#Mud

Over the last few months, InRange TV has found a successful niche of testing various firearms under their internal “Mud Test” for various classic and modern firearms. While not perfectly representative of the various military standards (their mud is “goopier”), the tests are the normal InRange combination of entertainment and learning.

Yesterday, we took a close look at the AK’s operating group, to enumerate the details that make this pattern such a dependable design. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the other elements of the AK that make it so reliable, but first I want to clear up some confusion that arose in the comments section of the previous article, regarding what the term “anti-preengagement” refers to. Hopefully the video below will help:

Dust, mud, dirt, sand: Ideally, a firearm should be kept clean and free of debris so that it functions optimally at all times. After all, the user’s life may depend on the firearm working properly!

The vz. 58 is a rifle well-known for being easily mistaken for – but totally different from – an AK. Everything down to the locking mechanism, fire control group, and operating mechanism is different from the famous Kalashnikov, despite appearances. In fact, the vz. 58 rifle was a huge achievement for the relatively small country of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), as they had produced a weapon every bit as good as its contemporaries from the superpowers. Certainly, a gun’s merits can’t be boiled down to a simple mud test… But it wouldn’t hurt to see how it does anyway, right?

As part of their recent set of mud testing, including some disappointing results from the fabled M1 Garand, and AK rifles, Ian and Karl of InRange have tested a weapon most people would expect to wither like a delicate flower at the first frost, in the presence of mud: The AR-15, designed by Jim Sullivan, and based on Eugene Stoner’s innovative, but maligned direct gas impingement operating system:

OK, so with the clickbait title out of the way, we’ve seen how the M1 Garand and the AK-derived Galil ACE fare in mud, but what about the legendarily reliable AK itself? Well, Ian and Karl’s recent round of mud testing continues, and next in line is Mikhail Kalashnikov’s masterpiece:

The M1 Garand is certainly a great design, but it’s often forgotten that it is fundamentally a piece of late 1920s technology, and it has some serious flaws. Its Achilles’ heel, though, is probably its susceptibility to mud, dirt, sand, and other foreign matter. Ian and Karl at InRange TV took an M1 out to the Arizona desert to give it a mud bath, testing the gun’s resistance to unforgiving conditions, the video of which is embedded below:

In preparation for an upcoming article about “light rifle” development (i.e., full power automatic infantry rifles), I have been reading the excellent Collector Grade Publication three-part volume on the FN FAL rifle. In it is contained the transcript of the 1950 Light Rifle trials, which pitted the American T25 design (a rifle that was at once a hybrid of the M1 Garand and BAR, but at the same time much more than that) by Earle Harvey, the Anglo-Polish EM-2 design by Stefan Janson, and the Anglo-Belgian FN FAL design – by none other than Dieudonné Saive, John M. Browning’s Belgian protégé – against the Second World War veteran the M1 Garand. The tests were comprehensive, but not all included the “control” rifle – the M1. Why this was so is not clear to me. In the rain tests, the M1 beat the EM-2 and was not so far behind the FAL and T25, and in the cold tests the M1 was a clear winner, functioning flawlessly (this would be echoed later when the T44E2 would beat the FAL in trials in Alaska, preventing its cancellation and eventually leading to the adoption of its descendant, the T44E4 as the M14, in 1957).