Cheese Grater Handguard for AK Type Rifles
If you own an AK with traditional wood furniture you probably know how hot they can get in sustained fire. Shooting an AK in any sustained fire mode can result in them becoming uncomfortably hot in the hanguard/forend area. This is undoubtedly due to the close fitting of the stock and handguard. You may have seen those videos of people actually deliberately setting their wood AK furniture on fire deliberately in multiple high capacity (very high capacity) magazine dumps.
I had heard that a "cheese grater" handguard could pretty much solve this problem but I'd also heard it would make no difference. Well I bit the bullet and had one installed and I must say I as impressed with the results. After letting the wife-cakes put most of a box of Wolf through it took it to the 200 yard range to verify zero with some high quality Hornaday SST. It was dead on. Then to the 200 yard plate section. I shot off 40 rounds, not exactly rapid fire but in pretty snappy fashion regularly making those plates ring. By the end smoke from lubricant was curling up from the stock. Well, long story short the new "cheese grater" handguard was barely warm to the touch and the wood fore end was noticibley cooler than times in the past when I did similar drills.
One brief addition, the old wood handguard showed charring around the edges of the wood, yeah they get hot. Probably one of reasons the Rooskies went to polymer furniture on later AK 47s and the AK 74.
