Well the conversion isn’t going well. The gas assembly wont fit over the rear of the barrel as I mentioned in post 2. My original plan was to cut down the barrel to the width of the gas assembly unit. As it turned out the outer barrel is metal and it would have taken ages with the tools at my disposable. With a lathe, it would have been simple.

Plan 2 was to then file down the inside of the gas assembly chamber. This I did. I’ve taken it down as far as possible before I think it’s got to thin. And that’s still to small to fit on the barrel. At this stage I was willing to give up until I could find someone with a lathe that could have cut the barrel down for me which is a shame because I now have most of the parts.

Luckily, I was helped out on the Red Alliance forums by a member who was selling various RPK bits and one of these was a full length barrel which I promptly bought. This barrel also has the benefits of having the cleaning rod and the retaining caps for the furniture and cleaning rod on so it’ll look better. All I have to do now is wait for that to arrive from the US.

As I mentioned, most of the parts are now ordered and arrived. I have the wire to rewire the Dragunov to have the battery in the stock. I ordered on Monday from Overlander and I got the wire the next day! Top service chaps!

As for the battery, I bought a second hand, barely used, 9.6v battery from Warrior on ASCUK. Again, I bought that on Sunday evening and it arrived on Tuesday. In the RPK, it has to have a custom battery to fit it. A standard large battery like that which an AK uses wont fit. It’s just to long. Even an 8.4v wont fit. A small battery can fit but you wont have the capacity. Luckily after some measuring by me and Warrior, we found that the PEQ box battery I bought can just fit in. Like it was especially for it. PEQ boxes are those horrible thing on the front of Armalites that look terrible but at least the batteries can fit the RPK stock! So now I have a 1700mA 9.6v battery that fits.

I placed my order with RSOV on Monday as well. RSOV is quite busy and they’re only processing my order today according to there website. I believe it’s run by one chap and maybe a couple of workers but I’ve heard good things so I’m not to worried.

I bought an AK74 metal body for the gun. I’ll just whip off the current plastic TM AK47 body I put on to test if I could do it and it all fit and whack on the AK74 metal body. I also ordered a AK74 plastic pistol grip. This will make the RPK look more like an RPK74 than if I was to use the wooden grip that the RPK kit came with. And because I felt like trying something else, I bought some cheap Dboys hi cap mags. These are double stack type mags and can carry a hefty 1000 rounds each! For £9 for 2, I thought they were worth trying out, even if they turn out to be terrible. I’ll do a review on just them when I get them.

My list of stuff so far I’ve bought is:-

I was eagerly awaiting the release of this when I first heard about it. It seemed fantastic! A game set in the Ukraine with Russian weaponry and atmospheric.

After waiting years for it to come out, I bought the special edition and installed and started. Great fun. Until I found I could only run it on the lowest graphics settings on my AMD 3500+ and nVidia 6200 based machine. The game quickly lost my interest when I found out that the torch beam does not show up on the minimum settings, thus making the game pretty unplayable!! I sold the game and thought nothing more of it.

Anyhow, I bought a new machine for my final year of university that was powerful enough for me to run computational fire models for my degree. Because the easiest (and almost the cheapest) option was a Dell machine, it also had a fairly decent graphics card, a nVidia 8800GT. Now I’d given up on PC gaming but this breathed some life back into my gaming and when I saw STALKER was cheap on Steam, I bought it. For just over £10, I thought it’ll definitely run on my new Intel Quad core and 8800GT combo.

Installed again and was very happy I can play with pretty much everything at max and quite happily play on my wide screen with 1440×900.
All I can see the game is very atmospheric. From having friendly stalkers sat around a camp fire, playing a guitar and singing along in Russian to investigating abandoned dark buildings, the game always makes you think your actually there.

The weapons in the game are very good as well. For someone interested in military gear it’s quite a nice game. At the start of it, the guns predominantly Russian as you fight the military a lot. AK74 feature heavily and the guns are well modelled with slight differences to the real ones, specifically to make it better for the game. IE, the AK74 has the cocking handle on the left of the gun as you hold it in your right hand. It’s a bit more obvious then that you cock it each time you reload. Later on, you get other weapons. The first time I used an SA80 (with a different name in game, possibly due to trademarks), I almost had to stop dancing around the place as it also contained a SUSAT and I was then quite happily picking off zombies and mutants from 4x away! Though this did have the downside of seeing some rather nasty mutants well before I fought any…

Also the jam function is quite a nice touch (but not whilst your under attack!). Basically the more you use a weapon, the more it deteriorates and thus the more likely it is to jam.

Overall the game is very tense and fighting through some of the areas populated by just mutants is quite nasty. Once or twice I’ve physically jumped back from the PC in fear. Luckily though in this game, flash lights never run out and unlike Doom 3, you can use both a gun and the light as the light is should mounted (if your the same as every other person in the game). The quest are fairly good as well. A mixture of this and that, never being to much of pick this up, shoot these people etc. it’s a very immersive game. The game storyline is great for drawing you in.

Downside is the long walks between some places. A few places in the game require some long walking between the two which isn’t good. Also, at times I can be quite hard. All I can see about it being hard is explore more. It can become much easier if you do that side quest you turned down etc. It’s worth asking people about anything and everything and looking around.

Just out of interest, I managed to stumble upon a Half Life reference in the game.

Well it seems the RPK is a big gun in the UK at the minute. With very little in the way of ready made ones, after market kits and conversions are the way to get these in the UK.

Clone Ranger over at Milgeek has a nice article on RPK’s in the UK here.

It’s a nice article and I must admit, I estimate the amount of RPK’s will increase in Britain with the release of an affordable RPK. Kind of annoyed I missed out on the SRC RPK’s at Red Wolf Armouries as that is actually a good price but on the other hand, my RPK will be “my” RPK as I’ll have built it from a Dragunov. Mine will also be an RPK74, not an RPK47.
It’s also a nice feeling to be able to actually open up the gun itself and mess with the internals.

Anyhow, read Clone Ranger’s post. Tis a good one.

Well the RPK furniture arrived and it’s very nice.

Here’s where some problems started. Because the JG Dragunov is based on an AKS body, there is nowhere to mount the rear stock. Not a huge problem because I was eventually going to buy myself a metal body and thus I could just buy a full stock AK body. Until I bought it, my mate was kind enough to give me one he had spare. Thus I took the AK apart and fixed that. Having never taken apart an airsoft gun before, it was bit of a learning curve. Luckily google helped and I found this fantastic guide from Classic Army.

After some messing about, that was done. Whilst it was also taken apart, I added a longer barrel my housemate no longer wanted.

The furniture will now fit the rear stock and the grip but the front furniture wont. It will but there’s a problem. The gas block assembly is stuck about 3 inches from the furniture because the outer barrel is 2 different lengths as the pictures below show.

As you can see, it’s going to need some work. I’ll be buying a Dremel next week and will be grinding the outer barrel down to a size where the gas assembly block can fit.

Here’s how the gun looks at the rear now.

Well that’s it as it stands. Until I can get the Dremel and grind that down, I’m stuck.

Below is a table of what I need and what I’ve already got and what it cost.

I’m after AK74 parts because I’m turning the RPK into an RPK 74 over the older RPK47. Slight difference between them but not huge differences. Simpilly put, the RPK47 is based on the AK47 and the RPK74 is based on the RPK74. Easy enough

A while back, I bought a JG Dragunov. Now this is a nice gun, even if it’s not a 100% Dragunov replica. I bought it to do some sniping with it whilst airsofting and I’d been waiting for a Dragunov that was semi automatic, like the real one.

Unfortunately, I’ve found sniping isn’t my think. Maybe it would be with a proper bolt action but not with this. Most of the sites I play at allow 500fps sniper rifles but not 500fps semi auto snipers. So I’m stuck with the standard AEG limit of 328fps. Not what I want really. I also found that single shots, a lot of people would shrug off not knowing if they had been hit or not. This meant I could either upgrade the gun to double tap quickly (which worked out expensive) or to use the gun on auto and fire bursts. This instantly took the gun out of where I wanted it to be used so I thought of getting rid of it.

I’ve wanted an RPK since I started airsoft. I thought I could convert this nice piece of kit into an RPK. So that’s what I’m doing. It’s a bit of the shame as I sprayed the Dragunov to start with to get it how I liked it (black). So I’m going to convert the JG and keep track of it here.

Here’s how the gun looked when I bought it.

Now that looks fine to me. Not a bad looking gun. Obviously I removed the bipod to get it looking more like a Dragunov. I then sprayed it black.

This is how the gun looks now before I start the RPK conversion.

To get the RPK looking like an RPk, I’m going to need the following:-

• RPK Furniture
• Sights
• Mags

Most of the above I have lying around. The mags I already have thanks to already owning an AK.

I ‘ve ordered some RPK parts from Action Hobbys and I’ll wait until I get those before I do anything else

A fantastic game at MIA airsoft again this weekend. greta game, thanks to all that attended. Shown me I need various equipment for playing CQB games. That’ll come soon.