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.