I just received a few new presents in the mail today, so I thought I’d post a review for anyone who’s interested.
First up, I ordered a PK-A Red Dot Sight, an AK MTK-03 side rail for an AK from www.kalinkaoptics.com/.
I placed this order on Friday 6/18/10, and it arrived pleasantly fast
and straight from Florida to Newport Washington on Monday 6/21/10.
Everything was packed decently well in the box, which is to be expected
when shipping optics. So they get an A+ for a quick and easy
transaction.
The PK-A sight is a tubular type affair with an integral side mount that
is quite a beast. I bought this specifically to mount it on my Real
Sword Type 56-1 and to keep it within Com-Bloc appearances, so to speak.
Mounting an Eotech or an Aimpoint on a railed handguard would have been
sacrilegious to say the least.
Total weight of the sight is approximately 1.3lbs. It features 8
brightness settings (there is even a model that features an infrared dot
for NVG users), with a battery run time of 50 hours on the highest
setting. One of the cool things about this red dot is that instead of
like the Aimpoint or Eotech red dots, where you have to click or push a
button repeatedly to get to the brightest setting (which is usually
necessary in direct sunlight), the PK-A sight has a single click setting
that automatically ramps it up to the brightest dot setting. Going past
that first click will drop the brightness to the lowest level, and it
goes up from there. Unfortunately it does not come with batteries from
Kalinka Optics. It uses two 3V D-357 type batteries that can be found
relatively cheap at any grocery store or radio shack.
The dot itself is a 1MOA dot, and readily visible in bright sunlight and
darkness. I tried it out with my PVS-14’s and on the lowest setting the
dot is visible, but not too bright to create a giant halo – so it will
work with NVD’s just fine. Construction wise, the PK-A is quite well
built and looks like it could take a serious beating. The windage and
elevation knobs make a positive click when adjusted and don’t have any
slop in them at all. Most of the lettering on the PK-5 is in Russian,
and so is the manual for that matter too, so you’ll have to figure out
what up and down, left and right are on your own. The tube itself is
nitrogen purged and is crystal clear. The sight is tall enough to allow
use of the iron sights underneath. The rail mount is actually removable,
and one could swap it out with an SVD attachment if they wanted to rock
a red dot sight on a Dragunov. It is easy to operate and has an
adjustable throw-lever on it.
The sight requires the use an an AK side rail mount. Kalinka Optics
offers a variety of side rail mounts that are designed to fit the AK,
SVD, Tigr, SKS, Mosin Nagant, and a Universal mount that can be adapted
to whatever you wish. Due to the specific design of the underfolder, I
had to move the rail mount farther forward than it would have typically
been mounted on the real steel rifles. This allowed me to have enough
clearance to install the optic, which only mounts one way and has to be
slid on from the rear of the side rail. Because it is a red dot, eye
relief is not an issue so this worked out quite well. I had to machine
the back of the MTK-03 side rail a bit to clear some rivets on my AK’s
receiver. The hardest part was actually drilling the receiver on the
Real Sword – it’s some seriously tough steel!
