#AKM

The Indian military will have to live for a while longer with the troubled and increasingly dated INSAS, and antique hand-me-down AKM rifles, it seems. Daily Mail India reports:

Taofledermaus, master of unconventional (and some would argue unsafe) ad-hoc gun modifications has taken the Kalashnikov hobby to a new level.

The constant bugbear in Soviet small arms engineers’ sides after 1950 was the poor performance of the AK rifle in fully automatic. The rifle was for decades very inaccurate in fully automatic fire, owing to its vigorous action and relatively (when compared to pistol rounds) powerful round. A wide variety of approaches were taken to try to mitigate the dispersion in the automatic firing mode, and a Russian blog post covering some of the earliest experiments has been translated by Ensign Expendable of the Soviet Gun Archives blog:

Gibbs Rifle Company, perhaps most famous for their 1903 Springfield rifles, were showing off today a .45-70 conversion of a Fazakerley No. 4 Lee-Enfield:

Coming on the heels of (and surely related to) news that Kalashnikov Concern has decided to launch the AK-12 on the open market, the Russian Army has announced today that both the AK-12 and the A545 (improved AEK-971 variant) have passed state trials and will be accepted into service with operational units for evaluation. VPK.name reports:

Russian news media today reports that, one year after Mikhail Kalashnikov’s death, the company that bears his name has officially launched the AK-12 rifle on the open market. Russia Today reports:

Our own Alex C has already posted a thorough review of the new CMMG dedicated 7.62×39 AR-15, so be sure to go check that out. Meanwhile, CMMG has released model and pricing details, through a press release:

Earlier this year we reported that  Chile had officially announced the adoption of the IWI GALIL ACE, the 5.56×45 mm version, as the standard service rifle of the Chilean Army. Local defense manufacturer FAMAE will be manufacturing the ACE under license from IWI. Infodefensa.com reports that last week the first FAMAE produced GALIL’s were presented to General Humberto Oviedo, Chief of the Chilean Army.