history and explain why these are the guns out of all the ones that have been through my hands that i have decided to uh to keep at least until something better even comes along this typically how i do with chinese i don't really add it's just when a nicer example comes i'll sell off the previous one so with that let's talk about the chinese sks these two versions here and their history the type 56 carbine china's designation for the soviet sks 1945 because china adopted the sks in 1956. and really china if not the first was one of the first countries outside of the soviet union to manufacture the sks they were interested early on mao had just won the revolution and so in the mid 50s relations were good they had previously manufactured the russian tokorev tt33 pistol his first the type 51 letter of the type 54 and the russian mosin nagant m44 carbine as the type 53 there was a bolt action with the sks they went to a self-floating rifle chambered for the 762 by 39 m43 cartridge and while this was quickly becoming dated to russia and many other european nations china thought it would be ideal for the large army that it planned and police forces reserves and for export so in 1956 production began at the zhing hall merging arsenal they use the factory code 26. and originally these were not only close copies of a late soviet pattern they were even built using soviet parts but soon china would switch to using all domestic parts and they would start making changes to the design so these are my two examples they kind of represent some of the most common traits of a chinese type 56 sks carbine the most noticeable difference is of course the stock while the majority of chinese guns have traditional wood a large number especially those kind of destined for export we're given this fiberglass furniture often called bakelite although it's really not and the theory is that these were meant for more jungle environments for wood maybe not the best thing what i think is interesting about this this the sling it comes with has these um rings kind of the pigtails for the metal instead of the leather which makes a lot of sense for a jungle environment another large change it was a big course with the bayonet originally the chinese guns would have the blade type just as a soviet although keep in mind the first year or so of russian production would also have this pig sticker which um china would go to with their sks around 1965. they would also move the rear sling swivel several times early on it would be on the bottom then they would go to the side and then for some some at least some later guns they'd go back to the bottom still had a trap door in the stock for the cleaning kit including on the synthetic stock model here and still had a blued finish to the metal and still had a 20 and a half inch barrel as well as a fixed 10 round magazine intended to be topped off with stripper clips those changes were kind of functional but many others were to speed up streamline for mass production unlike the soviets the original style would have a lightning cut on the bolt carrier they would do away with that there would also be a lightning cut on the rear sight they would do away with that similarly they would go away from having lightning cuts on the bayonet lug housing here and the gas block would change a few times as it did on the russian sks as well and they would go from a milled trigger guard here to a stamped and welded trigger guard as seen here and a few other little economies like that but these would not affect the functionality of the rifle production would continue at factory 26. for the chinese people's liberation army and for export customers such as vietnam well through the 60s and into the 1970s but then other factories started producing these smaller factories and in smaller numbers but producing them nonetheless it seems like main production ended in 1980 but they might still make some sks's using small batch runs and refurbishing old ones another change that would be hard to see here but you can kind of have the tail tail where the barrel meets the receiver the earlier ones in the majority of 56's were screwed into the receiver but late in production they took kind of the akm style and started pressing and pinning the barrels in again to save manufacturing time and make head spacing a little easier and some very light production guns would even go away from the machine to the meld receiver to a stamped one but it does not seem likely that these were used by the chinese army because they were so late in production and these would be popular in china kind of used as a de facto dmr also with police and kind of second line military units and they would produce millions of these no one knows how many maybe not even china but some estimate as many as 10 million and they started exporting many to the usa in the 80s of course the 94 band interrupted these but in the 21st century some 56s have come in from third-party countries such as albania so while this was a secondary gun to the ak types it was actually very important in china and very well suited to them and really had more of an impact there than it would in russia or any other european nation to be honest before we move on to the aks the reason i have these two no more no less is there good representations of the variations you know we have blade bayonet we have the spiker pig sticker we have synthetic stock we have wood this one has the side sling swivel this one has the bottom this one has early features like the machined trigger guard this one has later like the stamped this one even has a screwed in barrel and this one has a preston pendant it wouldn't be bad to have a stamped receiver chinese sks but those seem to be pretty uncommon and i have had a couple of the magazine fed ones but since they're not really military and they're only so so on the reliability department i've kind of chosen just to sell them off or trade them off over time i'm pretty content with these two the sks while i really like it is not my favorite gun so i don't feel a need to have half a dozen but i'm very happy with these two especially like the synthetic stock what i think it's just a cool variation and i like the pig tail sling it comes with just kind of different and with that let's move along to the other type 56. you know at first it might seem a little odd or confusing that the klashnikov the ak ak-47 type 3 whatever you'd like to call it was also named the type 56 in china but really it makes sense the sks was the type 56 carbine as in self-loading carbine and the ak was the type 56 rifle as in assault rifle or select fire rifle kind of like how the u.s had the m1 garand and m1 carbine so i have my spiker out here chinese mag in it and i have my russian again because early on china produced exact copies of the ak type 3. in fact in 1956 through the first couple years the guns much like with the sks production line were assembled using russian parts using russian supervision to help and these would come out of factory 66. there's some arguments as to what this code actually applies to which factory and many sources seem to indicate it's actually a shortened version of another factory but even there they disagree anyway that's where they started it's early on they were milled receiver guns standard wood furniture blued finish 16 and a quarter inch barrel type one bayonet lug under the front side base threaded except they would have chinese chinese markings one of the earliest changes chinese mag voucher by the way the china i went to in around 1960 the russian front sight base was open topped which is mostly what you see on aks well the chinese went to an enclosed front sight base excuse me front sight protector with a hole in the top for uh adjustment interestingly finland with their vomit also went to an enclosed as did of course israel with the glial so that was a relatively early change another change was adding the spiker bayonet the sks's came around 1965. well the ak would get it around 1966. but not all of course they would continue to produce some mainly for export to be fair with the type 1 lug also some mini produced for the chinese domestic use would not have a threaded barrel instead they would just have a bare muzzle but again for export they would usually thread them for versatility's sake and up until this point many things are the same however relations between russia and china had broken down it was a bit of a time between 61 and 62 there was a split and then there was some gestures to khrushchev and russia to open up relations again a year or two later but this thawing was very short-lived what this meant for the type 56 china was not given access to the newer akm plans which russia adopted in 1959 so as they move forward they did more and more their own thing one of the earliest things they did they went from the old school screw-in barrel as seen on the original russian to the more efficient press and pinion barrel from the akm and then beginning around 1967 they would go from the milled receiver machined receiver to a stamped receiver but this would be a unique stamped receiver it would not be a copy of the akm type the rivet patterns would be uh would be different and the front trunnion would be different it would still have a magwell dimple but it would actually be 1.5 millimeter instead of one millimeter so they basically took the milled ak type 3 and put their own homegrown stamped receiver on it that's why the chinese gun retains a lot of original features including the medium heavy profile barrel the sling swivel on the gas block the smooth sided hand guard usually the original 800 meter rear sight and often the wood pistol grip now they would go to a single top tang held on buttstock however it would still have more of a downward sweep than a typical akm and this is really when china started differentiate itself from russia and the rest of the pack by the mid and late 60s factory 66 was far from the only manufacturer you had other codes such as 56 386 416 and even more and probably some were not even aware of today the switchover from milled receiver machined receiver to stamped was not instant in fact foul all factories had not transitioned over until around 1970. but by this time at least for the people's liberation army the stamped receiver was becoming the standard interestingly a lot of the older mill guns were sent to vietnam during this time period which is why a lot of u.s gi's when they think of the type 56 they think of the milled version that's because they were kind of cast offs from the pla and while they were going to the newer stamped gun it was a lighter it had a few modernizations for example they moved the rear sling swivel to the bottom of the stock here usually kept the wood grip original chinese mags were much like russian but soon they would go to the style with the smooth back rib which is a little more ergonomic easier to get in and out of a pouch they simplified the ribbing and they were a little faster to produce they still had the ported gas tube though and even though the spiker bayonetta was a standard it's kind of neat it's it's actually pretty quick detachable you can remove it if not needed because it does add some weight so yeah from the 70s onward stamped were the game and these were still the front line guns for china but as they were able to produce more than enough for their needs they started actively trying to export them to i would say other friendly communist nations but let's be honest it was china they were exporting him to anyone who would buy and uh became quite a popular frontline gun although again the sks was often used by more second line troops the reason i have this one here well i was always the one i thought if i was gonna have just one chinese ak this would be it not maybe specifically this gun but this configuration fixed wood stock and spike bayonet this to me is just the quintessential type 56 and this is my second or third one that i've owned this one came from a friend who bought it new in the late 80s so i know it's history and yeah this would and this would be the last one i would sell of them because it is just their distinctive rifle and this this style isn't super hard to find i have had the legends before but the fact that they never really did a spike bayonet legend is kind of a turn off to me and also the fact that when they were doing the legends they were going more for a russian clone than a chinese type 56 clone is not exactly what i wanted and i had plenty of other male guns so in the end i decided to let the legend go to someone else who wanted it and would appreciate it more and i'm very content with this as my standard chinese ak you know with that let's look at some of the variants to go along with the fixed docked type 56 china pretty much from the outset adopted an under folding version known in the military is the type 56-1 typically written 56 dash uppercase i so roman numeral and of course when it well i should say when production switched from the machined receiver to the stamped it too went to a stamped receiver interestingly there's a bit of an argument as to if militaries actually used an underfolding spike bayonet slash underfolding stock version it doesn't seem like the chinese military did although perhaps simple autos were made and sold for export it really isn't a great idea because the underfolding bayonet and underfolding stock a interfere with each other and b really make it heavy so typically the 56-1 took a blade bayonet some might take a type 1 others might take a type 2 so an akm style some other akm features crept into the design such as the slant muzzle brake but many original features remained like the ported gas tube and the military select fire guns did not get the rate reducer at a battery safety mechanism as seen with the akm and wood pistol grips persisted for a long time they did also simplify their magazines further like this one here if i get it out maybe or hurt my hand okay there we go am i going to a kind of an all stamp design without the top piece just stamping it in still keeping the lack of a spine and there are lots of magazine variations if you really want to break it down and up here i have my polish akms under folder which is a dead ringer for russian it has the akms stock which is stamped and riveted it locks on both the left and right side and has a very straight angle analogous to the akm stock however the 56 1 kept the more downward sweep of the original ak type 3 and only locked on the left side you can see here there's no lock just a pivot here and it's more just straight it is stamped metal but it doesn't have the rivets and stuff it's just a different pattern and they continue to use the straight non palm swell hand guards depending on the factory bolt carriers could either be in the white or ballooned but typically the metal finish would still remain glued here we are folded up notice the [Music] rear here the single locking i mean the double locking on the akms and the rivet pattern the chinese it's pretty different we have two small rivets very close together it's kind of a rear block and that's that's it really on a thinner receiver they probably couldn't get away with this but since this is a 1.5 millimeter generally speaking they could the 56 one was popular with uh chinese and many export users well that needed a under folding stock gun it has all the benefits and the tractions you would expect here's a typical chinese chest rig that you're probably familiar with with lots of pockets holds three mags you actually do see quite a few under folders both military and semi-autos like these but notice they did not adopt a lot of akm features like the ribbed top cover the relocation of the sling swivel [Music] just really a lot of stuff it is at its core a type 3 a middle gun however by the 70s the chinese military is really needing something new there was some change over around 73 the uh kind of brand name narenko would soon appear standing for chinese north industry corporation or company depending on which source you ask and more effort were put into exporting these guns and work began on trying to update and modernize the design both to be cheaper and more competitive on the global market the pouch in between them is one of the many chinese styles this one holds five mags it doesn't really have much in the way of pouches besides it it's neat though got the little closure and a second one inside yeah so this one here is kind of interesting underfolding stalks are not my favorite let me get this fold it out there we go but i like the chinese because it is a unique pattern it's kind of a hybrid between the original milled ak type 3 aks type 3 i should say and the letter stamped ak ms and i thought the story of this one being a cotton customs gun was uh was neat and really the only artifact from that since it has a working stock and a removable muzzle device is that it doesn't really have a well i would say it doesn't have a working lug actually this front one still works fine as a type one lug but back here it's machined down and since it's not a true pre-band pre-band of course the price on it was much less in fact it cost me about what a nice mac 90 wood at the time and i thought man for that why not adds to the collection it's a good shooter and since the 56-1 was such a popular gun within the chinese military and for export having a semi-auto example sure why not i have had a couple of double folders as they're called ones with the spike bayonet come in they just i know to a lot of people they're very neat and that's i appreciate that to me they're not they're very gadgety the the two elements get in the way of each other and they're very heavy i like the fact that a simple under photo like this is relatively light and can be made very compact i just don't feel like i need a spiker on this one but i've got a spiker right over here so personal opinion gives a little different flavor a little different style and lots of companies have imported the chinese under folder this one is from style i believe might be csi but i think it's uh either way it came my way i wasn't really looking for it it's a good opportunity picked it up a few years ago why not and again i find the cotton custom story of the one five six s-one just very interesting and now my most recent acquisition and its history and this is what designers and norenko or what have you came up with the type 56-2 again the room the select fires would be written roman numeral two this is really the same gun they really had gone away from the uh spike bayonet at this point either using a type 1 or a type 2 akm style they went to a new synthetic furniture often referred to as bakelite a couple of different pistol grip styles have been seen but this seems to be the more common on select fire guns and of course we go to this new style of side folding stock it doesn't have a trunnion sticking out in the back although it does have a bit of a locking latch here and you can just pull it and then when it's in the back it locks in position very securely with a checkered button on top for release so actually quite quite easy to use it has just a simple metal bump light and under these bakelite looking panels there is a storage spot for a cleaning kit and they did make kind of matching mags that are often referred to as bakelite but truth is they're more of a modern polymer they're mark 66 they seem mostly to be for export especially to the us and unfortunately i don't have any at the moment so we'll have to make do with the tula but it shows you the thing the problem with the 56-2 is that it took them a very long time to develop this model china had been going through a lot of social upheaval in the early and mid 70s so this wasn't really ready until 1980 by which time the ak was looking pretty obsolete as a result for frontline service the army ended up going with the type 81 which is an entirely different gun so the 56-2 was primarily targeted towards the export market where it found greater success that said even within china a few military units acquired it more law enforcement did and some border guard patrols acquired it because it is more compact with the more modern furniture and has some appeal it's also worth pointing out that the 56 wasn't quite done there would be a carbine version known as the qbz 56 created mainly for the navy because the type 81 rifle didn't carbine well so that'd be one final chinese military version and of course in more recent years even the type 81 itself has been replaced at least in part by the qbc 95 bullpup so you know time moves on a number of foreign entities militaries police and otherwise were actually interested in the 56-2 so much so that the model is a pretty common sight in the in the world today many of these were sold to the middle east sriranka went to these pakistan acquired some and maybe most interestingly finland purchased around a hundred thousand of these in the early to mid 1990s supplement their vomits they weren't really planning to issue them on a day-to-day basis they just wanted to put them in storage to have stockpiles in case russia ever got up to anything they weren't sure the disillusionment of the soviet union what not they acquired like i said about a hundred thousand of these they also required about a hundred thousand east german mpi kms and km models the thai 56 also kind of has the distinction of being used on both sides of more than a few conflicts for example when china and vietnam were having a disagreement both sides had the type 56 also afghanistan many type 56s would be there and they'd be picked up by russians who would use them against the mujahideen and both sides during the iraq iran war in the 1980s would have some type 56s meaning that this rifle depending on you know 56 56 1 56 2 would more than once go up against itself which is not surprising because china built probably even more of these than it did sks's estimates are between 10 and 15 million even though kind of main production ended in the 1980s there were at least one or two factories still building them today although it looks like the days are numbered it looks like they're kind of producing these using the parts they have and then they'll roll up the production line because they're a couple of generations removed and the 56 2 is kind of the final major version designed and used for military customers and others needing select fire so with that what about semi-autos in the usa unlike the 56 s-1 i've actually been looking for a 56 s 2 for several years but a couple of things were always in my mind one i knew what i wanted and what i was willing to pay and therefore had a max price thing and i really wanted a norenko not a polytech the polytechs are more common but they're not quite as close to military as the norincos now this one here is a b west import which the b west imports are fine and it's kind of a hybrid it mostly has norenko features like the standard safety the standard mag catch and most importantly to me the curved pistol grip which i just think is interesting but it doesn't have the akm bayonet lug up here instead it does have the type 1 style that's the only thing that's a little disappointing about it i would have preferred the type 2 but since it is technically an aks not a 56 s-2 that's what it is but it came in at the price i was willing to pay it's in good shape and otherwise aside from the bandit lug that's exactly what i've been looking for the magazines are kind of a funny story a year or two ago i got a pouch full patch like this full so five or maybe six of the 66 marked mags and i knew as soon as i sold them because i didn't have the gun at the time i would actually stumble into one of these and that's pretty much exactly what happened so now i need to find at least two of the 66 matching mags but that's all right speaking of pouches here's the chest rig laid out has three large pockets for mags and then on each side it has two smaller pockets in mine i've got a mag loader stripper clips and a couple of cleaning kit things and a spare muzzle device they're neat and they're a very famous chinese pouch yeah i'm very pleased with this um like i said 910 it's exactly what i was looking for with all the bayonet lug not quite what i was hoping but the price was in line and i actually got it thanks to a subscriber on here so he knows who he is and i'm appreciative i didn't get it directly from him but he clued me into a place that uh that did have it and the reason i wanted to 56s-2 when there were so many other variants out there there's actually two one of them the stock and furniture is just unique there's nothing else like it when i was laying them out you know i compared these two with a russian and a polish analog i couldn't think of any other gun from another ak manufacturer hey look another cat say hi cat if it had this style of folding stock nothing even really close and another it was a military gun a lot of the imports we got in the 80s were just semi-autos made for the us market even if they were based on military stuff they were kind of just yeah but these three are all very close to chinese or other military issue guns of course the spiker is standard under folder pretty standard and the dash 2. i really wanted it primarily because of its connection with finland the fact that so many are using them in finland it's known as the rk56tp there but it's also used by other militaries as i pointed out and some were in service in china even if it was more of a police border guard thing this is kind of the ultimate culmination of the military type 56 because after that they just kind of went to other things and yeah that's kind of why these are the three aks i've picked if money were no object sure i would have an 84 and 86 but you know with the price of pre-bands even mac 90s what it is today you know one really needs to be selective about what they pick up and with that let's talk about pre-bands and mac 90s in more detail and we'll try to make a bit of a slide show for you here why ramble on so what about chinese aks and sks's in the usa well prior to the 1980s not much there were no semi-auto chinese aks here period the only ones here were bring backs from vietnam which as you can imagine were select fire many not exactly above board however the 1968 amnesty did allow some guys who originally brought them back illicitly to register them and get them on the the list legally which is good so there are a handful of true bring back guns that are on the paper and you can have register whatever also some brought back were de-milled cut and basically redone as semi-autos to some extent and that's another way on the other hand of course an sks a type 56 or otherwise could be brought back from vietnam no no legal issues there at that time so we did get a handful of chinese s cases that came back from the war but for real mass import we would have to wait to the 1980s now some people believe that golden state armory or golden state arms was the first this is definitively not true and it's easily proven clayco was the first according to public records the company was established at least in the form we know it as in kansas in september of 1982 golden state was not established as a company until two years later in 1984. the problem is quite simple there was another golden state arms or armory sorry it's late and i'm not gonna look way back in the 1960s it's quite famous for doing bm-59s and other italian guns and also conversions of infields however that wasn't golden state armory distributing or distributors the one that brought in a case was actually g s a d and that d is the important letter there so golden state distributors that brought in aks didn't really get going probably didn't have its first batch of aks on the market until 1985. still pretty early but clayco definitely had them on the market by 1984 based on ads that we have and several sources say by 1983 they were available so 83 84. yeah before that the only ak's really were valmets and some early mahdi's imported from egypt by steyer which which is very early on so with that what about the versions and variants we would be here all night if i tried to list all the different ones but you can pretty well break them down between early and late early would be pre-1986 and late would be 86 through 89 the band early on you had of course clayco and yes uh golden state was an early one another early one was uh b west and there were some early 1985 including mine dated kfs guns in other words kind of pre-poly tech the first guns to come in were essentially sold all under the narinco brand name so let's start there the difference between narenko and polytec norenko as i said earlier is the china north industries corporation or company it's kind of said both ways anyway you get it it's a combination of words which is in conglomeration it's not a factory it's just a company that exported and dealt with companies in the usa polytech likewise was a company that exported sometimes they even export from the same factory for example the factory coded as 386. but polytechs were near exclusively with just a tiny number of exceptions imported by kang's firearms kfs so kang's pretty much equals polytech and they were established to deliver almost slightly higher quality product at least what they thought was some refinements for example spring-loaded firing pins magazines with chrome-plated followers maybe a higher degree of wood higher polish blowing and also they were kind of an early tactical setter and that they went to a bit of an extended shelf on the safety and oftentimes would use extended mag catches little things like that on the other hand often times the norinco guns were closer to military type 56 types which is generally why i prefer the norinkos versus the polytechs not because i think norikos are better but because i think they are more authentic to military but as it happens and this is just personal experience it does seem like the narenko bluing while it's not as shiny and polished is maybe a little more durable um polytechs i think probably because of all the shine and whatnot tend to show fingerprints and even have surface rust a little easier it's just kind of what i've run across but you know your mileage will definitely vary so early on chinese aks were generally named enrollmart aks with the s standing for either sporter or semi-auto this would include the claycos also early guns because again these were very early ak's like the clayco's had all these wonderful warnings on the top cover about modifying it you can also see this on other imports from that era such as the imi uzi model a and model b people think that this whole gun control thing is a recent phenomenon oh no it dates back well to the 80s and even 70s so early imports while they have much to recommend them do you have a bunch of lawyers speak on the um dust cover which is kind of bleh now the guns that clayco and some other early importers brought in were kind of at the time the current type 56 analog and by that i mean no spike bayonet they had the more modern type 1 or type 2 bayonet lugs and they had the more modern synthetic furniture which is quite interesting while some claycos can have wood many have what we call bakelite and even neater it can be the reddish color in several shades it can be pretty much black and it can be what we call green which is really more of a black with a green undertone kind of like you know russian plum is kind of anyway yeah yeah some meat variations there and most of these would have the uh the slant type muzzle device as far as i know none of the 80s aks from china had a bear muzzle they all were threaded 14x1 with some maybe minor exceptions here and there but you don't see any of that next up the the synthetic ones and this is as more importers would get into the game you would get the spiker which you saw mine now mine's an early polytechnic type but before that i had an early b west type both were dated 1985 on the trunnion for whatever that's worth and marked aks these are probably the closest to a just chinese military type 56 spike bayonet which like i said is detachable which is pretty neat with the slab side wood hand guards wood pistol grip and the bolt carrier could be blue but often was white and there would also be underfolding versions with the spike bayonet but it's not really clear if the chinese military ever used these or not at least in numbers there might be the odd picture here or there but it doesn't seem like they used them a lot most would have the slant compensator but some especially the polytech types the kfs types would have the muzzle nut that that was kind of their preference and that's another thing to point out the chinese companies norenko polytech what have you would pretty much configure them however the us importer ordered them they were very happy to do that so you'll see different muzzle devices you'll see different types of stock you'll see some stocks that have more of a reddish hue and you'll see stocks that have more of a brown hue and some that are even more of the blonde and typically the bulk carrier being in the white or blue is an artifact of which factory it came out of for example 386 versus 4 16. but plenty of factory 66 guns have also turned up over the years so by the 1985-96 period this whole hey let's bring in some auto chinese ak's thing was really gaining steam while the styre madis weren't really doing that great [Music] the chinese were because the chinese were offering in more variety and more importantly they were cheaper also they consistently shipped with a bunch of goodies bayonet three mags cleaning kit the stires were a little more iffy some did some didn't but at this time that's all we really have in the pre-banned era that's about all we would get except for the kastner hungarian guns from feg but very few of those came in and very few of the mahdi's came in but the technical term for how many chinese guns came in between 83 and 89 is a metric [ __ ] ton and they would there would be many many importers and many variants i can't even list all the importers and i don't even know if anyone knows all of them for sure you had the big ones like i said b west kfs style out of new york s-i-l-e was another big one clayco kept on for a bit golden state you also had some that might be better recognized through other imports later like dominion investment group digg who was an early importer of bulgarian aks in the 1990s but then you had these little ones they were just like were little one-off mom-and-pop outfits that brought over a few hundred or a few thousand guns again the china was willing to sell anyone who ordered one that comes to mind you don't see too often is bci i think they were out of tennessee or kentucky and you had the so was it arms co i believe was another one oh there's again there's just so many you can look them up online it must have just brought over narenko pretty much your standard gun and around this time 86 87 they would stop using the name aks as much and go to 56 s obviously short for type 56 so semi-auto sporter what have you now there would be the standard type 56s which typically had wood furniture and took either a type 1 or more frequently a type 2 bayonets or akm that was your bog standard gun still in 762 by 39 you would have the 56s-1 which was an under folder but still again with the stamped receiver and it typically again took a type 1 or type 2 bayonet then you had the 56s-2 which is the side folder you saw and it had the synthetic furniture again with either type 1 or type 2 lug there's only two known legitimate spiker folders in the usa which seem to basically just be prototypes so for all intents and purposes they were all detaching bayonet guns in the line would just progress on from there you had longer barrel versions for example one company had been imported the 56 s-3 which was a fixed stock version of the 56 s-2 so pretty similar to the early clay cos at least in a lot of ways you had the match guns which had the 20-inch barrel many would refer to them as rpk's they're not they're just essentially long barreled 56s stamped receiver some would have the the chinese tubular bipod and flashlight or others would not many would be sold with the 75 round backloading drum it's true so kind of like the valmet m78 called a rpk but really not oh by the way most of them have kind of a club footstock thing too but not all and then of course you would have the one a lot of you are familiar with the polytech legend is this known officially row marked as ak-47 s this would be the first milled receiver gun most came in as a fixed stock mill gun although there were under folding and there were even some match target ones that were supposedly accurized with the longer barrel however there was not a legend spiker fielding bayonet all of them had the detachable type 1 bayonet the original ak type 3 to style that hooked under the front side base for whatever reason kfs kings preferred the older style bayonet lug you don't see many if all if any at all kfs guns with the type 2 the akm style lug now the legend is interesting over in china they had not made a milled ak for the military since around 1970 was like like i said earlier some factors switching over even years before that so that milled receiver was made for the u.s market and it was not made to be a cloned copy of the chinese type 56 it was actually made to be a clone a copy of the russian ak type 3. this is evidenced by the fact that it had more russian style markings on the rear sight and a lot of them came in with furniture kind of stained to be more of a russian red color and of course they had russian features like the open-eared front sight base and they took the russian type bayonet again kings really preferred that and what have you but i've done a comparison video in the past pointing out how the legend is different from a russian and you can check that out for a lot of details but i will point out things like it has a cast front sight base not machined it does not have the vent cuts in the upper hand guard and it has a wire recoil guide rod instead of the early machine type that russians would have used and one that always stuck out to me the trigger guard has three rivets instead of five on a russian and attached to it it is very clearly a stamped mag catch not the early russian style so you can definitely tell them if you look but keep in mind in the 80s while this was kind of considered a premium ak it was still chinese meaning it only cost 150 bucks more than your typical stamped type 56 now a lot of people will tell you they that they picked up a chinese ak for 100 bucks or 150 in the day that's one of two things it's either them mixing up sks which could be had for that money back then again remember they're both type 56s and they both shoot 762x39 or they're just bullshitting you they're just full of it i'm sorry but the chinese guns while they were affordable were never retail brand new even dealer cost brand new 100 bucks about the cheapest i've ever seen was there was a flyer or two and they went on sale stamp guns were about 175 dealer but there was more of a markup back then so even if the dealer was being generous they would have been on the shelf for 250 maybe 300 meaning the legends typically were on shelves for 400 to 600 but also keep in mind that was 1980s dollars you can use the online economy calculator you'll see that that was um that was more like 650 to eight hundred dollars maybe even verging on nine hundred and twenty twenty still a very good deal but honestly kind of right in there with where you see a wasser or a zostava zpap today just food for thought although to be fair they did come with a lot of accessories back then so yeah the legend we we have done multiple videos on them and while i respect them i don't really feel that it's all that close to a russian ak type three if it was still a thousand bucks or even 1500 i would still own one but considering all the differences and the fact that they're three grand and up now i i just let it go the truth of the matter is as i pointed out other videos i enjoy my other mill guns more when it comes to shooting but yeah you can check that out for some other videos that we've done so i'm not knocking the gun but it has definitely received a good dose of of over hyping in my humble opinion well the majority were in 762 by 39 quite a large number of chinese aks were imported chambered for 223 5.56 nato this would be the 84 s series most were your typical wood stocked guns so they looked just like a 56 s except they had a bird cage flash rider and they took their own proprietary 223 steel magazines there would also be an 84 s-1 under folder and there would be a version with synthetic furniture and there might have even been a few side folders but i can't remember sorry it's never been a gun that super interested me another one that's never really been up my alley but i think is neat just not my taste is the 86 s which is the bullpup it is just a 56s chassis put into a bullpup stock it has a four grip that can fold kind of borrowed from the steyrog it has its own unique flash hider and it has its own unique horrendous trigger pull they're neat but yeah it's yeah i mean they might have influenced later bullpups like the qbz 95 a little bit but not really uh it it was just kind of a fun commercial thing one of the rarest pre-banned chinese imports was the 88 s and that was chambered for 545 by 39 and this is a very interesting gun only 50 are known to have come in which would to me sound like a pre import sample batch now based on the year model 88 that tells me they probably were brought in right before the ban so that could be the reason but it also could be just the caliber 545 was a very new caliber in the 1980s anywhere and that would have been really the only gun chambered for that round in the usa at the time so where would you get ammo unless it was imported from china for that matter magazines and it's interesting this came from china because china never adopted 545.45 by 39 although they did make the type 88 for export customers and many consider it a clone of the ak-74 but it really wasn't it really was just a type 56 rechambered for 545 and with a copy of the russian big old 74 muzzle break nevertheless this is historic for being the first of its kind in the usa i also find it interesting that north korea adopted a 545 gun known as the type 88 and it's known that china provided military assistance and support i have to wonder if there's some kind of connection there but again story for another day just thought i would um point that out and with that i do apologize if i left out your favorite import i just tried to go through them kind of give you an idea of what we got you know fixed stock folders under folder side folder synthetic furniture black bakelite there's even an odd version imported by kang's that has like a galil type side folding stock i guess that was maybe the the the polytech version of the yeah i don't know it was an interesting thing seems to only really been made for america and you would have different versions of like the 56s-2 for example you'd have a polytech version and a wrinkle version little differences and things like i said the pistol grips another is a big one to point out the polytape version had more what's called as a 1911 looking grip more squared off and straight the norinco version has the grip like as on mine which is often referred to as kind of the vz58 style grip it's a little smaller more sweat back yeah just you know things like that even more annoying on the 223 556 market polytech and norenko at least some different versions there were two different patterns of chinese 223 magazine which is exceedingly frustrating as time goes on for us now of course all these chinese 56 guns would be new built semi-autos because of the atf now there would be a number of authentic chinese sks is brought over by the many times the same company for example csi brought over a lot of sks although they did aks as well some would be newly built or at least newly assembled from existing parts these are often referred to as commercial guns but many would be military guns either refurbished or even sometimes just under just in configuration brought over there were also some mag fed versions long ago we did a video on the navy arms magazine fed sks it's a little carbine with a 16 inch barrel that's a neat gun if you haven't seen that video you might enjoy checking it out they were also full sized so 20 inch sks that took ak mags commonly known as the sks d [Music] these don't seem to be military guns any of them they seem to be have done for the u.s market even though some of them were created by converting existing sks's again while others were maybe purpose-built a little vague there and it's it's kind of hard to know so things were really sparking 1987 1988 we had a lot of importers they're all bringing them in big numbers and china was producing these in a lot of factories and since the military was no longer really buying the 56 they they had plenty of capacity but all good things come to an end in march of 1989 an executive order came out of the white house that was signed off on by george h bush senior that banned the importation of assault rifles if you will you know military feature style rifles now this was an executive order and they got away with it because it was considered a clarification an addendum to the 1968 gun control act which was passed by congress and they couched this ban in amongst many details of a gun control excuse me a drug control order so you know war on drugs tough on drugs you remember how strong that was during the reagan era that's how it really slipped by and this is where imported guns were banned by feature you couldn't have pistol grips folding collapsing stalks bayonet lugs threaded barrels flash hiders it didn't really say anything about magazines interestingly [Music] but it addressed all the other little fun features it also banned many guns just outright by name including the styrog and chinese guns and blood a lot of bottom and this would lead to the 90s era now see a few websites credit this ban with clinton mixing up it with the 94 assault weapons ban which was a domestic thing no no this happened in 1989 and this is where we get a series of guns that were so called cotton customs my under folder 56s-1 is actually a 156s-1 that gun along with many fixed stalkers were caught in customs and were released but had very light modifications to make them compliant with the new uh executive order the new ban at that time they really didn't know what it meant and how secure it was it ended up leading to a kind of an amnesty grace period because a lot of these guns came in with uh thumb hole stocks quickly installed and muzzle devices quickly tack welded on and ban it was quickly ground off but at that time it was thought well once we bring them in we can restore them pull off the doofy stock and and you know untack weld the the muzzle device yeah the whole video we've done on that you can check out the things but by 1990 the full force of the post ban took effect but chinese guns were really selling well and so neither china nor the importers here wanted to give up on them so a special version to comply with the band was created it would go by a few names namely mac 90 or nhm 90. you'd see some of the old importers you'd see some new ones and essentially these guns were brought in with thumb hole stocks they would have the bayonet lug removed early ones would just have a muzzle nut tack welded on a threaded barrel but very soon they would start turning the threads off the barrel altogether and one of the most baffling things to me they removed the cleaning rod brackets on most apparently cleaning rods were evil the idea was to make the gun look more sporty less military they still had double stack mag wells although they did although they did start shipping them with 10 or even five round mags but they could take a 30. obviously they would quit shipping them with bayonets because yeah you don't really have a lug to put it on and these would just flood the market between late 90 and early 94. this would be the time when ak chinese akas would come in in numbers this would also be the time when quality control would start to slip they'd already been banned once so they just wanted to get as many over as they could and i think just they didn't care as much so there starts to be more issues with these most of them purely cosmetic like loose furniture or spots in the bluing canted sights rough triggers but some did come in mechanically pretty iffy is or they even run you would also get some that had so-called slant cut or slant back receivers which couldn't just take a standard butt stock this wasn't so much done to comply with any law as it was to use up existing receivers originally intended for underfolding stocks if you look at the end of my under folding stock gun you'll see how it's slant and kind of tapers in towards the pistol grip base it's kind of what they were there was also one batch of milled guns milled receiver guns imported in 1993 and all of these will be slant cut but it doesn't really matter because hey milgan pretty cool but aside from the polytechs that were imported in the 80s it's about the only milled chinese you'll get and they would do 223 variants as well as of course the 762 by 39 although obviously the the variety would drastically decrease because of having to have thumb hole stocks and having to have no cool features most of them just you know blood finish wood furniture a few different factory symbols would show up but yeah this too would pass because in april of 1994 all chinese rifled bore guns were banned were sanctioned now this was under clinton and this was in response to some international shenanigans dealing with ports and trafficking and i don't want to get into it now you can look it up if you want but effectively in april of 94 chinese guns were halted only shotguns smooth bores have continued to be allowed in all pistols and rifled rifles were banned including sks's there was no cnr exemption this time it also banned the the tokarevs and many guns this time were caught in customs again but unfortunately they did not quite get away as easy as the other guns in 89 many of these after languishing and dispute for a couple years were released to their importers to their owners but had to have their receivers cut up and then so they had a parts kit and then one of the most famous infamous guns was the m i sr 90 which was an egyptian receiver mutt with the chinese parts kit on it it was not good mainly because sentry arms had the assembly job on it but also just wasn't good because the specs are all different that was bad even worse in the 90s and one that really tarnished the name now like i said earlier b west was not only an importer in the 80s it was an early importer and they brought over a number of interesting guns uh spikers side folders under folders and the b west guns which were normico brand were no different no better no worse than anything else but in the 90s they decided to try building guns using chinese parts kits from demo guns on their own receivers [Music] this was bad their receivers were terrible they did not heat treat them at least properly and it almost seems like they just cold blued them whatever bluing they used or prep agent beforehand the bluing was very thin it would rub off and was prone to rusting even if it didn't again the heat treating was off typically the receivers would warp the pivot pins would egg out very bad stuff and it gave the b west chinese guns a pretty bad rap the thing is it's pretty easy to tell them apart the true imports will say china on them they'll say be west of course but china the us receivers will say usa and they won't say china so if you're looking at one just be mindful the b west guns at most the us ones are at most worth it for the parts kit most people agree just not to trust the receiver this might be behaving a little over cautious but better safe than sorry and enough issues have been reported that it really does seem to be a true issue not just one of those internet things and you know me i'm the first to kind of dismiss internet rumors but in this instance it seems true so where does that leave us after 1994 well we could not get anything rifled out of china for a long time but beginning in the 21st century a nice thing started to happen if a gun is in another country long enough some people say 20 years some people say 25 it doesn't matter best get generations of time worth as far as the government's concerned as far as the law is concerned it's no longer from its original country i.e china so we started to see sks's imported some years ago that were authentic chinese type 56 carbines but they came out of other nations probably most famously albania also in the last few years more and more chinese type 56-1 folding ak parts kits have come around and uh of course these have to be imported with the receiver cut up and after 2005 the barrel had to be cut up but you still have a parts kit therefore spare parts for your existing gun which is nice or something to build a chinese gun with here in the usa on a us receiver in a u.s barrel it is worth keeping in mind though that you will need a specific chinese type 56 receiver and barrel at least if you want to do the build right and not have something that comes off looking like a miss or 90 which you really don't want probably knows most famously james river armory jra has built them in recent years for classic but they're not the only one other other companies like say two rivers have built them and they seem to be of better quality two rivers but i think atlantic might have done a run as well but i may be mistaken on that i've not really been too interested since there are so many chinese imports a lot of pre-bands which are as you see and even more mac 90 style post bands how many we don't know for sure but chinese sources have estimated perhaps as many as a million that's one million chinese ak type rifles so whenever someone says how rare they are give it some perspective for example there are only about 350 000 cold sp1 rifles and carbines and you see sp1s quite a few places and you know they yeah there's uh maybe three times as many chinese aks here again counting post and pre-bin now some are really rare like the 88 s but if you're just talking about a bog standard fixed stock wood gun or under folding gun no those are imported in very large numbers even the polytech legend was actually imported in very large numbers comparatively speaking so don't really be taken in by the rarity of chinese guns the reason they go for so much money and can be hard to find is that they're under extreme demand and have been for the last few years it's interesting because they used to be kind of considered junk and now they're gold and did a video on that last year and they can be fun d-band projects for like mac 90s but just be sure you know what you're getting yourself into because uh you might find you ended up putting as much money trying to de-ban a postman as you could have found a pre-banned for and with so many pre-bands out there there are deals to be found they're not all two three thousand dollar up even today and i'm not talking about ripping someone off who doesn't know what they have but some people just don't care about aks some people just want to move them with so many out there you'll find a seller willing to kind of negotiate on the price or maybe you can trade one and do well that's another another decent option but up until recently the chinese ak was the most common semi-auto in the usa i think by now the romanian ak has probably eclipsed it but for a long time it was the cheapest most affordable ak you could get and was imported for well over 10 years and if you talk about pre-banned aks as i've outlined it's really your only option i mean at least in numbers yeah hungarian and egyptian guns are here but in tiny numbers compared to the chinese and it's debatable if a valmet or a galil is really an akak there were no pre-banned bulgarian romanian polish hungarian were again small numbers they didn't do like an amd 65 back then and there were no pre-banned russians so yeah there you go a bit of a narrative rundown and we have as i've said on and off many videos addressing this so if you're interested you can check those out for more information well we made it through another collection video event this one was a little a little different than the previous ones i know that chinese guns are very popular and they're still continuing to be a lot of interest in the sks's with recent imports and of course aks so even if i couldn't do a 12 13 gun layout for you i at least wanted to be thorough and again for more details on individual topics you can check out some of our past videos it's funny for quite a long time i was resistant to getting into chinese aks all together i was really focused on the european guns but as i kind of ran out of interesting options there and as these guns kind of came to me absolutely changed my mind my first spiker was because a friend just needed it to sell it and again the sender folder was just a good opportunity online and the side folder here was things to help from a subscriber here who knew of a gun shop needing to to move one and uh yeah both of these in fact this gun this sks came from the same owner that this gun come came from and this gun here came from the same owner who owned my previous spiker which was uh b west like uh this gun so i don't know why i find either in my own experience here i tend to find either b west norenkos or kang's polytechs that is just what i've found over the years and of course a host of mac 90s the only other one that's kind of tempted me to keep are the 20-inch barrel ones that have the tubular bipod i had a really nice post-band one come in that nevertheless still had the right stock on it and had the bipod the only thing it didn't have it didn't have the right birdcage flashlighter but as it so happened at the time i had a spare call it an 80 type 87 whatever you want to call it lmg type flash hider so i put it on there and that was uh that was kind of tempting to keep but since those weren't really really 100 rpks and weren't really used by the chinese military much i taught myself out of it again you have to be choosy and when you sell guns for a living you really can't keep everything you're you're never going to get anywhere in life and i still have bills to pay and i have plenty of rpks but other than that i haven't really been tempted by many other models like the 84 the 223 is neat but it just looks like the others except it takes extra expensive and hard to find mags the 86 bullpup is neat but i'm just not a big fan of bullpups especially half-assed ak conversions and as i said before the legend nice gun but not quite my speed i prefer say my hungarian slr 100h or my ssr 99p which is a polish build or the um the russian plo build you saw at the beginning of the video that's on a firing line receiver so i've just found other mills that are more my speed and honestly a lot cheaper because the legends especially have gone bananas the stamped guns you can usually find for 200 to 2500 with just a little bit of looking sometimes the under folder is even 1800 still but the milled guns good grief they've they've gone crazy and to be fair these uh these here the side folders tend to be a little high too but they're out there so um what chinese guns do you own what are your favorites are there any that don't really interest you i think the only one i might like to have it being all bakelite furniture black or black green from clayco that might be kind of neat so analogous to a type 56-3 although i don't know if the chinese military ever used them it seems like when other militaries were picking these up they really preferred the folders which makes sense by the standards of the 1980s really does so yeah i'd love to hear your opinions and thoughts if you could as always like share and subscribe and if you'd like to help support the channel please check out the link to our patreon page and with that we'll end another long collection video this is misha catch you very soon next time

Channel: Mishaco

Views: 17,230

Rating: 4.9045725 out of 5

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

Id: iIl4TyuJEzU

Length: 92min 11sec (5531 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 29 2020