Are B-West AK's any good? Do they have any issues? Thanks for any info.

https://www.google.com/search?q=bwest+ak&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#hl=en&q=b+west+ak

B-West IMPORTED aks are fine, US made B-West guns are notorious for non heat treated receivers which means the ejector hook wears off and the FCG pins egg their holes.
I had a very early production run version (serial prefix BWA) that just had the ejector hook problem, which I welded back and had no further issues; the later production guns without a BWA through D serial prefix are real junk however.

Run! Notoriously unreliable.

If the price is good could the receiver be replace?

Unless it's a rare variant of a Chinese AK, I wouldn't do it; it would add several hundred dollars to what you paid just to get it into a new receiver, but it won't necessarily increase it's value.
I have a bakelite sidefolder version, and I'm sure I could sell the parts for more than the gun, considering it's chinese parts on a B-West receiver.

Go buy a WASR or Yugo NPAP, the price is very nice on them right now and they work.

Thought it might be worth it to have a spiker.

Is it imported by B-West?  

Or is it made by B-West?  

There is a big difference.

Imported are as good as any Chinese AK.

Made by B-West is a turd.

Not sure going to see it tomorrow. Thought worst case as a kit gun. About the cost of a WASR. Does anybody make a replacement receiver?

I am curious about something from the people here that are saying that B-west AK are junk.   How many actually have first hand knowledge?

I have one that I bought 15 or so years ago and have never fired it after reading the negative reviews.  It is still in my safe, unfired.

I have read conflicting forum threads saying terrible things, but for the most parts they have been based on second hand reports.


I also read a thread that was here on ARFCOM, that supposedly a guy had, a former B-West employee, for a neighbor.  That thread said that the BWA & BWB serial numbers were good to go.  And the real problems started with the 999 prefix serial numbers

I am not suggesting that any B-West AK is more than a POS, but just asking if any have first hand knowledge??  Or are you reporting the same rumors that have been handed down for years?

I'd buy one for that price. Matt Yeamans from MY Guns Northwest makes a Chinese pattern receiver.

I'll chime in and ask, has anyone making these allegations ever seen a B-West receiver problem in person. I read a lot about it on the net but nobody can produce actual proof. It is always "this guy" or "I heard from..." but show me the validity of the statements out there. The biggest one on the AK forum/s is about a supposed ex-employee and when the ATF shut them down.

I own three B-West AK's and have never had an issue with the pins keyholing or any other problem from them. They are both the supposed dreaded 999XXX serial numbers. I cannot imagine how many thousands of rounds they both have fired between my friends and family over the years. I picked one up  recently and got it at a steal of a deal because of all the undocumented information damning them.

Like first stated, show me actual validity that the receivers fail and the pins keyhole!!! Not I heard from here or there or there was this one guy... crap.

There is actually a reason you cannot find them for sale that often and that is because they are in the hands of people still shooting them and not having issues like stated all over the net. Every once in a while something pops up with actual proof that any AK is prone to the same issues as a B-West but that can happen to any AK if fired enough.

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Did you not read what I posted? I have (actually had now) a BWA prefix bakelite sidefolder, and it hand a non heat treated ejector hook which wore down after about 200rds; I welded it and re profiled it and saw no further wear.
I also read that same thread you're talking about.

Image of peened extractor, before it got really bad and the corner was rounded off:

Formerly my rifle:

http://www.thegunzone.com/bwest.html



Worn ejector on B West receiver.
http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af157/Mackanson/805.jpg

I owned one and I could actually bend the receiver with my bare hands, after a few hundred rounds the rear trunnion became really loose because the rivets egged the holes in the receiver, sold it at a huge loss. I'm not saying they are all like that, but the one I had was a joke.

Without pictures I would still say it is hear say and rumors. I believe there were some bad receivers out there but that is like any AK on the market today. You have some good ones and you have some bad ones, some are better than others and some are just junk snapped up by the masses. Look at all the Yugo WASR AK's out there, they are positively junk part guns but get sold by the hundreds every month. I have three B-West AK's now and I must be really lucky because I have not had any problems with any of mine. The internals are all chinese and holding strong.

The one pictured in the previous post has already had 500 rounds punched through it and does not have any signs of weakness. So please post some pictures of some bad B-West ejectors and not just say you had one and is sucked.

I see two of the serial number prefixes  were the 999, what is the other?

Just FYI,

The Yugo N-PAPs and the new 2013 production WASRs are all new parts.

The older O-PAPs and the olders WASRs were miltary surplus parts.

Part of the problem you are going to find is BWest's are old guns now and lots of us got rid of the problem children BWest's. Why would we keep them? I know that sounds weird to you since you want to believe, but people largely either fixed them (if you go back to the '04-'07 time frame there was a rash of people heat treating them at home to try and stave off the egging of the FCG holes), cut the receivers and rebuilt them since they were only valuable as the parts kits, or sold them off. You can buy and play with the untreated US receiver ones all you want, and claim you put ten's of thousands of rounds through them with no issues but that is even more hearsay than the fact that they made them incorrectly.

Everything on my OPAP is new except the wood.

I had a B-West imported rifle that was great.  I have handled one B-West US gun that had egged out trigger pin hole.  I worked with a guy in Tucson, AZ who assembled rifles for B-West and he mentioned they were crap.  I lived just down the road from B-West from 1986-1988 and 1992-1995.  I was in the owner's gun shop monthly until it shut down sometime after 2000.  When AK guru Ted Marshal lived in Tucson he told me they were crap.  I think he posted one time on a forum about having seen one after a catastrophic failure at the trunnion where the receiver failed.

There was a guy over at the AKfiles at one time who went by dstorm1911 if I remember right that said he was the designer of the B-West receiver and worked for B-West building their rifles and he claimed there was nothing wrong with them.  He also had people sending him parts kits to be built into rifles back a few years ago. He had a big following over there among AK owners, he was a moderator on the board. People over there looked at him like some B-West authority.

He claimed to be one of the major AK builders in Arizona.  Said he had built thousands of rifles.  I lived in the same town at the time and had met about every builder in Arizona you would have heard of.  I contacted a few builders and no one knew him, some had seen his posts at akfiles.

He claimed to be a business partner of Don Bell of Omega Weapons Systems.  I contacted Don Bell and he mentioned the guy built a couple guns for him at his shop, but that he was lying about everything else.  Said the guy wasn't even living in Arizona when B-West was building AK's, wasn't his business partner. Apparently must have been using his business address to receive the AKs he was building for people or receiving them illegally as the guy told me he didn't even have an FFL.

dstorm1911 disappeared off akfiles some time ago but no one could find out why other than some "legal" issues that no one on akfiles/falfiles was allowed to discuss. He was an authority on B-West rifles.  If you can locate him he might be able to give you the info you seek.

Mak.   Yep Dstorm1911 was the guy that was supposed to be in the know.  I did a google search and found the archived thread,  You posted in it as well.

Archived thread

I am still on the side that they are likely crap, and will continue to leave mine unfired in the safe.  At some point, I may heat treat the pin holes and the ejector and give the rifle a try

Or more likely, it will still be in my safe when my son's have to throw my shit away after I am dead...LOL

I thought they were made from cutup M70s, and that's why there were only a limited number of them. That would explain the FSB and the non-grenade launching GB though.

Like I posted above, before Darrel Storm/dstorm1911 disappeared off the internet I decided to dig into his supposed background since I lived in the same town as him and had never heard of him and he was advertising himself as some AK expert who supposedly got B-West started building AKs (the story he told me in an IM).  That's when I contacted his "business partner" at Omega Weapons Systems and his story started falling apart.

I contacted him to try to get him to meet up with me and have him build an AK (I was just trolling him, I had no intention of having him do any work for me) and he finally admitted he had no FFL and no AK building tools.

If you search his screen name on Google you will come up with thread after thread of him dropping off the face of the Earth, threads about gun parts and firearms that disappeared with him.  There are also posts about others contacting his "business partner" at Omega Weapons Systems.  They also found out the guy was a fraud.

I posted about it at the Falfiles/akfiles years ago where he was a moderator and it got deleted.  He disappeared shortly after.  In the post you linked I was living in Arizona at the time in 2007.


And guess where he ended up?





I contacted gunplumber/Mark Graham back before dstorm1911 disappeared and we came to the conclusion he was a fraud back then but the akfiles would ban you if you told anyone.  I was calling BS on the guy over a year before he disappeared from the internet and went to prison.

This kinda kills any credibility he might have had

Yes.  If you look at that thread you linked and I posted in back in 2007, some guy (onerios?) was posting about how dstorm1911 was the B-West authority and then read my reply.  I was more or less saying the guy was a fraud way back then when he had all his fanboys and a year before he got arrested.  Then the truth came out.  There were a few others here, files and gunboards that knew he was a fraud but no one would believe us or if we posted our suspicions and evidence we were attacked on certain sites, not so much here.  You could see that member onerios was not believing me in the thread you posted.

When it comes to AK's and the different brands and manufacturers there will always be some bad with the good. I personally believe B-West AK's have been given a bad name when they are just as good as any other AK of the time. Newer AK's carry bigger names on them so getting a bad one is typically resolved by the manufacturer and never disclosed.

I personally have had to send a CAI (previously CIA) AK back to them due to several issues and it was resolved without and real problems. They stood behind their work after a little pushing from my end but I never flamed them on any boards because they fixed the issues. That is where I believe B-West earned their bad reputation because after they went out of business (Bad business practices - ATF issues) there was no place to have the rifles serviced from the manufacturer.

Yes, I have heard and seen some pictures (very few to date) of bad receivers but no more than any other manufactured AK to date. I personally have 3 of them and have not had any issues with keyholing or ejector problems. With the totality of what has been discovered and discussed I believe B-West AK's have been given an unwarranted bad reputation by fakes and wanna-b's claiming to be experts and former employees.

In totality I would not hesitate by buy another B-West AK and like any other firearm I purchase I would inspect it first and then make an informed decision on the purchase.

B-West may have shut down, but the owners had a business right next door that stayed open for over a decade before it was sold to a chain sometime in the early 2000's, Jensen's gun store had two locations in Tucson and you could buy their B-West imported rifles and pistols there for many years after they closed their import business.  I bought one of their B-West Chinese imported SKS's new in the box from them in 1999, Chinese imports were banned by Clinton when?.  I bought a BWK-92 from them in around 2001.