Balanced Recoil AK-107 / Kalashnikov SR-1: Is It Any Good?

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! One of the really interesting variations on the AK to come out of Russian military development and testing is the balanced-recoil system, as exemplified on the military AK-107 and the commercial Kalashnikov SR-1 rifles. Contrary to common assumption, this is not a system to counteract to recoil created by the bullet leaving the barrel. Instead, it is intended to counteract the movement of the rifle caused by the bolt slamming into he rear of the receiver and into the chamber. These two events are what cause most of the movement in a or AK, not the minimal recoil of the actual bullet. The AK-107 is the military iteration of this system, and the SR-1 is the semiauto competition rifle version, and they both use the identical counter-balanced mechanism. Basically, the gas port ve