Introducing Maria

Sep23
by jlgrant on September 23, 2013 at 1:00 am
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I think you’ll like where this is going.

SO! Decided to run the SKS test on Saturday.

For those just checking in, I took my SKS to a shooting outing a few weeks back, and the Old Man Murray firing pin I’d installed a while back failed. Pretty spectacularly at that. It appears that primers were popping, which melted the spring in the pin, which rendered the rifle inoperable until I found a way to get that bullshit out of the bolt. This pissed me off something fierce, as the OMM Firing Pin claims that it will make your rifle safer and more reliable. Instead, it did the opposite of that. Murray Hisself checked in on the comments of that post, and claimed that it was bad ammo – the link he posted says it was Wolf brand of some kind, and I remembered that we’d just bought some Wolf earlier this year. OK, I can see how that’s plausible. But I also wanted to see if the original firing pin would have such an issue – using the same ammo, I wanted to test the original firing pin.

So I did.

First off, I discovered, upon preparing the ammo for the range, that I own no Wolf brand ammo of any kind in 7.62 x 39. We bought some wolf recently – it was 1K rounds of WPA in .223. I misremembered. I tend to buy my 7.62 bulk, and I buy the cheap bullshit they import from the Soviets. Found out that the stash I’d raided for the ranch day was a mix of Tula, Ulyanovsk, and Brown Bear. I haven’t purchased ANY 7.62 x 39 in over 3 years, because I already had a bigass pile of it.

I had exactly 20 rounds of Brown Bear left (hate the stuff – lacquered casings make a stink, but admittedly, it always goes bang), so I grabbed that, 20 rounds of Uly, and 40 rounds of Tula.

The failure at the ranch occurred after exactly 43 shots. So it was 4 stripper clips, I do not recall what exact brands. However, within 43 rounds, primers popped and the spring melted.

So here’s our test:

Went to Elm Fork, on a beautiful day. Took my cohort, Trinity (who is also my daughter).

Trin was ready to help me blow off 80 rounds of mixed ammo and make sure we gathered every single casing.

The rifle, one of my favorites in our collection. Chinese SKS, Type 56 from the 06 factory, likely manufactured in 1973, but I could be completely misreading the markings. Whatever the case, it is NOT a new rifle, but it’s solid and tends to go bang every time.

The SKS Food. Two strippers of Brown Bear, two of Ulyanovsk, and two boxes of Tula.

About to start with the Bear rounds. Note my hi-tech shopping bag brass catcher, which worked fairly well – out of the whole day, only had to chase down about ten spent runaways.

Trin got through about half the second stripper of Bear, but didn’t like the recoil of the rifle. Pansy. (Kidding, I’m proud of her shooting abilities.)

Fun! Her grouping is the center, mine’s the upper left. 25 yards, I cloverleafed 7 shots while she spotted me. The trigger break on this rifle is snappy, but I might do a job on it to make it cleaner. Also, the sight picture is a tiny bit off. Need to raise the front sight post about 1 mm to get perfect.

We blew through the 80 rounds in about an hour. This was after we moved it back to 50 yards, iron sights – this rifle isn’t going to pound nails, but that spread near my hand? I’ll take it.

Tomorrow: THE RESULTS!