Springfield Armory Kuna Review

The Springfield Armory Kuna, let’s check it out.

 

Today we’re going to take a look at the brand new Springfield Armory Kuna. This is a nine millimeter roller delay blowback, a little what I like to call PDW.

It’s in the pistol form, has a brace, it folds, it’s got a lot of cool features, and this really surprised me actually. This is one of those firearms that makes it very compact, easy to carry, and with that roller delay blowback, it makes it very soft to shoot over the traditional blowback action. Has translucent magazines that are proprietary for this firearm.

Now the Kuna is actually one of the national symbols for Croatia, and these are made in Croatia, imported by Springfield Armory, along with the Hellcat, the Echelon, the XD series. And the Kuna is known for its high intelligence. It’s actually a European Pine Martin, but they are very cunning and very smart.

And again, it just represents this little compact firearm. So a big thank you to Springfield Armory for sending the Kuna for this review, and for giving me a chance to kind of give you a sneak peek before these hit the market. But guys, this is a sweet shooting firearm with a lot of options.

Well guys, I was a little surprised, and I shouldn’t have been, for Springfield Armory to release this. And honestly, these are made by SH Product, which is out of Croatia, the same company that makes the Springfield Armory XD, XDM, Hellcat, Echelon, and have come out with some pretty cool firearm designs. So this is a nine millimeter roller delay blowback, and that’s a big thing.

You know, your HK MP5s, roller delay, very soft shooting, very low muzzle rise. So I was really excited that they went with the roller delay. I mean, it just delays the gases and the bolt from going to the rear, and it just softens the recoil.

So first thing, we’re going to drop our magazine. These are translucent mags, and they are proprietary, and they do have metal feed lips. And the chamber is empty.

What I love about the PDW form is that it’s a very compact package. And especially with this, with the Strike Industries, and this is their FSA brace, it is a pistol. This is honestly very well done, has these hooks that you can rest your arm, your forearm on.

These are very well made. This is a polymer, but then we have aluminum that comes all the way down, and a very strong lockup on the pistol brace, and it is folded. So this is what really gets it down to a very small package.

Very transportable, very compact. Of course, obviously you can shoot it in this configuration. To me, this makes an excellent car gun, backpacking gun.

I mean, it’s just one of those small firearms. The one thing about this over a regular handgun is that you can rest this on your shoulder. You can put it even on your cheek, and it gives it more of a feel.

You can get two hands on the gun in a more stable position, and it allows for, honestly, better accuracy. Now, we have a six-inch cold hammer forged barrel, which is going to give you extended life. It’s going to extend the accuracy.

They’re just really some of the best processes for barrel making. Also, we have a muzzle brake. It’s multi-ported.

This is actually going to help as well with recoil or felt recoil. It’s half by 28 threads, so you can take this off, and you can put on a suppressor, which will make this a lot of fun. We have M-lock slots that are in the handguard all the way around.

It is an aluminum top receiver, and it’s 60-65 T6. Has a nice anodized matte finish to it, which I really like. It has a monolithic picatinny rail all along the top, but one thing that I do also like about it is that it has flip-up sights, so we can just flip these up, and you can go with it.

Now, let’s say you don’t have time to flip them up. If you have them down, there is still a sight built in, and these are metal sights. They’re very well done.

They are fully adjustable as well, and this is one feature that I really like. And, of course, your picatinny slots are numbered, but even with the sights down, I mean, that’s a really good sight picture. Now, one problem is you’ve got to get your cheek really low on the brace, so when you bring it up, it’s in a more natural shooting position, and with this, you’ve just got an aperture sight, and you have just a front post, but this really calls for an optic, and you can put a small red dot on here.

You can put even a micro red dot or even a scope. If you wanted to add night vision, you could put a laser designator. It’s one of the things about having this long rail, and these sights are going to kind of just lay down, so if you have any kind of see-through mounts, these sights are going to be really useful.

All of the controls are fully ambidextrous. We have our safety, we have our mag release right here, and then we have our bolt stop or bolt release. The charging handle can be switched to the other side.

It is spring-loaded, so you can pull it out, and then it just pops back into place, but we can take that handle, and we can switch it, so honestly, this is fully ambidextrous, but you can see the massive bolt that’s inside the receiver, but it’s a very smooth action, extremely smooth, and I love how that just pops down. There’s a lot of these that actually have a fixed charging handle piece that comes out. This really makes it nice to keep that kind of streamlined, and here are the controls just on the other side.

We do have an AR-15 style pistol grip, so you can switch this out for any grip that you want to. It does have that more of a Hellcat or Echelon kind of texturing to it, which is really aggressive, but yet it’s smooth to the touch, but when you just give it a little pressure, just locks into your hand, and we have this little cutout right here just to allow for more comfort. We do have a trap door on the bottom as well, so this is actually a pretty nice grip, and then we have texturing right here at the front of the magwell.

We have some lines, and this just, again, if you want to grab hold of this instead of grabbing the magazine. You don’t want to grab the magazine because you can actually cause malfunctions, so this just gives you another place just to kind of brace your hand, but you could put a hand stop or something up here. Of course, with a pistol, you can’t put a vertical foregrip, but you can put an angled foregrip, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but that’s, that’s just the way it is.

The receiver is polymer, and it’s a glass-filled nylon. Now, I really like the bright markings for safe and fire, very similar to your HK. The safety is stout.

It’s not too stout, but it’s definitely purposeful to be able to bring that up. And then with your other hand, bringing it up, again, just a little bit stiff, but not really a bad thing. Now, as far as the mag release, I actually like to use my trigger finger to drop that magazine more than this side for being right-handed, so if I’m going to bring this down, it’s easy to do, but you just stretch out your hand.

With this, I can just hit it, and it drops that magazine really fast. Magwell is beveled, so it’s going to make those mags easy to switch in and out. Now, the bolt release will pop up when the bolt’s open, and of course, all you have to do is hit it, and it’ll drop that bolt.

Of course, with the bolt release, pull it back and hit the bottom end, and it’ll hold it open. And then, just hit the top, and it’ll go forward. Now, the first thing that came to mind when I got the Kuna was this Grand Power Strebog.

These are made in Slovakia, and these are roller delay blowbacks. There are a lot of similarities. There are some pretty major differences, and we’re going to have an upcoming review and compare them head to head.

This one is in 10 millimeter, and it comes in 45, and of course, 9 millimeter. So, we’re going to be checking that out coming up and going through the differences. The Kuna is 24 inches in length with the brace fully extended.

Of course, it gets it really small when you drop that down. And with the brace, it weighs five pounds, five ounces, so fairly lightweight option. The brace weighs 10 ounces, and again, it is really solid on the back.

Here at the back of the receiver, we have a QD port, so we can just slide it in there. Makes it great for slings, and then also here on the FSA from Strike Industries, we have a port here as well. So, it gives you ready mount to be able to mount a sling, but also we have a slot here that we can add one.

But then, of course, you’d have to add something to the front, which is very doable. And guys, it allows you to do a lot of things with the M-Lok with the long Picatinny rail. It just gives you options for the lights, optics.

Of course, you have your sling swivels, your angled forearm, and yet it still retains that small size. Very compact. Well guys, check out Suchgear.com. We’re doing monthly giveaways.

We also have a weekly newsletter, and we have a lot of merch. So, check out Suchgear.com. Now, we do have a flat face trigger. Has very little movement to the wall.

Once you hit a wall, a little bit of stacking, and then you have your break. Reset right about there. Very quick reset.

Trigger pull weight with our Lyman trigger gauge from Brownells. 3 pounds, 13.7 ounces. 4 pounds, 5.9 ounces.

Around 4 pounds. That’s a pretty nice trigger. It does come with two of the translucent magazines.

You can see the rounds that come all the way down. I’m not sure what the price is going to be on these, because of course, this is just being released. But typically, they’re very reasonable.

And guys, when we were at the range, we had no malfunctions. The magazines just worked extremely well. Big thank you to Fiocchi for sponsoring our ammo.

All made in the USA. One of the largest suppliers of ammunition in the country. And very consistent.

And honestly, we don’t have any trouble with Fiocchi. Also, there’s no Lula loader, but this is fairly easy to load. And we’ll know once we get down to the 30 rounds.

But it just, they just pop right in, right in the top. All right guys, this was a big surprise. The Springfield Armory Kuna.

This is really one of those PDWs. Nine millimeter. It’s very small.

The beauty with this one in particular is that it’s roller delay blowback. So it’s going to soften the recoil. You have a heavy mass bolt, but that little bit of delay allows the gases to pass, and it just really makes it smooth.

Really like the MP5 from HK, that is a roller delay blowback. Very smooth shooting. We have a muzzle brake at the end, which again helps.

A lot of real estate on top. We could put a lot of different optic choices. We just went with their standard sights, which these sights are actually pretty cool.

They pop up, and when they’re down, they’re still sights. They’re actually integrated. But you have to get your cheek a little bit more on the rail to get a little bit tighter.

But here with it up, it’s a natural point. Non-reciprocating charging handle that does fold down, and really comfortable texturing. You can use your standard AR-15 grip, but this is just a real surprise.

And honestly, this has been one of those that I just love this type firearm. Of course, you can bring it back, and then when you shoot it, I’m telling you, this thing is so soft to shoot. I like the 45 degree safety.

Just bring it down 45 degrees, it makes it really fast and easy. The brace is just one of the braces that they sent. It’s very skeletonized.

It has these ledges here, so it makes it really nice if you need to shoot it with one hand, to brace it right on your forearm. And of course, this thing folds down and just makes it really compact. I mean, this is a very compact little package.

You just bring it out to deploy it. Just impressed. And Springfield Armory, when they bring out something really different, which they do on occasion, this really is just more choices in the market.

Load on Sunday, shoot through Monday. But definitely a solid little firearm. Again, just very surprised, but pleasantly surprised.

That is smooth. I like that. Yeah, it is smooth.

That roller lock makes it really smooth. What’s that? Well guys, as far as disassembly, go ahead and drop our magazine, check the chamber, and the gun’s empty. Right here on the right side of the firearm, there’s a pin at the bottom of the receiver.

Just push it through and then just pull that out. It is retained into the receiver. And here on this side, we can push the pin through, pull that out, and just remove our lower receiver.

This is polymer. It’s very lightweight. We can see the trigger pack inside.

It is contained and just a very cool looking design. Then here at the back, just push down on that back plate. Now there is some pressure from the recoil spring against it, so you’ve got to really bring it down and then you just pull it out.

And here, this just fits right here in the back. Now take your charging handle and pull back on it and it’s going to bring out your recoil spring. This does have a buffer which rests right onto the back plate.

Then we’re just going to pull our bolt right out. Man, that’s a heavy bolt. Again, very similar to the Strebog.

And then we have that roller delay right here. And this pin just drops down. So once it fires, the pin locks up and then it unlocks when this goes back.

And that just delays it just enough to give it that softer recoil, get some of the gases out of the way, and then it allows this to go back. Now here we have the bolt face right here and we have our extractor. Here on the back, we have a firearm retaining lever in the back and that way it just holds that firing pin into place.

We’re not going to disassemble this right now, but we’ll probably do that when we do our comparison with the Strebog. But a really nice weighty bolt. Now that when the charging handle is all the way back, there’s a little cutout.

You can actually just pull your charging handle out. Then we go to the other side and we can put our charging handle in. And so now you’re on the other side.

So whether you’re left-handed or right-handed, you can switch this around and it just gives it more versatility. Guys, honestly, it’s very easy to disassemble. So we’re going to reinstall our bolt system.

You want to make sure those rollers are in place. Now you’ll notice that hole in the bolt. You want to put your recoil spring through that and bring it down and just set it into place.

Now on the adapter plate in the back, you’ll notice this little hook and it just goes in low like this, and then you just push upward. Just make sure your holes are aligned. Then we’re going to put in our front pivot pin.

Then we’re going to lock down. I mean that is very simple to assemble and disassemble. And we’re going to function check and we’re good to go.

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So check out Otis Technologies. Highly recommended and we want to thank Otis for being a sponsor of the channel. The retail price on the Springfield Armory Kuna is $999.

With the brace, it’s $1,149. What are some pros and cons? First off, it’s a very small compact package and yet you’re going to get better accuracy, more control over the firearm than just a handgun. The roller delay action is going to make this very soft to shoot.

It’s going to get you on target faster. It’s just a pleasure. The brace is a big plus to me.

I really like the Strike Industries FSA brace. It’s very sturdy, very solid. Sometimes, especially with braces, they can be very wobbly and this was really just a solid performer.

Very easy to bring back and forth. And again, it gives you that compact size that just makes it so compact and easy. And again, you can shoot it this way as well.

Bring it out and two, that brace just locks in. The brace is a big plus. AR-15 compatible grips.

You can change that out very easily. The monolithic Picatinny rail. I mean you can do a lot of things.

I love the sight system flipped up or down. Gives you some really great options. Non-reciprocating charging handle that you can switch easily.

Ambidextrous controls all throughout. And we have a muzzle brake, but obviously you can put on a suppressor, M-lock, mag well. Really high performing magazines.

Overall, it just has a ton of pluses. What are some minuses? Well, first off, it has proprietary magazines. So you’re going to have to get those directly from Springfield Armory.

But honestly, a lot of the guns that are coming out have these proprietary magazines. And this just happens to work really well, but it is a little bit of a con. It’s in a millimeter, so you can get an AR-15 pretty much not much larger than this.

Typically, I like an AR-15 pistol with at least about a 10 inch barrel. So you’re going to have a little bit more length. You do have your buffer tube that’s going to extend out.

So you’re not going to necessarily be able to fold it and make it as compact as this. So there are some advantages to nine, but if you want to get out to a little more distance, your 556 or 223 is going to be a little better. But it’s made by SH product out of Croatia, and they have a huge reputation for high quality.

And so that’s going to be really a big plus for this firearm. So overall, if you’re looking for a small nine millimeter PDW, personal defense weapon, I think the Springfield Armory Kuna is going to be something that you’re really going to want to take a look at. So guys, it’s great to have a lot of choices, especially when it comes to these pistol caliber carbines in the pistol form.

The brace makes it very suitable. Of course, it makes it a very compact package by folding the hammer forged barrel, the roller delay blowback action, and of course, it’s fully ambidextrous. This is just a great little offering from Springfield Armory, and we really appreciate those guys for sending the Kuna for this review.

Kind of like a Kuna Matata.

 

Be strong, be of good courage. God bless America. Long live the Republic.

 

-Don