Omar Gets a Hit
Well then! This storyline might end up interesting.
This post is going to be interesting only to a small percentage of readers, but I really do feel a need to get the word out on this.
QUICK SUMMARY: IF YOU HAVE AN SKS RIFLE, DO NOT INSTALL THE OLD MAN MURRAY SPRING-LOADED FIRING PIN. RIFLE IS FINE. THIS FIRING PIN FAILED ON ME MOST SPECTACULARLY IN EVERYDAY PLINKING.
Longer version:
I purchased an SKS 5 years ago from a friend. Fell in love with it quickly. The gun is solid as shit, a glorious piece with very, very little wear and tear – interesting, since the markings and serial number put it at about the Korean War in age. It went bang every time, and I’ve gotten damned accurate with it. Originally wanted to bubba it up, but after firing it a few times at the beginning of my ownership… nope, I want to keep it just as it is.
*does the math* …in the first year of ownership, I put somewhere between 3000 and 3500 rounds through this rifle. Mostly rebranded Tula, Ulyanovsk, or other cheap USSR rounds. Fuck it, this gun eats bullets no matter how dirty they are. Not a single FTF, although the third time I took it out, I experienced one single FTE, when the action got caught on a shell that didn’t eject properly. That’s IT. This rifle is solid as hell, easy to clean, and I love it a lot.
But the floating firing pin bothered me. Looking back, it was a stupid worry – I’d put about 1200 rounds downrange with it, before a local friend noted that if the firing pin jammed in the forward position, I might experience the dreaded SKS SLAM-FIRE.
Now keep in mind: I had never had this happen. Ever. And common sense says that this would only happen if you let the firing pin channel get clogged with crap and dirt. The idea that the firing pin, on racking the bolt, would “jump forward” (as the kids in that video say) and “tap the primer” hard enough to set it off… that’s a really stupid idea. But once the idea was in my head, it wouldn’t go away. And said friend noted that there’s a solution for this: the Old Man Murray Spring Loaded Firing Pin.
God. “Make your SKS safer and more reliable!” MY ENTIRE ASS.
Installation was quick and easy, aside from having to hit the bolt retaining pin with the wrath of god to get it out. Once it was in, the firing pin no longer floated – it was held in place by a spring. Awesome! And yeah, I immediately ran out and tested it. No light strikes, no popped primers. I figured everything was totally cool.
I was so, so wrong.
Most recently, we dragged my SKS along with the rest of our guns for a day at the ranch. We had some new shooters, and I got to tell them all about how failsafe and sturdy the SKS is. And for the first 40 rounds, the new shooters loved it.
Then, suddenly, a click instead of a bang.
I walked the rookie through clearing a jam. The cartridge ejected had an extremely light strike on it. The next round went bang just fine.
The one after that went click. This time, the primer was only barely grazed.
And the one after that clicked too. Barely a mark on the primer.
So I retired the gun from the firing line that day, figuring the firing pin channel had gotten so dirty that it was no longer functioning correctly.
I am typing this Sunday night. I just got done fixing the way this stupid fucking aftermarket piece of shit totally boned the rifle.
So I go to clean the rifle, knowing that the bolt needs special attention. Upon cracking the action apart, I find that yeah, just 40 rounds of Silver Bear dirtied the gun up a lot. I pulled the gas tube and piston, cleaned the black crap out of them, then checked the bolt. The firing pin was frozen in the bolt. Would not extend beyond the face of the bolt, no matter how hard I pressed. OK, it’s dirty, dag nabbit, I need to beat that fucking retaining pin out and clean the sucker. Which I did, using a sledgehammer. The pin was still frozen, and required the use of pliers to remove it from the bolt.
At which point, two little dots fell onto my gun cleaning mat. They fell out of the firing pin channel. “What ho,” said I, “these two dots doth be most alaruming.” I inspected them closely. They were two tiny beads of melted metal. And that ain’t good.
Upon further inspection of the firing pin, I realized the spring had not come out of the pin channel. It was stuck in there somewhere. Probing with steel picks told me that yes, something was jammed into the firing pin channel. Something about .75″ long. Trying to insert the original, Russian firing pin resulted in a blockage three quarters of an inch from flush. The OMM pin seated in, but encountered light resistance in that same amount of space.
I tried Break Free. I tried WD40. I tried various picks and probes. I scraped and hammered and whacked and screamed at it. In the end, I had to BOIL the fucking bolt in a pot of water for half an hour, then use a Q-Tip with its end tangled into the spring, to remove it. When it finally came out, the relief I felt was like removing a long-hated ingrown hair. And what came out seriously pissed me off. The spring was crushed, and had melted into one tiny tube.
Keep in mind: We were not bump-firing this rifle. We weren’t torture testing it, or anything like that. It’s not full auto, and we were lighting off about one round per 2-3 seconds. I did note that it was running hot when the failure occurred, but that happens when you blow 40 rounds of 7.62×39 out of a rifle. But it wasn’t glowing yellow or smoking or any of that jazz. It certainly wasn’t producing enough heat to melt a spring, if that spring was made of an alloy that should reasonably be expected to complete the firing pin mechanism of a goddamned SKS.
Proof:
So fuck that. I made sure the channel was clear as hell, then put the original, matched serial number Soviet firing pin back into it. Floating firing pin be damned, that pin never fucked up this royally. I feel like I got ripped the fuck off. Old Man Murray is going to receive a package in the mail containing the melted spring, OMM firing pin, and beads of metal. And a note requesting a fucking refund. This shit seriously pisses me off.
Play party? Same one Alex was going to go to?
Ooooooohhhh shit!
Not the same one. Alex’s was upcoming and on a Friday; this was past and on a Saturday.
Wait! The cigarette! It’s her, isn’t it?
Good catch! I bet that is her.
Nope, you can just see that the hair on her head is brown and cut differently.
And i can’t believe i looked that hard at something other than the tits in this comic.
and mrs thorpe doesn’t wear a cross from what we know.
Look carefully. That’s an ankh. An ankh is like a +6 Talisman of Gothdom.
Like there aren’t goths who change hairstyles and hair colors every other week?
But in the linked comic, she clearly states that the green hair we see is a wig…
I am skeptical-like. End of Alex’s hair comes down to her collarbone, no sign of blue in the pic. No tattoo on left shoulder ( though that might be juuust out of frame ).
But the plot twist DOES seem pretty irresistible.
I don’t see any scars either. Were they all on her back? He’s effin around with us now! 😉
Not Alex, Ms. Thorpe.
You mean the teacher? Ah.
Ha, no. Although Zera comes back into the strip this week.
The spring…melted O_o? Even your butt standard stainless steel alloys have a melting point of about 1500 C. I can’t *imagine* that the inside of the chamber would be that hot for long enough for it to reach a *sustained* 1500 degrees for the kind of time it would take for beads of metal to melt and fall off the front of the spring let alone the rearward parts of the bolt. That spring almost *can’t* have been actual steel of any kind.
Considering that the melting point of cartridge brass is between 915 and 955 C second this comment. In stead of a steel spring they included a springlike object. I also bet the spring will fail the magnet test (grab a magnet, stuff that sticks to it passes, everything else fails).
If you weren’t sending the spring back, I would be happy to look at it in my professional capacity as a metallurgical engineer / metallurgist.
The damn thing looks almost forge-welded. No way in hell a rifle should be running hot enough to do that to a proper spring.
Inconel, or a related alloy? Naaah. That’s too expensive, when compared to an honest steel spring. Even ductile iron should’t melt at rifle temeratures, though it *might* weld. A little.
looks to me like a dark plastic cocoon around the spring. This would mesh well with the fact that he is shooting coated steel ammo. If the firing pin doesn’t fit the hole well then you could get plastic melting off of the cartridge and flowing back into the channel. finally when there was enough it would obstruct the firing pin.
Likewise, trying to remove it cold would be a royal bitch, and heat would be the only thing that would soften the plastic enough to let it break free.
Floating firing pins are really not a safety issue unless you start seeing dimples on your cases after chambering but before firing. every single US service rifle uses a floating firing pin from the Garand to the m16. I’d have to look, but i don’t think that the AK uses a firing pin spring either. With ALL of those rifles deployed, I haver never once heard of slam fires being an issue on a properly serviced rifle!
I am inclined to back this theory, but it doesn’t really explain the little beads of metal…
The SA80 family use floating pins too, in L85, L86 and L98. Same mechanism inside, just that the 86 has the heavy barrel, bipod, rail and rear pistol grip, the 98A1 was manually cycled and the 98A2 is semi-auto only. It’s not a great bolt carrier design. No hammer needed, just a bic pen to poke out the retaining pin, but the retaining pin hold the firing pin in place through the middle of the bolt and the firing pin holds the cam stud in place, so assembling it by touch can be tricky and you have two tiny components that are easily lost in the woods in the dark.
They all had problems. Hell, they’re world-famous for having problems. Magazine catch socket in the side of the magazine just a little low? Magazine catch in the magazine housing just a little high? You’ll have to slam the butt of the magazine into your hip painfully hard to seat it with the bolt closed then lie with the rifle against your shoulder and get your mate to kick the cocking handle to cycle the action … or just use 29 rounds per magazine, not 30, of course. For extra fun, that combination of edge-of-the-tolerance-envelope shit tried to chamber two rounds at once for me. I had to pry them out with my knife.
The one with the fewest problems in my experience was the L98A1. Its main issue was that it was handed to 14-yr-olds and not every 14-yr-old could handle manually cycling the action against those return springs. That’s why they now hand 14-yr-olds the semi-automatic L98A2 over here in gun-fearing Limeyland.
As for the L85A1, the Individual Weapon (rifle to any other nation), eight soldiers shooting 60 rounds each without a stoppage was unheard-of. Every single weapon test we did had at least someone getting to the last part with too much ammunition left over because his chunk of junk got stuck during an earlier part.
We never had a slam-fire.
We had the fire selector break once. That was kind of special. Poor rookie was meant to fire a single shot and fired a 5-rd burst.
Holy fuckballs. I’d been considering an OMM pin (even though my SKS’s firing pin channel is spotless), then I read something about how it’s not compatible with the Kivaari trigger job, which I HIGHLY recommend. Apparently that’s not all it’s incompatible with.
On that melted “spring”; did you test it before installation to see how springy it was? Part of me is highly suspicious if you clipped off a single ring of it and put a lighter to it (roughly 1,200 degrees F., 1,400 for a hot lighter) it will melt. Somewhere I got a batch of springs a year or two back like that… when you compressed them by hand, they stayed somewhat compressed. That was the first warning something was wrong. I took a propane torch to one to detemper it and heat it to drop it into an oil bath (I was suspicious they had not been heat treated) and the damn thing melted… the puddle looked an awful lot like hard solder. Silvery and very clean (with the fouling from the dirty ammo, it would look more like the dots you have in the photo). I am not sure where they came from, but they went back to the hardware store with a whole lot of complaining. For the life of me, I have no idea why anyone would coil a spring out of hard, and further work hardened solder unless it was a scam to MAKE them fail in some other part (which I have heard second hand tales of). Either way, good to know about this problem.
Reminds me of a story an old friend told me about his time in Desert Storm. When he arrived in Saudi Arabia, his entire company was basically told to trash their standard issue M-16, except for one piece (which was apparently enough to qualify as returning equipment that was issued) as soon as they were able to acquire a discarded enemy AK. When asked why, the platoon First Sergeant dug into the sand, pulled an AK out from under about 3 feet of desert, shook it a couple of times to clear the barrel, then proceeded to empty the magazine downrange without a single misfire or jam. Soviet weapons may seem sloppy and poorly constructed, but they’re practically fucking indestructible and don’t need “improving.”
Accuracy and range suffers. But with full auto, accuracy is a non-issue. And with sand in the rifle, a non-firing rifle has an effective range of 0.
Yeah, AKs are designed with more slop than anyone with access to skilled labor would ever be OK with…
The M-16 and the AK is like an object lesson in the design philosophies between the USSR and the US – one is designed with pretty tight tolerances, while the other is just designed to WORK.
But personally, I would rather clean my weapon every night than deal with the accuracy you “get” with an AK. Check out some really slomo video of an AK firing – you can see the freaking barrel flex. Sure the round from an AK gives better power, but you will almost never hit your target at any real range.
When the AK was designed, Soviet industry was fully up and running like gangbusters. They had access to all the skilled machinists they could ever need.
The ‘slop’ was deliberate – they’d more than plenty of experience with the kinds of conditions you could find in combat – mud, sand, ice, and the general gunge that poorly-trained soldiers permit to build-up on their weapons. In the Soviet’s eyes, functioning weapons were more important than highly accurate ones – especially considering that most actual combat happens at ranges under 300m.
While I also prefer accuracy, the AK’s success speaks for itself.
This is where thee and me disagree. I believe in durability and reliability over pinpoint 1000 yard accuracy. I am not a soldier, and I cannot think of any time in my life I will require a rifle to hit MOA groupings at 1000 yards with iron sights.
I get a lot of shit from this, mostly from my wife and our roommate, because they’re both AR-15 fans, but I really don’t like the AR-15. I’ve had a couple fail in ways that others told me were “unheard of” (including a blown gas ring that jammed the sucker so hard I had to take it home to hammer the bolt out). Rare failures? Maybe, but they’ve happened to me. The AR needs to be relatively babied, when compared to the AK.
YMMV, and I understand why people prefer the AR to the AK. On the one hand, you have the rifle that our military and many others use successfully in real battle every day. On the other, you have the rifle that banana republic fighters and African 9 year old use every day. Given a choice in a survival situation, I would take the AK over the AR any day.
To be honest, my preferred long gun is the M-14 (or M1A1, for you Springfield Armory tytpes!). Solid, robust, and durable. Also able to *really* reach out and touch someone, for when you *really* need to let ’em know you care.
I may’ve mentioned that I had a collateral duty as duty-section counter-sniper one of my ships; basically I needed to be able to put lead in close enough proximity to a sniper to suppress him (or her) long enough for a close assualt team to close in and deal with them. For that purpose, the armorers issued me an accurized M-14 (not quite to XM-21 standards).
On my best day with that rifle, I shot 1.5 MOA @ 500 meters. Pretty sweet. And yet I could use it like a baseball bat, and expect it to only need a touch of re-zeroing afterwards.
A shame .308 is so heavy. :p OTOH, the Mini-14 is a reasonable substitute.
I get what your saying, and for most circumstances an AK-type would be used for defense, accuracy at range isn’t all that important.
I just like the option of longer range shooting when possible. I’m a huge fan of the AR platform, I just hate .223 ammo.
It is that reason along I’m investigating ARs chambered in .300 blackout – accuracy AND stopping power, and parts and gear as far an the eye can see.
And as for MaskMan’s point – I have fired and M-14 and an M1 Garand and loved them both, but the M1 was by far my favorite. Something aboutthat big ol’ bit of lead moving down range, ya know? And hey, if it was good enough for Grandpa, it’s good enough for me. 🙂
I also like the M1. 🙂
OTOH, M-14 removes many opportunities for “Garand Thumb.” 😉 Also, .308 doesn’t weigh as much as .30-06. Though firing from a ship, that probably ought not be a large concern. :-p
Terminal ballistics at-range on the .308 and the .30-06 are sufficiently similar (albeit the .30-06 is very slightly superior) that I don’t see the point in the heavier round. Of course, *everyone’s* milage varies – so shoot what you love. :-p
Well, a good quality M-14 is way, way cheaper than a similar-quality Garand….
Before I end up with a long gun, I’ll have to move somewhere that isn’t a condo. Granted, I don’t give a single fuck about my neighbors, but even *I* don’t like the idea of surprise high-power rounds going through their home.
Hahahaha this is going to be brilliant. Omar is going to get mugged and the shop robbed, all because he is horny and inexperienced with the internetz 😛
That’s a good bitch/warning. Gave background, explained expectations, gave results, explained why this was unsat, gave evidence, showed next step.
Ok how many beers/rounds does your friend owe for recommending the “old man murray” crap?
If you are firing steel JACKETED rounds, the life expectancy of the barrel is 6k rounds. No rifling left at that point. Steel case, no problem. Check with a magnet. Some may have a steel core, some just a steel jacket, some have both.
Ouch. It’s amazing how some products just don’t have a consistency of quality. I’ve looked at so many things on Amazon and read reviews where one person says five stars and others say one. Probably all coming from different factories.
Long time member of SKS boards here. Murray has been in business probably the better part of the decade. I haven’t been at SKSboards in a while but he had a pretty good rep. I would take this to him and see if he can make it right for you.
I think those round things are bits of primer. Firing pin (too long? too sharp?) pokes a hole in the primer and the pieces blow back into the firing pin channel and jam the pin. I bet if you looked at the fired cases, that’s what you’d see. Don’t know why the spring got so mungled up.
I can rule this one totally out. I’ve had popped primers before, but not in the SKS – and I was diligent in examining everything after I did the OMM upgrade.
Holy crap, meltings. *clings to her precious .22 LR protectively* No, baby, there will be no meltings within your chamber.
Also, that pose reminds me of Faith. *insert obligatory goth-porn music here*
no steel alloy should melt at those temps, no matter how crappy it is…. you might have gotten some bullshit tin/ aluminum alloy or something like that.
either way, no business being in a rifle.
So FTF-comics had a FTF…
Ironic?
You could ask Mr. Wolff at Wolff Gunspring Mfg’ing what material he uses to make our springs, but we are very confident in them. If you care to go to the page listed, you’ll find it is the ammo that is causing your problems, and not the gun or the firing pin. And those are not melted pieces of spring, they are pieces of primers. No spring in the world could withstand the hot gases blowing back through the bolt when a primer pops.
http://www.murraysguns.com/poppedprimers.htm
This page at SKSBoards tells more and on page 2 is our new cure. http://www.sksboards.com/smf/index.php?topic=38792.0
Been doing this 24 years. (Thanks Carolina!)
Thanks for the link. However, I feel I need to test this.
That page apparently says it’s “that ammo.” I’m assuming you mean Wolf Brand. I can’t swear that I was shooting Wolf that day – it may have been from the stack of Silver Bear or the cache of Tula I have. It was various mixed taken to the ranch, already in stripper clips.
So if it’s popped primers, and not the firing pin, then I think we can agree on a good test:
Right now, the old girl has the original Soviet firing pin in ‘er. I will take 40 rounds of Tula, 40 rounds of SB, and 40 rounds of Wolf to the range soon. Using a brass catcher and carefully keeping notes/documenting with pictures, we can test to see how many primers pop with the original Soviet pin. This sound like a good test, to you? If I’m wrong about all of this, and it’s not the firing pin, I will make a corrective post.
Thanks for letting us know about this—I’m considering buying an SKS myself.
I can’t recommend the rifle enough. Even now, you can usually pick one up at a show or Cabela’s for $250 or less. Solid platform, reasonably accurate for a Soviet rifle. Ammo (Obamascare notwithstanding) is cheap and plentiful, and it’s in good ol’ 7.62 x 39. Like I said, I’ve had virtually no problems with this rifle. It’s one of my favorites.
I’m sorry, but given how much bad publicity this is giving you I think that your response is WAY below acceptable.
Much better would be offering to test and fix the gun/bolt at no cost or pay for J to take it to a gunsmith in his area and get it fixed. Then the problem could be documented with pictures and a fix shown to his loyal readers.
I would bet a SKS the once the original firing pin goes back in J will not have a single problem. I’d bet my entire gun safe with all of it’s contents that once he posts that finding back here you are going to loose out on *a lot* of sales.
Let’s not set the dogs loose here. I didn’t expect the original Ol’ Man to reply, and he does make a valid point – it COULD technically be caused by weak primers on a bad batch of ammo. Unlikely, in my mind, but it’s possible.
Let’s see what the tests show. Yes, his reply DOES smack of blaming the ammo, when the whole fucking problem was caused by me installing the firing pin. But let me test it. I didn’t put this post up to shame OMM’s product, but to warn other shooters in my situation that this could happen. If I test my rifle this weekend with the original firing pin, and primers pop, I will document it and bitch at the brand of ammunition. I’m very much on board with this test – could be hells of fun. If nothing else, I get to light off 140 rounds of ammo this weekend, which is always a good time.
But if I test this with the original firing pin, and no primers pop, then I’m placing blame squarely on his product. I don’t like having an “upgrade” crater one of my favorite firearms. And in that case, again, I’m not looking for publicity, good or bad. I’m just putting a warning out there that this product does not operate as expected.
I look forward to your update. I’ve put hundreds of rounds of mostly Wolf ammo through my SKS’s (one Chinese, one Soviet) and have never seen a ‘popped’ primer in any of my recovered casings.
have we ever stopped to consider that maybe the ole ruskies made it a floating firing pin for just this reason?
maybe they were counting on a bunch of their hastily made russian ammo to pop a few primers, and adjusted the design accordingly.
at any rate, once i pick up an SKS its most likely remaining bone stock.
1)Mick needs his ass kicked.
2)Heidi made a nice green night vision movie, didn’t she?
3)Please tell me P NOCHA isn’t Heidi or Alex hitting on Uncle.
4)I have to wonder if P NOCHA could be Heidi’s ex-room mate.
5)You have me cringing. Should I be cringing? Of course I should be cringing. Damn you.
(great job)
Dear Omar, the saying goes, Ass, Gas, or Grass, nobody rides for free.
I still say Omar needs to try for a munch (meetup of kinky folks in a public space). It’s good to see Omar back in what’s been a pretty heavy week.
Doesn’t nickel have a lower melting temp than steel? If I’m remembering correctly, what if the spring is nickel steel with the wrong percentage of metals? Nickel’s melting point is around 1455 C. Those beads just remind me of my jewelry / metalworking class when we worked with nickel-silver.
Your OMM response is quite restrained and entirely within bounds (you will be enclosing that last picture, won’t you?). You are to be commended for your civility.
Im not buying Murray’s explanation. If those are primer pieces, then where is the spring? I have had two SKS rifles, a russian and a chinese and have put several thousand rounds through them both, all the same crap ammo you’re using, and have never had a single FTE or FTF on either gun. Those guys at SKS Survivors board are frequently playing with themselves, and I know this because I am a member. They talk a technical game but if you have an engineering degree (like I do) you quickly see that most of them are full of shit. Murrays firing pin fixes a problem that doesnt exist. If you want to do some good to uour SKS, get kivarri to do a trigger job ( or do it yourself, it’s easy).
I’m not buying the “plastic” explanation because the firing pin’s too clean.
That spring’s not evenly coiled. If it got glued up with plastic and had to be hauled out as described, you could possibly distort it that way, but I’d expect to see one end over-extended, as happens when you use a screw to pull a spring out of a mechanism. It’s not over-extended. It’s crushed. It was fully compressed and then some when it got stuck.
A way to check this would be to cut the thing in half along its length and get a close-up of the cut surfaces. It should be really obvious whether it’s glued or welded.
I loved my Chinese SKS, which had a loop over the post. I equipped it with a 1/4″ aperture sight, and the peep sight covered the exact same field of view as the post loop. I’d love to have it back (fat chance) or another.