Stenzel SAK-21: "American-Made AK" Does Not Do It Justice

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look at the Stenzel SAK-21. Now this is often referred to as an American-made AK, but I don't think that's actually a very good label to put on it. It is sort of accurate, but the impression that that label gives is, well, every other American-made AK out there. Which is to say, Someone attempting to compete on price with surplus parts kits, and also attempting to replicate mass production industrial tooling, like stamped AK receivers, on a small scale basis. American-made AKs in general are not that great, they have a very poor reputation. But this isn't the same sort of thing. This is essentially a ground-up, newly developed firearm specifically intended to use AK magazines. And yes, the operating system does have a lot in common with an AK, but it also has some fundamental differences. There are, for example, zero parts from an AK that will interchange into this rifle, with the exception of the magazines. Now the backstory on this begins in Afghanistan, where Joe Stenzel, the designer, was serving on deployment as an Army Ranger, and realised that US troops had really good guns in 5.56. There are a ton of options, and they're really well made, they're reliable, they're accurate, they're excellent. But there were times when American Special Operations in particular wanted to use AK magazines and ammunition for any number of different reasons. And there were no good AK options that were up to the quality level of American 5.56 rifles. So what these guys would typically do is find some local AKs, obviously they'd be ex-Eastern Bloc stuff, Romanian, Hungarian, Chinese, you name it, use them in a mission, and then pretty much just toss them at the end because they weren't worth keeping around. And Stenzel had the idea of, why couldn't we make A rifle using AK mags and ammo that was up to every top-tier standard of every other rifle that we use. And wouldn't that be an interesting thing to have for American Special Forces in particular, for military operations, but also for the civilian market for people who are interested in having really nice, cool rifles. So he came back from deployment and set about designing, like, what would you do if you needed to use AK mags, and you were sort of starting with the AK as the basis of your concept, but you wanted the gun to actually be really good. And that is where the SAK-21 comes from. So let's just take a closer look at this, let me show you all of the different elements. that it has that are different than AKs, as well as those that are similar, and why this thing is even worth considering at its very high price point. Today's video is brought to you by Headstamp Publishing and Varusteleka. 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And yeah, actually my preference, having done a bunch of shooting with this now, would be to have the 12.5 inch barrel, but with the long handguard, just to give me a little bit more reach out here and more coverage of the barrel. But that's neither here nor there. Before we really dig into this, I do also want to point out this is not the original muzzle brake that came on the gun. It originally shipped with this muzzle brake on there. When I got this to Finish Brutality we popped this off and put on. This is an Ase Utra brake, and I was running a silent steel suppressor on it. This is absolutely a rifle that ... really it's intended to be suppressed. The concussion and blast that you get out of a 9.5 or 12.5 inch AK barrel is Quite substantial, the suppressor really makes 100% sense on this rifle, and that's the intention that it was designed with. Here are the markings on it, Stenzel Industries Inc. out of St. Michael, Minnesota. Calibre and model designation there. Because these are all sub-16 inch barrels, instead of having a permanently attached stock, they have a Picatinny rail attachment for the rear trunnion there. They come with arm braces, all like that, from Stenzel. Now let's start by taking a quick look at the controls. Let's start by taking a look at the controls, and then we'll do some disassembly. So magazine release is just like an AK. Big paddle back here pops the magazine out. Because they are standard AK mags, it's nose in, rock back. Now it's worth pointing out that they worked with XTech on the project, and they come with specific XTech proprietary magazines that have this unique follower with a bolt hold open tab in it. Now the gun will use all standard AK mags, But this is what it comes with, and we'll get to the reason why in just a moment. The controls in general have been made to sort of the American large control, easy ergonomics, fast to operate with sort of mindset. So the safety, instead of being an AK lever on the side, is a cross bolt or a push through safety. So white here is safe, push it across, red is fire. That is readily accessible from a firing grip. And it's really convenient, like this beats the heck out of a traditional AK safety. The only concern with it, certainly for me as a left-hander, is that there isn't really any fencing on this. And running with this thing slung, as I may have done at Finish Brutality, you do have the possibility of the gun bumping into your gear and popping into fire position. Now that said, There is a nice stiff spring and detent holding this in place, so it doesn't change position easily. But it is possible. If you're right-handed it's a lot less of a concern, because this would be the side of the rifle that's going to be hitting your gear. And so, worst case, it goes on to safe. Now on the left side we also have what looks like an AR bolt hold-open control, and that's kind of what it is. Note that the control itself is a big American flag. When I pull the bolt open, I can push down the bottom piece here, and manually lock the bolt into the open position. I can then hit the top and drop the bolt forward. So I have a manual hold-open. I also have a bolt release on the right side, so if I'm right-handed, that's going to fit right under my trigger finger, and allows me to also drop the bolt. Now the reason that you would want a bolt hold open on an AK is because this follower actually locks the gun open when the magazine is empty. It engages, or activates, the bolt hold open system, which means then I can pull the magazine out, the bolt stays open. Until I want to close it, presumably on a new magazine, to chamber a round of ammunition. So on a generic, regular AK mag, this Chinese example for instance, does not lock open. But I can manually hold it open using the control on the right side. And then of course there are also some AK mags that have flat-backed followers, designed to hold the gun open. These ... will operate in the SAK-21 just like they do in a regular AK. Which is to say, when the magazine's empty it will lock the gun open, and when you take the mag out it will drop the mag forward. So this hold-open system, I think, really is a very clever and very well-integrated concept. If you have the special magazines you get extra functionality, if you don't, you don't lose anything. You have exactly the same sort of manipulation that you would have on any normal AK. Stenzel gave this a flat-faced trigger. It is a two-stage trigger, just barely. Just a little bit of first stage take-up there, and then a very crisp firing, little bit of reset. Compared to a normal AK trigger, this thing is just absolutely magnificent. It is as good as pretty much any good AR trigger that you'll come across. I should also mention we have a big chunky charging handle there, very easy to access and get your hands on. Up at the front we have our gas block here, and we have a two-position gas regulator, along with a set screw right here. The set screw allows you to tune the gas ports, it tunes both of them at the same time. So typically what you would do is pick the one that you're going to normally use. One of them is intended really for a suppressor, and one of them for non-suppressor use. Or if you don't have a suppressor you would use one normally, and use the other as an adverse condition. Having this set screw allows you to tune it to get whatever balance of recoil versus extra reserve power you want to have in the gun. And this allows you, the design in general, the construction in general, along with the adjustability here, means that you can actually run a rifle that... It kind of looks like an AK without it having the traditional AK massive over-gassing and substantial recoil. Like a lot of the recoil in an AK is not actually from the cartridge itself, it's from the over-gassed bolt carrier slamming into the back of the receiver. And this system allows you to absolutely minimise that if you want to. The handguard is free-floated, so you can attach something like a laser or an optic up front if you want to. If you wanted to have thermal up front, that works fine. The top cover then is pinned to the handguard. The handguard is clamped very securely onto the front trunnion there. And then absolutely one of the coolest things about this rifle, it's like it's not the most important thing, in fact it's one of the least important things, but I think it is a brilliant little detail, is the disassembly. We're all used to AKs where you have to push the recoil spring in and then pop the top cover off. Well, what Stenzel did is essentially add a little shelf inside. So I can push the spring in and drop it down, and it just stays right there. So I just have to then lift the top cover up to disassemble it. And when I'm done, I put the top cover down, and I reach in and I just slide this up a millimetre or two, and the spring pops back in, and your dust cover is locked back in place. This retained zero, it got bumped around a lot at finish brutality, I had it open and closed cleaning the gun, never had any problems with retaining zero. Alright, so let's do our actual disassembly here. Pop that down. Take the recoil spring out. It is kind of interesting that this does not have a fully captive recoil spring. We have a half-length guide rod there, and then the recoil spring comes out. Then, like an AK, the bolt carrier is going to come back and lift out. It is worth commenting on the very fine precision machining that went into this. It's an aluminum, a milled billet aluminum receiver, steel bolt carrier. This thing slides like it's on glass, it is very, very nice to work with. Now when we pull this out, this looks like an AK bolt carrier, but this is not actually the gas piston. This is just extra mass in the carrier. This gun actually has a short-stroke gas piston up here, and we'll take that apart in just a moment. First, however, let's pull out the bolt. So this comes out just like an AK bolt. This is not interchangeable with an AK bolt, but it is mechanically the same. So you've got two locking lugs, you've got a rotating cam, extractor, like this is just a copy of an AK bolt. However, the firing pin is fixed into the bolt carrier by that pin. There's no firing pin spring, this just has a little bit of travel forward and back. The firing pin retaining pin is captive in there once I pop it out. So the firing pin retaining pin ... has a split end to it. You can pull it all the way out if you want to, but you don't actually have to. You can just slide it to the edge there, leave it captive in the bolt carrier, and pull out the firing pin. Now moving up to the front we can remove the gas block... moving up to the front we've got our gas piston moving up to the front. We've got our gas plug here, you can see the one detent and the two positions that it can be in. In order to remove it I am going to push the detent in and rotate it a little further till ... there we go. Gas plug comes out, so there are our two gas ports. And once it's out you can see that hole in the front. Which goes clear through from there. This set screw simply obstructs a part of that vent hole. So the more you run the set screw in, the more you're blocking off this hole, and the more gas gets run into the system and propels the bolt carrier backward. As you run this screw out you are opening up this gas port, you're venting more gas out to the outside, and you're reducing the amount of gas that's actually pushing on the system. With the gas plug out, I can now just run a cleaning rod up into the gas system and push the actual piston out. So there's your gas piston. No spring on this either, it's pushed backward by gas and it's reset forward by simply the impact of the bolt carrier. So the front of the carrier right there interacts with the gas piston, pushes it back and forward. Alright, looking at the receiver, a couple of things to point out here. First off, like I said, we have aluminium sides to the receiver, but there is then a steel insert in here. And that's quite relevant because it's actually these steel rails that the bolt is running on. So those steel rails run right inside those two grooves, so this isn't wearing on the aluminium receiver. The front trunnion is very clearly copied from the AK or AKM, which makes sense. The bolt also is using a known good core operating system, like the rotating bolt and trunnion from the AK, is a smart thing to do. And of course you know it's going to interact well with AK magazines, which was the whole intent of this rifle in the first place. So by copying the AK trunnion you've got your front mounting lock for the magazines in place, At least you've got... Locking shoulders for the bolt, all that stuff is very AK, unlike some of the other elements. Now that front trunnion is held in by four large screws. Those are permanently in place, like that's not intended to be disassembled. We have another two sets of screws at the back holding the rear trunnion in place. One of the cool things here is this does give Stenzel the easy option at a later date of changing up what sort of rear stock attachment they want on the gun. Like if these do well, if there's demand or interest in something other than Picatinny rail back here, that'd be easy to do with this setup. Alright, and there is the SAK 21 all field stripped. Alright, like I said, I took this rifle to Finnish Brutality this year, used it through the match. Now, unfortunately, if you've watched my Finnish Brutality videos, you'll notice a fair number of malfunctions, which are sadly all directly related back to the magazines, and in one case me sticking the charging handle in front of a barricade. But I took regular surplus mags on the basis of, hey, this rifle uses standard AK mags, I'll just take some of those instead of polymer modern ... US-made mags. That turns out to have been the wrong decision, I had a bunch of malfunctions from my magazines. But while I was there, in addition to using the rifle myself, I also put it in the hands of a couple of other folks competing. Namely, we had Calvin from Firepower United, we had Giga from Polonar Tactical, and we had FPS Kenny all take a turn with this rifle on one of the stages. So let me cut to some discussion of what they think of it, so you have more opinion than just mine. No, it was it was fun to shoot with a rifle that's actually zeroed and it works. Yes, yes. And it ran so well that if like if you blindfolded me... I would never say this is like an AK, because even on adverse setting, it doesn't recoil that much, it has like a flat trigger, it feels way different than a normal AK, and of course the stock is different, so I would just be, oh, this is some kind of AR or something. Probably the softest 7.62x39 rifle thing I've ever shot. How much are the recoil mitigations from the weight of the rifle? a little bit some it's it's chunky it's chunky um chunky but it's like it's not that heavy like is this aluminum receiver yeah okay all right yeah it's aluminum receiver with steel trunnions well the only thing that i kind of don't like about it it looks cool but i don't like the the color scheme because of Q it just i think it's I don't know, I like the color scheme a lot, I think it's actually pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, I just, it reminds me, like... If Q made an AK. Kinda, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would be douchebaggy. That's the only one. So, one thing that we've talked about, a bunch of people out here, is the handguard is very short on this. And they do make a 16-inch version with a longer handguard. And I can definitely see the practicality of having the long handguard on the short barrel. Yeah, what I did, I kind of touched the barrel a bit. It was not bad, but yeah, you have to keep in mind that this one is short. I have short arms, so that wasn't a problem for me. Another thing that I'm interested about, I see that it has bolt catch, bolt release. Yes. Does this work with normal AK magazines? No. Okay. It works with their followers. I didn't bring those, but I also haven't shot it to bolt lock. In this match. Because we're doing a lot of, you know, fire 10 or 15 rounds, and then unload and make a high-value shot. And then when I reload it's typically from a fresh full magazine, so I don't think I've actually had a time in the match where it would have shot the bolt lock. I like the safety. It's very intuitive and it's not too like too hard Um, I use it in the match. That was good. What's this? Oh, that's the bolt release. Oh, so it's just on the other side Oh, yeah, yeah Also, it loads AK magazines really nicely. It does. I agree. Yeah, I know I did talk to them One of the things I wanted to do was see if there's an FRT was possible but because of the safety design how it goes through they are saying that FRTs would not be possible, but So just make it full auto. Make it full auto, yeah. And I've got to shoot it a couple times at other events I've been to. It's been pleasant. The only issue I had, which I believe is a magazine issue, was I had a double feed at the end. So it was honestly, oversized charging handle made it super easy to just clear. Like, this is huge. All the controls on it are oversized. It's awesome, yeah. So I was able to rip the mag out, charge the bolt, put it back in, rack one, and go quick. Yeah, super, super pleasant. Very, very nice recoil impulse, I would say, yeah. Calvin, anything else? Just one other thing, I noticed that the way the carrier rides in the receiver, it's also the smoothest I've ever felt in. Yeah, yeah. Very, very smooth. Zero side binds. Yeah. And for what it's worth, we've had the Aimpoint on there the whole time. Other than the one time I accidentally unlocked the locking lever, it has retained zero, it's not wobbling, top cover's solid. It's gotten banged around a bit in this match, and no loss of zero to it. It's because they make excellent products. I meant the rifle, but yes. The Aimpoint itself, also. Are you sponsored by Aimpoint? No, but I'm trying to. I want to come back to my comment from the beginning about how calling this an American-made AK really doesn't give you a proper understanding of what this rifle really is. It's like calling it's like calling the PPK a German-made highpoint. Like, technically, yes, they're both blowback pistols available in .380, but That, like, a German-made high point does not give you the correct impression of a PPK. Well, same thing here. Calling this an American-made AK does not give you the correct impression of what it really is. Because overall, this thing is magnificent. It's extremely well made, it shoots very smoothly. If this was the only AK you'd ever shot, you would not understand all of the negative connotations of AKs. And so in a way it's unfortunate that it does just kind of get sidelined as American-made AK. Now, is this rifle something that everybody needs? Is this rifle something that American Special Forces need in a way that they might have while we were still active in Afghanistan? Well, no, certainly not. It's certainly not for everybody, and it may have missed its moment for American Special Forces. Although, who knows? where we're going to be sending troops next, so they might want an AK compatible rifle to use. At any rate, it is available on the commercial market. They do make it in two different barrel lengths, 9.5 and 12.5. It's an awesome rifle. If this is the sort of thing that you think is cool, this is an extremely good execution of the concept. And I was very happy to see that. Not all small new American firearms manufacturers managed to put out something that's actually really good, and Stenzel has. Now, full disclosure, they sent me this rifle to film, to use in the match, and to keep. So perhaps I have a bias there, although I ... I don't think that's the case. Like, this would be a fantastic rifle if I sent it back to them, and it's still a fantastic rifle that I get to keep, and I'm just really happy that I get to keep it and continue using it. Because it is, like, just light years ahead of any other AK that I've got. So thanks to Senzel for sending the rifle over. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Oh, also thanks to Calvin, Kenny and Zhiga for joining me at Finnish Brutality and doing some shooting with this. They certainly enjoyed the rifle. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.