This Romanian PAR-1 is mostly made up of traditional AKM parts with a twist. It features a pump action mechanism rather than a functioning gas system.
Interestingly unlike most pump actions the pump on this rifle is spring loaded. Meaning that it will slide back forward after being pulled back and released.
Why?
It was made as an attempt by gun importers in the 1990s to keep selling their AK hardware while complying with the US 1994 Assault Weapon Ban, import restrictions, and various other restrictions by states in the 1990s.
That’s actually kinda cool. So people could convert it back into an AK? Or maybe even a saiga?
It wasn’t designed to be easily converted by buyers, but was a way for sellers to use most of their existing parts assembled with some new parts to make something legal to sell.
To convert this to semi-auto would require drilling a gas port in the barrel, fitting a gas system, and figuring out how to put on some standard handguards or saw down the pump handguard to fit and stay affixed. I don’t think there’s any point in time when this would have been worthwhile to do compared to just getting a semi-auto AK from the start.
In terms of wacky things done to comply with laws, it’s the AK version of this:
This is mostly a guess, but I would imagine it’s probably for places like the UK where semi-auto rifles are caliber restricted to .22 rimfire. If you want to shoot anything larger the action has to be cycled manually.
I’ve seen pump-action conversion kits for the AR platform as well.
Like, in that there probably isn’t a huge application for a pump-action AK-47?
Why not?
I mean, there is a lot more variety in firearms out there than purely-functional reasons. Why have different finishes available on firearms? Why am I drinking my (sips) chocolate shake, rather than just gruel?
What the fuck were they thinking? This is terrible.
“what did we design after we ate those shrooms last night?”
