The History of PKM, the Most Common Machine Gun In the World. Part 3

By Vladimir Onokoy

In  Part 1 of this article, I wrote about the beginning of the Kalashnikov machinegun story, Part 2 was dedicated to the bureaucratic hoops he initially had to jump through. In this chapter, I will talk about the technical triаls and competition between Kalashnikov and his rivals, Nikitin and Sokolov.When the competition between two machineguns began, Kalashnikov was way behind, since the other machinegun had already completed the first stage, the technical trials.The technical trials of PK started in June 1960 in the little town of Klimovsk, in the small arms research institute that was supposed to be a non-biased middle ground between two giant arms factories, Tula and Izhevsk.

Author, shooting PKM at the indoor testing range

Kalashnikov arrived with five prototypes, but his first meeting with local management wasn’t very encouraging. The institute was happy to test a new gun, but they explained that the other machine gun developed by Nikitin and Sokolov was already entering production

Source: The Firearm Blog