Finally ponied up and bought a new gun, from a new manufacturer. Kalashnikov USA KP9, with a Jmac 1913 5.5 end plate, and SG 1913 folding brace. Swapped to a well worn Tapco G2 trigger from my neglected Saiga 5.45 last night since the KP9 factory trigger has a mile of take up and over travel. Ran about 200 rounds through right at dark and it ran like a sewing machine. Hopefully I can put in a few hours this weekend and burn about 500 through it to break everything in. Finish is nice, everything is super smooth and tight, a few things too tight. The bolt took a good bit of work to wiggle out of the receiver for disassembly, so I took a file and took a little material out of the cutout on the receiver rail, comes out with no issue now. The lower hand guard retainer is fit very tightly to the barrel too, and require a lot of finagling and a few taps with a hammer to free the front hand guard. Rivets are well done, everything is straight as piss. Seems to be a very high quality AK. I would put it up against an arsenal any day. Time will tell how it holds up, but reports from the internet seem very promising.
