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How to Build An AK Without Expensive Tools Or Jigs

To do this cheaply You NEED: a drill press a bench vise a hammer, a 3# short-handled maul should do the trick. a good set of punches. a circular saw with a metal-cutting wheel. a rotary (Dremel) tool with cutoff wheels and coarse sanding drums. a stack of about 15 pennies.

Use the drill press to get the old rivets out of the trunnions. The hammer and punches will help here.

You have to remove the barrel from the front trunnion. To do this you're going to have to come up with a way to lay the front trunnion/barrel on its side, supporting the barrel/trunnion pin without blocking it underneath. Next use a punch and the hammer to drive out the pin. Now every time you whack it you're probably going to have to rebuild your cradle. That's the price you pay for not having a press.

Now you'll have to make a cradle to support the front trunnion side edges with the muzzle facing the floor, the breech on top, and the trunnion "ears" supported on the sides. You'll also need to make some 6" long x 1/2" steel punches out of Home Depot bar stock. Now stack up four or so pennies on the breech, set the punch on top of them, and beat the shit out of it until the barrel drops out of the trunnion. Again, every time you hit the punch you'll have to rebuild your rig, but that's the price ...

Now you have a demilled kit, and you can begin. Get a 30" pair of bolt cutters, and use a bench grinder to make a rivet press out of them. Look around on the internet for the instructions. They're easy to find and the tool is easy to make. Rivet your front trunnion in place. Do the back rivets first, and the front rivets second. That way you don't have to reach around the front rivets to get to the back ones. Now the front trunnion is done.

To rivet the trigger guard I guess you're going to have to make a bucking bar and a bucking plate. There's no easy way around this. You're going to have to get bar stock, then drill out dimples so it fits the two rivet heads under the trigger guard on the outside of the receiver. You'll do one side at a time in this evolution. Set your plate in place under the receiver and under the trigger guard (Don't forget to put in the safety selector stop plate - and not upside down either!) Now with the receiver set up, so the trigger guard and bucking plate are at the bottom, use a punch with a dimple drilled out to make a rivet head (or just crush it flat instead like I do), and hammer down the trigger-guard rivet. Do this for all five trigger-guard rivets.

Now for the rear trunnion. This is the easiest of all if you do it correctly. The rivets run all the way through the stock mounting block, so you're going to have to support one end of the rivet while you crush the other end. The best tool I've found for this is my bench vise. Using two bucking plates drilled out to fit rivet heads, I place a plate on each side of the rivet to be crushed, then with my third hand I close the jaws of the vise until it holds the plates firmly. What we're after here is to get them parallel with each other, and parallel to the sides of the receiver. As you close the vise and crush the rivets you're going to have to check every 1/4-turn to see if either plate is becoming misaligned, and fix them if they do. A misaligned plate will contact the receiver before fully crushing the rivet head, and it will damage or destroy your receiver. Once this is done, you pretty much have the receiver assembled.

Now to press the barrel in: You're going to have to make another cradle with a bar that runs through the magwell and is supported on each end, so you essentially hang the receiver from the bar through the magwell with the ass-end of the receiver facing down. I made the bar with flat bar-stock from Home Depot. I cut four 8" lengths of 1"x3/16" flat bar stock. I shaped them using my bench grinder to fit inside the magwell. I insert them one by one until all four are in place. I hang the receiver on the bar, then put the barrel in place, pile pennies on the muzzle (facing up), then start hammering on the penny-covered muzzle until the barrel finally slides into place inside the trunnion. You'll want to headspace the barrel as it goes in, and for that there's no substitute for the $30 headspace gauges from Brownells, Midway, etc. When the barrel is correctly positioned in the trunnion, pin it in place using the pin you bashed out in step 2. You're pretty much done at this point. Assemble the stripped components, and fire the gun.