Not sure if serious.....or.....

AK-46 looked to have greater external similarity to the STG-44. Still has a rotating bolt over the tilting.

Here is something to think about, we couldn’t make a AK and make it reliable like the Russians, Chinese, and every other combloc third world country. Now your thinking bullshit, those very superior manufacturing capabilities will kill our built AK. Allot of the AK’s legendary but not entirely deserved reliabilty is from loose tolerances if we tightened up those tolerances we’d now have a very unreliable AK, needing constant cleaning and oiled.

The AK was designed to be built on shitty equipment run by uneducated operators, to be used by barely educated conscripts using only the basic supplies of diesel and motor oil. Now tell me what happens when you tighten up the tolerances?

select fire box magazine intermediate cartridge was "invented" just after ww1.
STG44 was first successful mass production of that concept, kalshnikov followed.

They tried stamped but couldnt figure out out till much later.

Do I have a story to tell you about the zundaps

Yeah, until they raped, pillaged and rummaged through all of the stolen industrial machines and like monkeys tapping on keys for a million years, they figured it out.
ohhhhhh.. yeah...you have to control the quality of the metal, you might have to do proper heat treatment also.

I believe the original plan was to stamp it, but they couldn't get the tooling setup properly or economically at first so they went with milled for a time.

The Russians recently fucked up the AK-12, the revised ergonomics AK-74 Kalashnikov (Izhmash) "Ratnik" program rifle.  There were reports they were unreliable even before the war, in Ukraine last year both sides were ditching them pronto for battlefield pick ups.

You're not wrong.

Trigger group and bolt and carrier was modeled after the Garand. The Garand trigger group was modeled from some French ww1 semi auto rifle I can’t think of right now.

They stole a whole motorcycle factory.

Could it be said he improved on the design?
Roy

Yup

Another person confused about the difference between tolerance and clearance.

We could have made an AK that is far superior to the soviets at any point since it's design.  The reason it wasn't done was cost.

Steel stamping was (and still is to a degree) an incredibly expensive process to setup.  The tooling is very expensive.  The only thing that makes it cheap to produce things that way is volume.  The Soviets knew before they built the factories that they would be producing millions upon millions of rifles for at least a decade.

With enough production volume even the most outrageous initial tooling costs become insignificant.  The Soviets had a guaranteed customer (the military).  American firearms companies had no reason to risk investing millions of dollars to make a rifle that will still cost more than the Soviet imports whose tooling costs were already absorbed by their MIC.

ETA:  The American companies did the smart thing and designed rifles that could be made with much cheaper machinery, albeit at a higher per-unit production cost.  

Think of it like 3d printing vs injection molding.  Even an industrial grade 3d printer is much cheaper than injection molding if you're making a small number of units.  With enough production volume, however, the speed and repeatability of injection molding quickly overshadows the initial setup costs.  Hence why prototypes are more likely to be 3d printed while mass market plastic products are virtually always injection molded.

ETA2:  Notice that a viable American AK didn't show up until the import AKs started increasing in price dramatically.

It was designed in the middle of 1942. The soviets wouldn't have encountered the MP44 until maybe 1943. My point was the Russians had stamped designs with hinged lowers before the MP44 was a thing. It was possible for Russia to have organic designs on something instead of 100% copying everything.

Not really.  The locking system of the STG 44 is almost the same design as the FN FAL.  No rotating bolt design.  The fire control system is completely different.  The gun has a piston so I guess to the layman, that would be the same as an AK.

Wonder how they fucked up the AK to make it unreliable?

Just like we ripped off Von Braun and his crew.  They went from making German V2s to Jupiter and later Saturn rockets for the U.S.

The Germans had a lot of good stuff to steal.

I feel like I’ve traveled back in time to 2007 and people are just regurgitating dumb shit from the history channel or wherever.

Pretty soon we’re going to hear about how all the GIs in Vietnam threw down their M16s made by Mattel to pick up AKs. The M16 is designed to wound. The AK can shoot our ammo but the M16 couldn’t shoot their ammo.

We’ve already learned we’re incapable of making an AK because our manufacturing technology is too good and by building a gun shitty it is better. We’ve had half the forum come out of the woodwork to tell us that “akshually” the AK was milled. We’ve had the tolerances confused with clearances confusion.

For a gun forum… there isn’t much knowledge of guns being displayed.

I’ll, admit I did use tolerances instead of clearances as I was in a hurry. I will though clarify that both tolerances and clearances come into play with Russian equipment. The allowable tolerances are much greater with east block manufacturing equipment due in part to the inability of the equipment to maintain tight tolerance as well as operators who don’t care. We must also think about how long this equipment is run before adjustment (if possible) or replacement. We also need to question the quality of the equipment used to manufacture AK’s. This is obvious when disassembling AK’s how some are looser or tighter then others, you can also swap parts around and see, hear and feel parts looser or tighter.

These are issues you don’t regularly see on quality USA made parts. When you do see it it’s promptly replaced by a company that stands behind its products. This manufacturing technique was pretty prevalent in the USA as matter of fact, when I did my first classic muscle car the rear end was off to one side a 1/2”. I started doing research and it was acceptable up to 1/2” on the rear end spring mounts. I have found mounts off of up 9/16! My point is back in the day even the USA wasn’t so worried about tolerance's as long as it worked, today in the day of educated operators and CNC equipment tolerances are in the 1000ths or less. Does anyone think Russia has improved their manufacturing techniques or manufacturing process?

So yes both tolerance and clearance come into play when discussing AK’s and manufacturing. I still stand by the fact the USA can’t build a reliable AK using our standards for tolerances and clearances.

Having poor tolerances is never going to be a benefit.

If it is designed with loose clearances, then you can open up your tolerances and have a functional end result within reason. Having better tolerance just means you don’t get that “some mixes of parts are loose while some are tight” issue when building the same product. They designed something that could work with the manufacturing base they had available to them.

We designed something that could work with the manufacturing base available to us, which made CNC machining of aluminum alloy forgings practical for us to do, which for the Soviets would have been… impractical.

The idea that we can’t do stampings, roughly machined forgings, etc. because of tolerances is just not true. We did build stamped guns of similar manufacturing quality as the Kalashnikov.

Part of it is the design of the Kalashnikov is geared towards mass production in a state-funded facility where enormous front end costs are okay. It’s not that we can’t make that tooling, it just isn’t cost effective for us to make that tooling to sell rifles commercially when other countries are already set up for it with equipment that is already bought and paid for decades ago.

So we mimicked it with cheaper options. That means instead of forgings you end up with investment casting or die casting of parts, when they weren’t intended to be built that way. You get small companies trying to do what was done by huge state arsenals.

To suggest we can’t do it… of course we can. Why would we if there is no profit motive?

I have never suggested we can’t do it, I’ve implied we could do it much better. We would take a gun designed to be loose and tighten up just by the fact we do not manufacture products that way. If a AK was built tight it most likely be prone to jams as the secret to a AKs reliability is being loose and way over gassed. The AK was designed for quantity, cost effectiveness, be used by conscripts with little education, cleaned with diesel and lubed with motor oil.

Why do you think that the US was incapable of manufacturing an AK that would work? Look at the M3 grease gun. It’s an almost completely stamped smg with huge clearances.

If we wanted an intermediate rifle stemming from the Stg44 or Stg44, we could’ve easily built a great version. Ordnance just wasn’t at all interested in an intermediate rifle. They turned down the 280 British and were dead set on a full power cartridge.

Stg45 led into the cetme and eventually the g3. The stg44 led into the FAL. Unfortunately NATO required both designs to be produced in 7.62 Cetme/NATO. Both were originally designed as intermediate cartridge rifles.

For fucks sake, read what I said, I said we would probably make it to tight (no clearances) and it would loose its legendary reliability. This is simply from superior manufacturing, educated work force and superior manufacturing equipment, so by default our builds would be to good. I’d like to also add why would we want to build a trash can gun such as a AK?

The STG44 uses a gas system of the SVT40.  The gas system is driven by a short-stroke, spring-loaded piston housed above the barrel, and the locking mechanism is what is known as a tilting breechblock. To lock, it drops down into a solid shoulder of metal in the heavy receiver much like the bolts of the Russian SKS carbine and French MAS-49 series of semi-automatic rifles.


US Ordnance was convinced that shortening the 30.06 to .308 was now a intermediate. We strong armed NATO to adopt the 308, hell politics forced the M14 over the FAL. The STG44 or even the STG45 only share or have in common to the FAL is the original chambering of the 7.92x33. The British suggested the 280 as they were designing a new rifle and wanted a 280 FAL for trials. Dieudonné Saive knew that his FAL design had to chamber the round the US Military used in order for success, he hedged his bets the 308:would be the NATO round, so while the 280 was built he knew he had to also needed it to chamber and work with the 308.

The USA was pushing the 30 light rifle (308j and the T44 which would become the M14, when the Churchill became prime minister again Truman and Churchill had some sort of agreement making the FAL the NATO standard and the 308 becoming the 7.62 NATO.