My semiauto 7.62x39 Chinese conversion is finished!

[Peter Laidler]

Though I fired them from the waist, never in anger, we were taught to do it with the gun pulled back, across the top of your pouches.

Just be warned when you get the parts for the carrying handle and look at the parts list for correct assembly. That's because the screw thread for the outer sleeve, called the CATCH, carrying hande and the NUT, catch carruing handle AND the STEM and NUT carrying handle (sorry if I've got the nomenclature wrong here but it sounds right!) are a VERY fine -about a zillion TPI - metric thread and VERY easy to cross thread and once it's been X-threaded it is pretty well impossible to make good, believe me! We all had a special home-made forked screwdriver set into a flat hollow barrel that would hold both nuts square against the spring while they were being tightened.

There was an issue tool AND a forked screwdriver in the Mk1 combination tool. DO NOT USE THESE MONSTEROSITIES. They don't hold the nuts square and once they start to X-thread, you're knackered!

As I seem to recall, the HANDLE, carrying only came as an assembly and you couldn't get the internals separately. Not a problem in the Armourers shops as we usually had plenty with broken wood grips that we could use. At the big Field and Base workshops we could and did repair and patch the wood grips. Anyway............