DBoys RK-06 AK-74 Review

[Utty]

DBoys RK-06 AK-74 Review

 

 

A friend donated me this DBoys/Kalash RK-06 for reviewing. Owning a very early version RK-03 (AKS-74) and an RK-01 Steel ver. (AKS-74U), I was interested in finding out how they would compare. The DBoys AKs are VFC clones, which means far more realistic design and feel than the pre-blowback Marui AKs and their clones. Let's take a look.

 

 

The box arrived in pristine condition.

 

 

 

Nice presentation, the manual being on top of everything else. Probably wise.

 

 

 

Under the red cardboard: Gun, cleaning rod (under the gun), sling, useless charger, weak little 1100MAh 8.4V stick battery, plastic hi-cap magazine, complimentary BBs.

Package tauntingly features cut-out for AIMS foregrip, and a lot of spare room for whatever.

 

But wait, the sling looks different than the garbage one supplied with my previous two DBoys AKs:

 

 

This is basically a real-steel AK sling, there are very little differences between this and a real AK sling I have, both in materials and shape. The toy slings supplied with my other DBoys AKs went straight in the trash. This one's definitely a keeper.

 

Let's take a closer look at the externals of the gun, starting from the front. The neodymium magnet rods are attached to all steel parts, if a part doesn't have a magnet on it, it's alloy, not steel. The exceptions are all pins and screws, which are steel all steel.

 

 

The flash hider is, surprisingly, very solidly attached and doesn't wobble at all. The same goes for the front sight assembly, firmly pinned to the outer barrel. Note that only the front sight post itself is steel, not the whole assembly. Also, only the gas tube and the front of the upper handguard bracket are steel, not the gas route pinned to the outer barrel, nor the rear upper handguard bracket.

 

 

 

The leaf spring behind the rear upper handguard bracket is, of course, steel, and so are all the other parts with a magnet on them, plus all pins and rivets.

The selector is much more firm and positive than my other DBoys AKs, almost reminds me of the selector on a RealSword AK.

The RK-06 has (sadly) the newer matte black finish, not the semi-shiny and wonderfully scratchable finish found on older RK versions. Oh well.

 

Moving on to the stock:

 

 

Sling attachment is all steel, as is the rear stock plate, including the round, spring-loaded door hiding the tool compartment (which is surprisingly roomy, more on that below).

 

Moving back to the flash hider for a moment:

 

 

The brass inner barrel goes all the way out to the larger side vents on the flash hider.

 

 

 

The front handguard and gas tube takedown. Easy and quick to do, no surprises here.

 

(to be continued)

[Utty]

(continued from part 1)

 

 

The wood is old-school Dboys wood: not very pretty, but does the job. Just begging for some sanding, staining and weathering.

 

How about those pesky DBoys AK magazine catches, they still have those?

 

 

Yes.

Looks like they took an angle grinder to this particular specimen in the factory... but not enough. Neither the supplied hi-cap nor MAG midcaps would lock in place, at all. Quite a lot of material still needed to be removed before the magazines would lock in place, fortunately it's easy to do with a small file and a dremel.

 

Anyway, how's that fixed stock, then?

 

 

Not very fixed, in fact. It wobbles. See that gap? It goes from no gap to that much. Tightening the stock screw does nothing, it's the wood stock itself that doesn't have a tight fit with the stock attachment.

 

Not only that, but the stock is actually warped:

 

 

The whole thing bends clearly to the right when seen from behind. Also the stock attachment on the receiver seems to be misaligned, pointing a little to the right.

 

It's fixable. Pushing the stock as much as it'll go to the left, ligns it up with the rest of the gun. Some epoxy, and it should be sorted. Still, it shouldn't have to come to that.

 

Also, I was expecting the stock to be solid, but it's actually hollow:

 

 

 

There is actually plenty of room for a 2200MAh 11.1V LIPO, so the gun is actually read for being wired to the rear, which is pretty cool. However, as the gun is a VFC clone, it already has room for a 12V stick battery in the receiver, so I have no plans for wiring the stock for larger batteries.

 

 

 

Let's have a look at the internals.

 

Before opening the sucker up, I test fired the gun. Smooth and quiet mechbox, no feeding issues, 400fps with a 3fps deviation using G&G .20g BIOs. And that's before I even cleaned the barrel, which turned out to be grimy, but not full of grease.

 

The mechbox:

 

 

 

Looks fine. Nylon bushings, though.

 

 

 

Sloppy grease job, and yet the gears themselves are 90% dry. *facepalm* Despite that, the mechbox actually sounded very smooth and quiet before opening it up.

 

The gears are very nice specimens of the XYT steel kind, very smooth and even.

 

Spring guide is plastic with metal base, and twin washers instead of bearings. In my experience this stock DBoys spring guide is very durable and doesn't need replacing.

 

(to be continued)

[Utty]

(continued from part 2)

 

 

The spring is very short, but stiff. Here is a visual comparison with some other springs.

 

 

 

Cylinder/piston parts, covered in brown sauce. Not much to complain about, except the piston head O-ring is rather rough. But since the initial chrono results were so impressive, I decided to keep it to begin with.

 

 

 

Mechbox cleaned up and ready for closing. I opted for a dry film lubricant for the gears, just to try it out.

 

As you can see, the piston sits further back than before, and some of the 2nd to last tooth has been removed. This is because of the angle of engagement mod, where shims are placed between piston and piston head, to properly align the last piston tooth with the corresponding sector gear tooth. This improves piston durability, but also reduces effective cylinder air volume, potentially dropping the FPS a bit.

 

After closing the mechbox and reinstalling it in the gun, the chrono results were in the 370's with a deviation of some 18fps. Hmm, something wasn't right. My bet was the poor quality piston head O-ring, so I tried replacing it with a better, and oversized, O-ring.

 

FPS readings jumped to 385 with a 3fps deviation again. Seems the raggedness of the stock O-ring was compensated for by the large amounts of brown goo jammed inside cylinder. With a sane amount of cylinder lube, the stock O-ring loses its ability to provide consistent compression.

 

 

Switching to G&G .28g BIOs for some outdoors longer range testing, I found that the stock inner barrel and hop-up rubber are actually decent. Consistent A4-size groupings at 25 metres range, can't really complain about that. However, I had to turn the hop-up to 100%, and the BBs were still dropping a little at the end of the trajectory.

 

The hop-up rubber is the same ol' DBoys quality, very stiff and plastic-like. A better rubber will certainly help, but the stock part actually performs decently. I may try a larger nub before switching the rubber.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The RK-06 is definitely great, as expected, but the wobbly, warped stock is a letdown. If I was in the market for plain-jane AK-74 with fixed wood stock, well, I'd have to choose between this and the VFC.

If fixed wood stock wasn't a requirement, I'd choose a different DBoys model or one of the recent CYMA VFC-clone AKs, just to avoid the RK-06's wobbly stock.

 

That said, I'm going to epoxy the stock on mine, and skirmish the hell out of it. I love the look, feel and balance of the full wood furniture, and the non-wobbly flash hider and front sight assembly are a positive surprise. I suspect my other AKs will be gathering some dust from now on.

 

Comments and questions are welcome.

[Utty]

(Update)

 

Having epoxied the stock, the result can be seen here:

 

 

The stock now lines up properly, the epoxy rendering it a monolithic shaft of supreme stiffness. Nice.

 

 

I also experimented with the hop-up. Trying out different nubs, I ended up using two: a Madbull fishbone spacer inside an Element blue nub. This provided the needed girth and hardness to properly push down against the rather stiff Dboys hop-up rubber, to lift a .28g G&G BIO at about 50% hop-up.

[Sig552]

Does the gun still seem to be holding up? Any problems with it so far?

[Utty]

Actually I haven't skirmished it yet, not enough games and too much work. *fruitcage* dat! I hope to go skirmishing this sunday, so that I may blast some *albatross* AK style. ~____~

[Utty]

Oh yeah, so I skirmished the RK06 on sunday, no problems. Of course my other Prometheus barrel & Systema bucking-equipped guns shot a lot further and straighter, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

 

Time for some upgradin'.

[The Reptile House]

Good news! My RK03S will have its first outing on Sunday in vanilla mode, before a bit of a refit