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Budget 7.62x39 AR - Radical Firearms 7.62x39 Complete Rifle
Updated
23 months ago
Good morning, everyone, hope you’re all having a wonderful day today. Today we’re taking a look at a complete Radical Firearms 7 .62x39 AR-15.
Full disclosure on the Radical Firearms 7.62x39 is we paid our own money for this and we have absolutely no affiliation with anyone for this review.
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Getting into the specifics of the build, this is, of course, a 16-inch 7.62x39 rifle by Radical Firearms. Everything other than the stuff that I’ve added to it, the optics, the grips, that is all Radical Firearms, as it came from the factory.
Starting out with the barrel, which is gonna be one of the most important components on any AR-15, this is a 16-inch heavy barrel 7.62x39 with a melonite finish. Now, the gas system on this barrel is a carbine length, that is standard for 7.62x39 whereas a 556 you would usually like to see a 16-inch mid-length gun. On 7.62x39 usually to get a mid-length, you’re looking at an 18 or 20-inch barrel, but in this case a carbine length gas system is perfectly fine.
As I already mentioned, this is a heavy barrel, so you have almost a 1-inch straight profile for your first section until it hits your 0.750 gas block journal, and then it is a straight 0.750 towards the end of the barrel.
This is a fairly heavy gun, I believe without the optics, it’s like 7.5 pounds, and then you add your optics, magazine, so on and so forth, and you’re looking like 8.5, 9 pounds for a pretty standard looking rifle.
We’ll get into accuracy later on, but there is a trade-off there, you get a very heavy profile barrel, but you also get a very accurate barrel in 7.62x39.
You have your standard steel gas block, stainless steel gas tube. The barrel is actually dimpled and I have not touched anything on it whatsoever and the gas block has not moved whatsoever, which is always something nice to see.
The handguard, this is their RPR 15-inch M-LOK handguard, so you have M-LOK at the three, six and nine o’clock positions, a full length Picatinny rail on top. Your lock-up system is you have two clamping bolts on the bottom, you have two set screws on the bottom, and then anti-rotation tabs as well. For a budget build, a budget handguard, it’s just fine, I don’t really have any problems with it whatsoever. One kind of strange thing about the handguard is it’s almost, it’s very angular, it’s very squared off, so you have like kind of these sharp angles on it. It’s not a bad thing by any means, but it’s definitely a much more angular handguard. It’s not gonna be quite as slim of petite as other handguards on the market, but that’s gonna be more of a personal preference thing.
The muzzle device, that is standard, is a A2 flash hider in 5 8x24, no problems there. Moving back to the upper receiver, this is a very standard 7075 T6 aluminum mil-spec forged upper receiver, nothing special going on with your ford assist, standard mil-spec charging handle.
Getting into the bolt, this is one of those areas where I am always concerned on a 7.62x39 upper receiver that you can have problems with bolt, which we’ll get into why that is a little later on. The bolt itself or the bolt carrier is a nitride bolt carrier, 8620 carrier, 9310 bolt and it’s just a basic nitride job, of course, in 7.62x39.
We’ll touch more on that later on, but right now we’ll go ahead and get into the lower receiver. The lower receiver as well, this is a Radical lower and it actually comes standard with B5 furniture, so you have the B5 stock, B5 grip, which is all actually very nice. The lower receiver itself is just a standard 7075 T6 aluminum forged lower receiver, no problems there, again, B5 grip is at a very nice angle, very comfortable.
It does have a mil-spec style trigger, which is probably about nine pounds, it’s very heavy, it’s very gritty, it’s very stagey as well.
The only other thing of note on the lower receiver is actually gonna be the safety, as you might tell, we have ambidextrous safeties, so the one of the left is your full length and then on the one on the right is a little bit shorter so it doesn’t rub up against your hand as you’re firing.
Personally, ambidextrous safeties are not needed for me as I am, of course, right-handed, but if you’re left-handed you might like to see them. The one problem that I had with Radical’s ambidextrous safety, which is a standard feature, which is nice, however, these are bolted on and throughout the review process these did come loose one time. I noticed it and was able to catch it ahead of time and just tighten them back down, and they haven’t come loose since, but safety itself is nice. It’s nice to have ambidextrous safety, it’s not the most positive safety on the market and the bolts come loose one time, so, again, that’s really the only thing that I have to say about that.
You have your standard buffer tube carbine, buffer carbine string, so they didn’t send anything special, though we did switch out the buffer, which we’ll get to in just a minute, and your castle nut, as far as I can tell, is not staked in place, though we haven’t had it come loose during the seven to eight hundred rounds that we put through it at this time.
Before we get into the bolt carrier group we should probably talk about the barrel, gas settings and the buffer combination that we were using for this review. So, the barrel from the factory was fairly over-gassed, so it was ejecting steel case 7.62x39 at about two to three o’clock, which is a little bit over-gassed than what I would like to see, and one of our malfunctions that we had because we did have two malfunctions with this gun, one of them was with a Hornady Black 7.62x39 for our accuracy testing, it actually ripped the case apart, it totally ripped off the case head during ejection, and obviously did cause a bit of a problem, fortunately I was able to resolve it easily, but with that sort of over-gassing I felt the need to throw in a heavier buffer than the standard carbine buffer that it ships with.
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So, what is currently in the back here is an H3 buffer. After that incident it never happened again, it did slow down the bolt and it changed the ejection pattern to around 3 30-ish, most of the time, so that is where I would like to see the ejection pattern on a 7.62x39. So, just note, from the factory this is pretty punchy, so I would throw in a heavier buffer or a stronger spring or some mix of the two.
Getting into the BCG on the Radical Firearm 7.62x39, this is one of the areas where myself and most people online are going to be concerned with, especially in terms of long-term durability, this is very gross right now. The reason for that is that the way you get 7.62x39 into an AR-15 BCG is you have to remove a lot of material from the bolt face to be able to get that much fatter case into the bolt.
That does a couple things, it does make your bolt by definition weaker, if you take around 30 to 40 % of the material away from the face of the bolt, it’s going to be weaker, more prone to cracking, but biggest thing, the biggest problem that I’ve had on all of the 7.62x39 uppers that I’ve tested in AR-15 is that you have a tendency to break an extractor every 500 to 2 000 rounds, somewhere in there that extractor is just going to shear off.
I wanted to try out a Radical Firearm 7.62x39 because I had heard good things about them and very bad things as well, so currently we’re at about seven to eight hundred rounds, mostly steel case ammunition. The only malfunction we had in terms of ejection or anything regarding the BCG is going to be that shear case head with the Hornady Black, could have been a bad case, could have been that the fact that the upper was over-gassed, it wasn’t crazy over-gassed, but it was over-gassed a little bit punchier.
The second malfunction that we had was a light primer strike, so looking at the bolt face this does have an enhanced firing pin, all that means is the shoulder on the firing pin is pushed back a little bit so that it protrudes out the bolt face a little more. Could have been an ammunition thing because we are, again, using the crappiest, cheapest steel cased ammunition possible, but we did have one light primer strike and one ripped case head/failure to eject.
With all that being said, though I can say that the extractor has currently, at this current point in time, held up just fine. I actually went ahead and read some reviews online and I had some people say that their extractors were breaking after 60 rounds, some people had them break multiple times in just a few hundred rounds, so I had some people having very bad experiences with their extractors and other people saying they were good to go for thousands of rounds, and that’s just kind of one of the things about 7.62x39 in an AR-15 platform. Most of the time the way that these companies achieve that is by removing a lot of material from the bolt face, meaning the bolt itself is weaker and the extractor is also weaker.
There are some remedies that you can deploy to alleviate some of these issues, most of that is going to be retarding the BCG somewhat, so you’re either going to be throwing on an adjustable gas block to tune the amount of gas coming back into the system or you’re gonna be going with heavier buffers, heavier springs.
There are actually a couple companies out there that are doing things to increase the durability, longevity of 7.62x39 in an AR-15 platform, one of those is going to be CMMG, their mutants, which are 7.62x39, actually are using an AR-10 bolt, which, of course, has a lot of material in it, and then they fit that for a 7.62x39, so those are much stronger even than a standard AR-15 bolt, that is one way to do it.
LMT has a very specific extractor design that they use for their 7.62x39’s, however, you can’t find them anymore, so there are a few companies out there truly doing something to make 7.62x39 more usable in an AR-15 platform, however, most of the time, and this is from all the experience that I’ve had with budget 7.62x39 uppers, at some point that extractor is going to shear on you and it’s going to become unusable.
My solution to that is just to have extra extractors on hand, and personally I don’t put 7.62x39 AR’s in a duty role, home defense, self-defense role, they’re more of fun range guns, and 7.62x39 is still cheaper and easier to find, as of right now in 2022, though that could change in the future, and 7.62x39 could also fill a very nice hunting role, I know some people that shoot hogs with 7.62x39 and it works great for that, and the AR-15 platform is very modular, very easy to set up in different ways.
There are still categories where it does make sense to have 7.62x39, especially if you have a ton of it laying around, just again, personally, it’s not what I would consider a duty use or a home defense or a self-defense of application, it’s more of a hunting/fun/training setup.
Getting into how it actually shot, it is still a bigger caliber than 556, it does have more recoil, it is gonna push you around a little bit more, but it’s not untenable and with good recoil management you can still definitely get the job done.
When we get into accuracy on the heavy barrel we did some testing with just a couple different loads, again, that Hornady Black, which grouped at about 2 MOA, and then we actually got a 1 MOA group with Red Army standard, which I was very happy with that, and on top of that, with just 3x prism, we were able to get this all the way out to 400 yards very consistently in a 7 62x39 with just Red Army standard ammunition.
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Red Army Standard 7.62x54R Ammunition 20 Rounds 148 Grain FMJ | AM3421
$21.39
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Red Army Standard 9mm Luger 124 Grain Full Metal Jacket Brass Cased Pistol Ammunition, 50 Rounds, AM3295
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Red Army Standard Steel Case Non-corrosive Rifle Ammunition 7.62x54R 148gr FMJ 620/ct Case (20/ct Boxes)
$399.99
Natchez Shooting & Outdoors
YCAM3421
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Personally, in 7.62x39 I actually prefer a heavy barrel, that is two-fold one because generally speaking it is more accurate with cheaper ammunition, and in this case it is very accurate with cheap ammunition. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, it does have more recoil, so if I add in a little bit of weight it helps to take the edge off of that by soaking up some of that felt recoil.
When we get into the value talk of the Radical Firearm 7.62x39, from my experiences currently it’s actually very good. You can find these total complete rifles for around five to 600$, depending if you getting them on sale or something like that. They come standard with a good stock, the Bravo systems, the B5 stock, the B5 grip, very good furniture, you get a nice long M-LOK handguard, fairly accurate heavy barrel. If you don’t like heavy barrels, then this is kind of gonna knock that out of it for you.
The assembly process seems to be of decent quality, all of the components are fairly budget-tier, you know, as you’re in that budget-tier category for sure, there’s nothing exceptionally nice about it, but currently it has been running very well, other than those two ,malfunctions that we’ve already talked about it, and, again, it’s very inexpensive and shoots a very inexpensive cartridge, so it kind of makes sense for what it is.
At the end of the day, I would not recommend it for any sort of “duty role”, any sort of serious application, home defense, self-defense, whatever that may be for you personally, but if you are looking for something that shoots your stockpile of 7.62x39, it does it in a fairly manageable way, a very accurate way as well or for some sort of hunting application or something else that you guys are thinking of. Personally, it does a really good job at all of those things.
Right before we end the video we should talk about magazines, the two magazines that I personally recommend for this gun are going to be the DuraMag 28 or 30 rounders, those work flawlessly for me. ProMag’s, AMC’s, I would say not really they’re not worth the money since they’re about the same price as the DuraMag’s anyways, and the other magazine that I used with great success was actually the Unimag, which is basically a multi-caliber magazine, it is a little bit tight in the magazine well as it’s not quit too, you know, standard stanag specs, but it does actually shoot very well with 7.62x39, 556, 6.5 Grendel, 6.8 SPC, all those calibers.
