Jim Fuller Interview: Parts Kits, War in Iraq and the Beginnings of the AK Manufacturing in the USA

In the first part of the interview, I spoke with Jim Fuller about his experience with Chinese AKs. In this chapter, he will talk about the early 2000s, when US companies just started to build the first American-made AKs.

In 2007, Jim Fuller founded Rifle Dynamics in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2017, he sold the company and remained there for a few years as a consultant and later started a new company, Fuller Phoenix, in Scottsdale, Arizona joining forces with a renowned firearms instructor Travis Haley.

To this day, a lot of AKs made in the USA are based on imported parts kits. Those kits certainly became a foundation for AK manufacturing in the US. So I asked Jim, who was there when it all began, how it all started.

Vlad: Just when did the whole thing with the parts kit start? What kind of legislation brought the situation to the point when the parts kit became necessary? Was it 1968 or 1986?

Jim: Well, we were getting parts kits even in the early sixties. But they were the parts kits when a gun basically just had one saw cut on a receiver. So the original reason, for the existence of parts kits, is just the fact that it makes it easier to repair existing guns. But people begin to figure out, well, if we just manufacture a receiver we can make a new gun out of this.

922r compliance is another issue too. The ATF came up with a list of 20 gun parts that they consider to be major. And so they decided that their general ruling was that any gun built here in the US could not have more than 10 imported parts out of 20.

And of the 20 parts that they have on the list, on an AKM, only 16 of those parts exist. Yeah. So you have to put 6 US parts in it for the rifle to be “American-made”.

Vlad: When did people start building AKs using parts kits?

Jim: it just kinda died in 1994 after the assault weapon ban and then it didn’t really get revived until the early 2000s, because in 2004 the assault weapons ban expired.

Around 2003 another thing that came along was the war that started in the Middle East. Аt the time I was training together with friends, many of them were security contractors: Aegis, Blackwater guys…

And those guys were going over there and discovering the AK for the first time. They were former military guys and used to run an M4. And to that point, a lot of them had never seen any action, they’ve been in the military in peacetime. So, they go over there and get handed an AK and go: “What the hell is this thing?”

And then they used AK it a little bit and went: “Hey, this thing’s kinda cool”. And next thing you know, guys are calling me: “Jim, you do those AK things, right? Man, I’m coming back in about 6 months. I’m gonna have a shitload of money. Build me, like, 3 of them. I like these guns”.

That was when I just started to get my FFL. The contractors are basically what launched my company. First, I was just building AKs for friends. They’d come over, and we’d spend a weekend in my garage building guns. And, through that process, we started learning stuff.

Vlad: And just as far as I understand, those AKs stayed here stateside and were not shipped to the Middle East?

Jim: No, they were for their personal use. Now we sold stuff to contracting companies, but you know, that’s a different story all the time.

Vlad: Just my experience working in all those countries – you rarely get AKs from the US. Usually some cheap stuff.

Jim: Yeah, the stuff we make here is way too expensive for them. Like I said, I started out just you know building them for my friends. People like to say: “Man, I gotta have one of these. These are pretty cool guns. You know, I’m an M4 guy, but I want one of these too. Because it served me well in Iraq or wherever. It kinda reignited the desire for the Kalashnikov here.

Probably by 2006, I had so much stuff piled up in my house waiting to be built… Our dining room didn’t exist anymore. We just had box after box after box that people were sending me their parts kits and receivers.