Destroying an AK, Russians “Stress Test” 70 year old “supergun”

The footage, titled “How to kill AK-74M? Full auto fire | Destroyers of weapons” was posted on Kalashnikov Concern’s YouTube page and has since gone viral in Russia. While rifle-destroying videos are a thing among some gun enthusiasts, it’s a rare sight for an arms maker to be putting its own piece through a full-auto meltdown torture.

The gun involved is just your average army-issue AK-74M assault rifle, manufactured in 2014. It had seen some use already, and was not readied or hardened for the test by any means, according to Kalashnikov.

A whopping 26 magazines – 780 rounds – were readied for the test, and the gun managed to chew through most of them. The plastic parts of the rifle eventually began to melt and it went on fire, and the gun ultimately blew its barrel after shooting 587 rounds in full-auto mode.

The AK-74’s barrel became visibly dented after the stress test, while the last round’s casing got fused solid within the chamber. The receiver was apparently not damaged during the shooting, apart from getting a thick sap cover.

The overall result appears to be quite solid – at least according to the Russian Army’s demands, which require an assault rifle to be able to withstand the shooting of ‘just’ 180 rounds in full-auto mode. “This firing rate is not considered normal for the weapon,” the Kalashnikov expert frankly warns, before proceeding with the torturous test.