Ethan Dublin, a very innovative 18 year old college freshmen, has developed an interesting charging system for AK-type rifles.

Ratchet Charging System

The Ratchet Charging System comes with a replacement gas tube and a sleeve that bolts onto the end of the gas piston. The design offers quite a few advantages over the standard charging handle. Being on the left hand side it is faster to manipulate when doing magazine reloads (if you are right handed), it can be used as a manual bolt hold open and, if the standard charging handle is removed, the Ratchet system can cycle the bolt and chamber a round with the safety engaged. This video demonstrates it in action …

I asked Ethan if the cut out gas tube venting gas would affect the operation of the rifle. He said it would not.

The only major disadvantages that I can see is that the charging handle must be unscrewed when field stripping and that leaving the bolt locked back in the field could allow dirt to get into the gas block.

Bolt locked back.

The installation is gunsmith free and it is compatible with …

• Romanian AK-47 (7.62×39)
• Saiga (5.56)
• Polish Under folder (7.62×39)
• Bulgarian AK-74 (5.45)
• Egyptian Maadi (7.62×39)
• Russian Milled AK-47 (7.62×39)
• ROB. Arms VEPR (7.62×39)

I wish Ethan the best of luck with his endeavor and future engineering studies. Maybe we have our next Eugene Stoner here? 🙂