VFC AKS-74UN DX Review

By Brandon
December 9th, 2006

Hello All…

I come to you today with my own review on the VFC AKS74UN, which I received in the mail yesterday afternoon.

So lets get started.

Down with the unboxing photos:

A nice pretty full colored box. Very solid, and leaves no question as to whats inside. Probably good for you who either own your own home, or live in your parents home. Not so good for myself on the Uni’s apartments.

First glimpse inside the box reveals the instruction manual, written in English, Russian, and Taiwanese. Also, a 40ish page catalog full of other VFC goodness. They have some very interesting stuff coming down the road for those of you who don’t keep up with your airsoft news.

Here we are, my new baby nestled into its little cardboard holder. Its not the securest of packing, but it looks like nothing came out in shipping. Now that its out of the box, lets have a look.

So lets start with initial impressions.

Upon removing the gun from the box, you find that this thing is heavy! The gun weighs in on my scale at a little over 12 lbs with the magazine attached. The entire exterior excluding the pistol and foregrip is a combination of steel and machined aluminum, with steel presiding.

The wood is the correct color for a soviet manufacture AKS74U, and feels like laminated plywood as the real gun uses. There’s a slight roughness to the wood in places where the finish isn’t uniform. It makes it alot more authentic in my opinion.

The gun’s construction is completely solid. There is not a single creak, flexing joint, or lack of rigidity anywhere in this rifle. My only niggle is the fitment of the wood to the body, mine looks off by a few millimeters.

The gun is very short and natural feeling to me. I don’t exactly have the longest arms in the world (My G3 fetish is a mystery even to myself) and find this gun to be a perfect size for me. The stock has a simple spring loaded latch to keep it both open and folded, and in either case, it is solid and positively locked in place. Below is an image for a size comparison with the gun’s stock folded, myself as a backdrop.

Sights are fairly standard AK sights with a twist. The rear sight is flip adjustable with a small, and very slightly smaller aperture. Front sights remain open ring and post sights, so anyone used to the Marui AK fear not.

Those of you familiar with these know they come in a standard and DX version, DX including the wood grips (where the standard has plastic), and the DX Having individual serial numbers stamped on the bolt, the nameplate, and the upper wood grip. I have #433 out of 1000 DX versions. You can kind of make out the serial number on the picture of the bolt below.

Another neat feature is that one can pull the bolt on this all the way back. Not sure how important this is to you AK owners, but the bolt goes as far back now as the realsteel.

So, lets now talk about the internals.

This gun uses a V3 Mechbox, with high-end gears, piston, cylinder, spring guide, 7mm bushings, and a good hi-torque motor. On an 8.4v battery, the gun has a great stock rate of fire, and a 9.6 turns it into a beast. Interestingly, a 9.6v isn’t even the full capacity of the gun. The battery compartment is hollow all the way through the foregrip, allowing up to a 12v battery to be fitted to the gun. Also, in the picture below, note the 20Amp automotive fuse used instead of the strange 15A consumer electronics style fuses used in most other guns.

In terms of bb flight, I am unsure as I have no place to test the gun at range. I’ll update this when I can, all though I will say that this punched through 2 layers of heavy cardboard this morning with little issue.

Overall, this is a wonderful little toy, and I would recommend it to anyone who collects merely on the quality of the build.