Kalashnikov Media has published a video showing the prototype of the Kalashnikov Concern’s upcoming straight pull rifle. The gun is called TB2-LAW and it represents a crossbreed of the company’s Maral and Los rifles. The rifle is built with the LE needs in mind, however, it can be sold to the local civilian market, too.

The straight pull action is borrowed from the Maral rifle and the barrel and magazine are taken from the Los. The rifle is chambered in .308 Winchester. It is fed from single stack three-round Los magazines. An optional five-rounder is in the works. The barrel length is 350 mm (about 14″). This particular one is also equipped with a Vertebrae muzzle brake.

The stock on this TB2-LAW rifle is made of laminate wood. It has an adjustable cheek piece and butt pad. The stock design may change on the final, production rifle. The lockup is accomplished by a three-lug rotating bolt. The charging handle can be folded forward for ease of transportation. When the action is closed, the bolt gets locked in place and can be worked only after pulling the trigger or pressing the bolt release button located at the bottom edge of the ejection port. Due to the very short ejection port, the single feeding requires manually guiding the round into the chamber.

This prototype rifle has a rubber cover worn over the smaller plastic round bolt handle knob. The final version will have a solid knob of the shown size.

Apparently, the action of TB2-LAW is quite sensitive to the quality of the ammunition. If you watch the video (it is impossible to embed KC videos into the article), you’ll see that it had extraction issues with some of the polymer-coated steel cased rounds as well as with almost all hotter loaded cartridges. In order to eject these stuck cases, the shooter had to mortar the gun every single time. According to the host of the video, the issues with extraction are probably caused by the lack of the strong primary extraction mechanism normally seen in standard (non-straight pull) bolt action rifles.

In the above-embedded image, you can see the groups fired at 100-meter targets. The far left one is factory TulAmmo with 165-grain soft point bullets. The middle group is printed with the hand loaded (the hot loads that caused extraction issues) ammunition with the use of Tula components, and the far right group is done with a hand loaded ammo sporting 167-grain Lapua Scenar projectiles.

Images from www.kalashnikov.media

UPDATE: The company has uploaded the video (in Russian) to YouTube.