IO AK47s....are these quality AK's

[aquaman]

I would avoid I.O. like the plague. Their receivers are not in spec to normal European-style receivers (1.0 standard vs. 1.1 I.O.) that could lead to interchangeability issues down the road. They are the same if not worse than Century and TGI builds as previously mentioned. The only cheap AK I would consider buying would be a WASR-10/63 that uses surplus Romanian military parts that were used on ex full-auto military AK's built at Cugir (the military gun not the WASR) with chrome-lined bores.



Actually starting in 2000 after Romania was caught selling AK's to unfriendly nations, the government shut down AK production at Cugir to save face and transferred production to Sadar which was already building AK's for the foreign market. However the quality was not as good as those built at Cugir whose quality also suffered after Ceaucescu's 1983 purges that included many technical experts at Cugir who knew how to build AK's well.

Sadar is know the sole producer of AK's in Romania including the WASR's. A lot of the early WASR's had problems because they were built with Sadar quality which was terrible to say the least. To put it bluntly, a Cugir rejected part was still 5 times better than a Sadar rejected part. Now with the Romanian military going away from the 7.62 AK platform as can be observed with the tons of parts kits in country, Sadar bought a lot of them as well to be built into the WASR-10/63 to help improve their image on the commercial market. This is because they were built using parts from their sister arsenal Cugir who as previously mentioned were much better at building AK's than Sadar was even with the purges done by Ceaucescu.

Information can be found here:http://www.mouseguns.com/wasrrev/review.htm

The factory is still going and still state owned completely or partially. They had financial difficulties in 2006 and century was actually going to buy all or a portion of the factory but they eventualy pulled through. Here is their website

http://www.arms.home.ro/arms/pg/index.html

I think you may have got some bad info?

*EDIT*
I emailed them on this. Better to get the answer directly from the source.

 

[Scott7891]

The factory is still going and still state owned completely or partially. They had financial difficulties in 2006 and century was actually going to buy all or a portion of the factory but they eventualy pulled through. Here is their website

http://www.arms.home.ro/arms/pg/index.html

I think you may have got some bad info?

*EDIT*
I emailed them on this. Better to get the answer directly from the source.

I never said Cugir went out of business. I just said they stopped building AK's. Cugir makes heavy weapons solely for the Romanian military like machine guns, tanks, artillery etc. and moved all AK production to Sadar. Id still love to hear the information they send you.

 

[aquaman]

The email bounced back. The contact info on the website listed an email address with a german country code(.de) Im not going to give up because its worth it to alot of folks to know exactly what they are getting. I didn't mean to imply you did not know what you are talking about either, just that from other information I have seen over the past few months conflicts with this.