Fleet Farm Ad

[heavy metal daze]

Fleet Farm keeps them 'as packaged' so they're usually filthy and require a full strip cleaning. Not sure if Fleet Farm lets you pop the cover off to look inside, but as long as the sights and gas block are reasonably straight, the magazines aren't too wobbly, and the barrel looks servicable, then it'll be a decent buy. I think the fixed stock ones have the muzzle nut welded on, and the folding stock's slant brake is removable. The extra steel magazines are soaked in cosmoline.

[schnit]

I recently bought a WASR10 at fleet farm.

I had to inspect about eight of them to find one that was actually built right. Most had sights so badly canted that I wondered how they even left the factory. Most others had magazine wells so opened up that the magazine felt like it was going to fall out. Others had rust.

The one I found has a perfect magazine well, a very slight cant (still shoots straight) and zero rust. A little polishing of the contact parts of the bolt carrier and the receiver and it actually is a nice weapon to fire. It feels pretty solid as opposed to some of the ones with the gaping mag wells.

[heavy metal daze]

CAI hogs out that mag well to accomodate those Tapco magazines. A lot of the steel surplus magazines are worn, so those can be fairly wobbly depending on how worn. Though, if the Tapco mags are wobbling about, avoid.

The underfolder WASR I have can be pretty wobbly with certain worn steel surplus magazines. However, it's a nice tight fit for the Tapco magazines, Romanian drums, and newer Bulgarian/Hungarian steel magazines. Even the wobbly ones, however, still work just fine, and the mags don't wobble as much when loaded compared to unloaded.

[Norsesmithy]

Though why anyone would want to modify a gun to make the Tapco or US Palm AK mags to work, I haven't the foggiest. Saw a guy fumble a tapco mag trying to swap his mags fast. It landed feed lips down, and promptly rocketed into the air on a column of spilled ammunition. Totally borked. If an AK mag isn't steel, or doesn't have steel reinforcements at the locking lugs and steel feeding lips, it's not worth your time. It's not like an AR-15, the gun doesn't cradle and baby its mags.

The best mags are the black body Bulgarian Circle 10 mags, followed by Chinese steel mags, and then steel mags of other provenance (Chinese is preferred due to flat steel back, other steel mags have a rib that can bite into the web of your hand). The clear Bulgarian polymer mags are not nearly as durable as the black ones, and the other colors I'd consider untested, unless someone wants to spend some money buying mags and then doing the Russian Drop Test, and probably destroying the mags. Bulgarian "bullet" mags are weird, some are nearly as good as a circle 10 mag, but most lack the proper reinforcement, and sellers of these mags don't seem to differentiate between them, so unless you are buying mags you can individually inspect, I'd leave them alone.

Of course, if you know how to tig weld, or know someone willing to tig weld for beer, it's child's play to fill in the mag well until it is under spec and then hog it out again, more carefully than Century does.

[1000]

Check out I.O.Inc http://www.ioinc.us
They make some really good AK's

Peter

[spliznat]

Buy a WASR take it home shoot it a couple times..........if your a little hand with tools buy a NoDAK spud receiver and rebuild the thing using better wood and presto ya have a sweet AK

[plink]

Check the rivets too. Some are pressed in too tight and will push the sides of the receiver in with it. Some are way loose.

Of all the possible problems, the canted sight is the easiest to fix. Higher priority stuff would be a straight gas block and mag wobble.

[heavy metal daze]

Newer ones aren't including a cleaning rod or sling. Sort of a good way to gauge if there's ones that been sitting in store for a while I suppose. It's a Century thing, they've stopped including them recently, as well as increased the price. Not that this should be a deal stopper, a cleaning rod can be had for 10 bucks, and the slings are too short for anything other than carrying behind the shoulder.