I notice that AKs with the lighter profile barrels are handier than the thicker ones, like the AKM vs Norinco or Type 56 with an under folder bayonet even worse.
Norinco has a heavier barrel profile, but it also has better build quality and trigger than most AKMs, even though I like the classic look of the AKM just for aesthetics.
The tiny pistol grips don’t provide a lot of control to the overall firearm, so thicker pistol grips definitely help manage the gun better. You see that as one of the main upgrades builders and even the Russians went to with the newer guns. The larger backstrap on the pistol grip gives you a little more control of the gun when going from carry to presentation.
I like blasters that feel like a wand, not a cumbersome weight. Wands point naturally. Precious few AKs have this type of natural pointing feel to them.
For factory configurations, the AK-74 beats the AKM, Type 56, anything with a billet receiver, and most other AKs when it comes to pointability.
The Galil SAR beats the Galil ARM in that area as well.
If you look at an AK in strict terms of mass placement relative to your hand, all the steel weight is well forward of your pistol grip hand, with exceptions to a few minor small parts in the buttstock or the stock itself for some of the folders. Not only are the heaviest steel parts well forward of your firing hand, but they extend even more forward due to the long stroke piston. When you combine that with a loaded mag in 7.62x39, they are quite unwieldy compared even with a heavy-barreled AR-15 carbine.
So regardless of the individual’s training regimen, he or she will always be quicker on a shot timer from low ready to rounds on-target for CQM with an AR-15, even when we allow for the AK’s selector lever to be left on fire and the AR-15 starting on safe.
That is a real man-machine-interface advantage to the AR-15.
Then there’s the trigger. When will it release the hammer? Somewhere between here .......and.........there, which is a long, unpredictable path.
AKs do well to have an updated trigger installed I think.
Americans get really enamored with the mystique of the AK, dive into studying it, learning its features, without understanding that it’s the least amount of materials the dirt-poor, war-ravaged Russia could slap together to equip its soldiers and vassal states with, without straining arms production and strategic materials demands for more important weapons like tanks, artillery, fighters, bombers, APCs, etc. They compensated for their weakness by relentlessly pushing this propaganda about how it’s the greatest rifle ever made.
That’s why sheet steel was so important for the original design, even though it took them about a decade to get it right from the original Avtomats to the AKM.
