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Old 01-02-2013, 05:05 AM
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MT2008 MT2008 is offline
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The Specialists (the big armory in New York) has AK-74Ms and AKS-74Us in inventory, if you check their web site. As far as I can tell, they are the only American armory that has purchased and converted any 5.45x39mm AKs, though if any of the armorers in California on here can correct me on this, I welcome their input. However, this is ONLY the U.S. - I have seen 5.45x39mm AKs in countless movies and TV shows that were filmed in Europe and Canada.

I think Nyles is correct - 5.45x39mm blanks are probably going to be less readily available than 7.62x39mm or 5.56x45mm, so it makes more sense to mock up AKs in either of those calibers to resemble AK-74s. Think about how difficult it is to buy that caliber in the U.S., and you can expect that this will be a major problem for armorers who routinely work on films where thousands of blanks are going to be fired even in movies that are not very action-oriented.

I suspect that this is the reason that "GoldenEye" used Chinese Type 56-1s to stand in for AKS-74s - the armorers at Bapty & Co. probably couldn't manufacture sufficient quantities of 5.45mm blanks for the dozens of AKs required by the production. And I would imagine that whatever blanks they were able to manufacture in time for filming would have been reserved mostly for the AKS-74U used by Pierce Brosnan (since it was one of the "hero" weapons in the movie) rather than the AKs used by the extras playing the Russian military personnel. The issue was clearly not that AK-74s weren't available to the armorers, since there actually are some real AKS-74s seen in the movie (in the tank chase, one of them is even fired).
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Last edited by MT2008; 01-02-2013 at 05:18 AM.
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