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> There's a reason the good old AK-47 - a design from 1946! Not a great example. After a number of tweaks to try to simplify production it was eventually acce

> There's a reason the good old AK-47 - a design from 1946! Not a great example. After a number of tweaks to try to simplify production it was eventually accepted that the original design wasn't conducive to mass-scale manufacturing. So it was redesigned from scratch as the AKM, which entered service in 1959. It used simple metal stampings instead of a milled receiver. So the vast,vast majority of AK patterns you see on the news are actually AKM derivatives since very few countries ( Finland, Israel, Yugoslavia ) could justify using the original 47 design.

webmaven 5y ago
> So the vast,vast majority of AK patterns you see on the news are actually AKM derivatives since very few countries ( Finland, Israel, Yugoslavia ) could justify using the original 47 design. Israel's derivatives (the Galil family) diverge enough from the AK-47 that it is difficult to completely exclude the AKM as a source of inspiration. Although the design was derived from the Finish RK62 (itself derived from the Polish version of the AK-47), The first Galil prototypes actually used stamped parts like the AKM before (mostly) switching to milled parts. OTOH, the very earliest models of AK-47 also had stamped receivers, so there's that.