Sleazy Car Salesman
Believe me when I say that I will take your money
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 27, 2021
That's how a publisher typically works, yes. They publish what their authors are writing.
General GunTuber thread
- Thread starter Trig.Point
- Start date
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
RSU 1741
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
The selection is still peculiar: for example, the book on the Chinese Mausers, Arming the Dragon, is a reprint Dolf Goldsmith's 90ies work on Chinese imports. It's dreadfully outdated and working on insanely sketchy grounds (even the author admits so). Of course, a reprint is cheap, but we don't live in the 90ies anymore and despite issues research and sources on chink weapons have leapt forward in a massive manner.
Or the fact that the same author of Arming the Dragon wrote some excellent books on the Maxim and the Browning. Why not reprint those? They're rare and starting to get insanely expensive.
Of course, his business, his books, his choice. But at times I grind my teeth in having to hunt for used copies in some boomer collection and seeing absolute vanity projects thrown out just because. It's like he doesn't want my money, nor he does need to because parasocials.
ellroy
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2021
That does remind me of a video he made a couple of years ago talking about some Russian gun books he picked up but mentioned he had no desire to learn Russian and was going to wait until AI was good enough to translate them for him.
The lack of intellectual curiosity is bothering me on this one. With the war in Ukraine, if you are interested in military weapons and modern militaries in general, now is a good time to learn Russian, especially if you're aspiring writer/historian. You can be the first to write something due to all the original research you can do in real time.
It just irks me, it seems like such a waste especially for someone who at one point seemed worried his channel was going to dry up.
Sleazy Car Salesman
Believe me when I say that I will take your money
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 27, 2021
He's going to be waiting forever. Russian is, for whatever reason, seemingly absolutely impossible for machine translation.
I might sound like a serious Ian simp here, but...
I don't think it's that big of a business opportunity, and clearly Ian doesn't have a specific fixation on Russian firearms. To call it "lack of intellectual curiosity", not to put in maybe a few years of effort into becoming proficient enough so that he can easily utilize those books (or more modern reference material) for purely professional interest seems pretty unreasonable to me.
For the majority of the people, learning a language requires real interest beyond "I just want to be able to understand and speak language X". You can't learn a language just by reading a coursebook and doing some exercises. You have to actively try to use the language. Watch TV shows, listen to people speaking, listen to music... That usually requires that you are invested in that country and their culture. And I haven't really seen Ian take that much of an interest in Russia maybe ever, and even less so after the (full scale) war in Ukraine began.
RSU 1741
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
Learning Russian isn't particularly easy, I guess. It's not like learning another language entirely is a small task, particularly if you don't have much interest in their literature. Furthermore, good fucking luck accessing archives and collaboration with the rooskies nowadays, even after the Azov book debacle before the SMO.
But there's still so much untranslated! Think about Mosins! In English you have subpar Ospreys or the laconic work from Lapin: how hard would it be to take Drei Linien to an English audience? Instead we get Japanese Tobacco in World War II.
Again, his company, his books, his rules, and translating books isn't incredibly easy between rights and issues. But ..... every announcement from Headstamp Publishing is me sighing "another niche/generic book that I have no interest in". But it's just me.
ellroy
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2021
Would be even worse as a scanned document. Giving AI virtual memory page layouts and telling it to find certain bytes is already challenging enough as is. Couldn't imagine another language.
I'm aware of how hard Russian is as I have been trying to learn it, albeit casually, for the last four months. It's not an easy language, there are no good language apps on a smartphone like French has. He has covered Russian firearms and was even friendly with a Russian firearms historian/expert Max Popenker but now that's gone with his public support of Ukraine and NATO. I think the interest was there for him to even pick up those books just the lack of interest to follow through. Going through his site, he still covered a lot of Russian made weaponry after the war started.
This is what I was trying to get at, there is a lot about Russian firearms that hasn't been recorded in the West. Like Mosins is a great example. He fucking loves those rifles and they are still being used in Ukraine! There is content to be gathered. Granted I don't know what those books on his shelf actually cover Mosins but it was clearly something that he thought would be interesting.
But yes, his books, his rules. Though I don't think anyone is worried about Russian intellectual property rights at the moment.
Last edited:
Romulus augustulus
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2023
I read that as "Flemish small arms" at first was was actually interested for about 3 seconds
German small arms are overdone at this point. There are scads of books about every obscure prototype germany ever made.
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2023
I’m going to sound like one of *those* guys, but I am still fairly skeptical of US made AK’s. Some of the newer built ones are apparently okay, but I don’t know why a person would go from one when imports are still available, unless they were dead set on a 100 series style gun.
That said, even the imports aren’t all that great now. The prices have climbed a ridiculous amount and I’m not just talking about WASRs, $1500+ for a Beryl? Madness. I used to tell everyone to just buy an Arsenal, but their quality has nosedived over the last 5ish years and there’s no chance they’ll be importing their stamped rifles again in the near future.
I have a 9 AK’s, I love them, but I just cannot recommend people buy one anymore unless it’s just for the vibe, it’s just not worth it.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2014
You answered your own question
Sleazy Car Salesman
Believe me when I say that I will take your money
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 27, 2021
I also hate to be that guy but honestly most of the ones made in Europe in actual AK factories aren't that great either.
Polish and Serbian ones are better than Russian ones. Most of the stuff imported to US is probably from Romania and Albania, which are dubious at best.
Chinese guns are utter trash, not that you guys can get those anyway, but just to squash some myths. They fucking suck. FDF scrapped like 30% of the rifles they bought in the 90s basically at inspection, because they didn't meet even the lowest service standards. And this was for a military contract, you can imagine what they sell to civilians.
- Joined
- May 3, 2024
After Clinton banned Chicom AKs Norinco stopped bothering with QC because the only customers for Type 56s by then were Third World shitholes who don't give a fuck, unlike American gun owners. WASRs were fine after 2008 once they were able to meet demand. After the AWB sunsetted Cugir was pumping out as many WASRs as they could and Century didn't give a shit if the front sight base was canted. If you want a cheap and decent quality AK try looking in gun stores and pawn shops in the middle of nowhere ran by a boomer or older. They still think AKs are trash and price them accordingly. I found a pre-ban Yugo M70 for $700 a few years because the pawn shop owner thought it was a CAI built one.
Nah. American civilian market is big but it's not that big, that it causes that type of a shift. Besides, the FDF guns I mentioned were bought in the early 90s.
You have just fallen for the lore, Chinese guns are in fact, shit. Just like pretty much anything else coming from China. They cut corners wherever they can, to get the cheapest product out there.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2019
But we can't have them anymore, which means they're good. You should purchase some of them off GunBroker for five grand. They will change your mind. If they turn out to be shit, it's probably just you.
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2013
Chinese AKs used to be really nice. I would take an 80s norinco over any AK i could buy new now. The only real bummer is very few made it in with side rails.
Edit to be clear NO ak is THAT nice, but the Chinese ones I've seen all had straight sights and cycled, and they were dirt fucking cheap.
Last edited:
In Europe, we still have access to Chinese guns, and AFAIK the quality is all over the place. Some, shoot really nice. Some, are utter garbage. You are graded by your lowest score IMO, thus why I said that the Chinese guns are shit. There might be nice examples out there, but even the nice ones are not better than Yogo or Polish ones, or a genuine Izhevsk made gun.
- Joined
- May 3, 2024
Norinco had different production lines for military contract Type 56s and the American bound guns. In order to sell a Type 56 in the US they had to redesign the internals so that it wasn't easy to modify to be full-auto and couldn't be built on a full-auto receiver. And yes, the American gun market is big enough to warrant that, especially if you have the industrial capacity that Norinco has. We have 120 guns for every person here, there's more guns than people in the US. Why do you think after the '89 assault weapons import ban Norinco immediately started importing compliant guns? The shift in quality in Type-56s wasn't just due to lack of the American market but also the Chicoms moving to the Type-81. By the early to mid 90s there wasn't a market for new production AKs when the market was being flooded with millions of AKs from the former Warsaw Pact that were cheaper than any new production Type-56 so corners had to be cut in order for Norinco to turn a profit.
Chinese guns weren't all shit, for years it was common to buy a Norinco M-14 copy so you could get a forged receiver for your M-14 build instead of the cast garbage Springfield was putting out. The AKs they imported into the US are all high quality, especially the Polytech milled receiver AKs and the NDM-86s.
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2013
They may have only sent us the nice ones or something, but I remember before the ban and the Chinese guns were all pretty good. I still have a norinco clone of a browning SA22 and it shoots like a dream. The only negative thing I can say about it is that the stock front sight was too tall to zero with high velocity 22 ammo. The norinco tt33's are some of the best we ever got, and a lot of them came with a 9mm conversation kit too.
I mean I guess it's just a matter of perspective. You guys don't have access to the Chinese stuff or genuine Russian stuff. Both are available in Europe (obviously Russian stuff has been cut off for many years now but previously it was available), and then you had a lot of European made AKs. In that context, the Chinese stuff wasn't that good. Now, when I say this, I'm not talking about reliability, it's the accuracy. Some of the Chinese stuff shoots fine, even pretty good for an AK. Some are 5-6MOA guns out of the box. That's just the way it has been. They all shoot reliably.
I would absolutely take my chance with a Chinese AK rather than any of the American made ones, I can tell you that much. Like I said, some of the stuff is genuinely good.
I would absolutely take my chance with a Chinese AK rather than any of the American made ones, I can tell you that much. Like I said, some of the stuff is genuinely good.