So I have the day off, and I decided to get up bright and early and take the new WASR-10 to the range now that its all clean and ready to run.
Well it more-or-less works as advertised, I only shot it at 25 yards, and the groups shot offhand were neither impressive, nor disappointing. The big complaint about WASR-10s I hear are canted sights, and trigger-slap. Well I dunno if its because the trigger in this gun is stamped “Tapco” but the trigger pull on this gun is actually REALLY nice, crisp, not overly heavy or light (maybe 3# pull with just a tiny bit of mushy slack to be taken up) and zero “Slap”. The front sight appears to have a slight cant to it, but the rounds were all on paper at 25 yards even with fairly rapid fire, so I see little need to complain about it. Frankly with a cheap AK variant I think if you attempt to reach out much beyond 100 yards is ambitious, and the round drops like a rock much beyond 200 yards no matter what gun you sling it out of. I was impressed at how easy it was to fill up the magazines, tho I’m not used at all to the “Rocking” it takes to feed an AK or other battle rifles with this style magazine latches. (Anybody have any hints for me?)
Only troubles I had were a few stove-pipe jams. No idea what’s causing it. Could have been rust on the ammo, as several of the cartridges fired had gotten soaked in the flood and were a nice orange color, or it could have been cosmoline leaking out of the gun with the heat.
I will say the gun was weeping the stuff after a few magazines. Generally for cosmoline packed guns, I use mineral spirits to pull most of the gunk out of them, then I use the heat from ammo to cook the rest off.
Speaking of cooking, DAMN the gas system gets HOT on these guns, and the wood furniture doesn’t help as much as you’d think. Also that front sling swivel conducts most of the gas heat right to where your fingers can find it!!
Also because I had some 7.62x54R in the bandoleer with the 7.62×39, so I brought along an Mosin Nagant 91/30 just for fun.
You might be a gun nut if you get on your hands and knees to crawl under a table to retrieve a piece of once-fired .45 ACP brass somebody missed.
Speaking of Brass somebody has a pipe-bomb waiting to happen. I pulled out some brass from the bucket that looked odd to me. The round appeared to be a bottle-neck pistol round, but the shoulder was just barely visible. The head-stamp was a bunch of factory-code nonsense, and the case was FILTHY DIRTY and about the same length as a .45 brass. Also the primers were bulging like the eyes of a dying fish. I saved one, but I seemed to have misplacced it. if I dig it up I’ll take a picture.
My guess is somebody has a TT-33, CZ-52, or other 7.62x25mm pistol with a HORRIBLY out-of-spec chamber. This is ALWAYS why when I shoot a new gun, even if its from a reputable source I load just a single round and examine the brass for such oddities.
Well that was fun!
It is also entirely possible that they’re shooting 7.62 McSilly out of a gun for which it isn’t chambered, because people are dumb like that sometimes.
I dunno, I’ve seen pictures of people who have stuffed 9×19 into .40 S&W guns, or .40 S&W into a .45 ACP, tho I’ve never seen .357 Sig in a .40 S&W, I can’t imagine the cartridge would still look like it had a shoulder…maybe i’m wrong, and this is just somebody stuffing a 7.62×25 into a 9×19 gun or something….
“You might be a gun nut if you get on your hands and knees to crawl under a table to retrieve a piece of once-fired .45 ACP brass somebody missed.”
I’ve taken my own brush and dustpan. LOL. Generally when I go there are a few CCW classes going on at the public range and they bring me their brass when their done. Love em.. Love em all……
The club has REALLY nice assortments of brooms and dust pans. I just had brass fever and was in the middle of the firing line with the tools on either end of the line, and that piece of .45 looked as big as a soup bowl to me, and was shining like a new dime…..
Cerosafe is cheap and easy to use (in the kitchen when your wife isn’t looking) and then you don’t have to fire the gun to know if the chamber is correct.
http://www.4-dproducts.com/submenu/Cerosafe.htm
FWIW, I don’t snag other people’s brass unless it’s a shooting buddy who buys factory and doesn’t reload.
You never know what people have done to it even if it looks new. My bags of used brass are labeled by how many times used.
Eh, I’m not anal about my brass, I check it all for signs of stress or a hard life, and look for that faint white line that comes when the brass at the head is just about paper thin, and I toss everything that doesn’t look kosher.
Even my own brass is a total hodge-podge of makes and numbers of trips up the feed-ramp.
If I was shooting for pristine accuracy I might keep every batch together, like-with-like…and I’d probably hand-measure every damn charge too.
Instead I stick with getting the most live pills out of a reloading session with safety being paramount, and “more accurate than I can shoot” as a good measure of quality.
I anneal mine for greater longevity. Does that count as anal? Helps a lot when you’re fiddling with wildcats and obsoletes you have to reform from something else and when you’re shooting regulars in improved chambers. And it you’re going to bother annealing a batch of brass, you may as well make it a BIG batch. Keeps it from work-hardening near as fast.
Does Annealing help with straight-wall cases? I’ve been thinking of annealing my .257 Roberts brass (and maybe when I get a proper SHTF gun, my 7.62x51mm) but with pistol rounds seems the brass I throw away is the stuff that gets fucked up on ejection/landing, stuff that just looks beat up from being shot a ton of times, and stuff that’s about to loose its head.
I don’t see how annealing would slow that much. But I fully understand how it’ll keep the necks from splitting on bottle-neck cartridges….
Helps with anything that’s being bent different than it was before it goes in the die.
Brass work-hardens. Copper work hardens too. If you are working with them it never hurts to anneal before you bend.
the fact that over time you will stretch things some and trim some, and eventually end up with thinner brass should still be taken into consideration on brass life, but annealing does make a difference.
Or buy a H und K 91/93 or a CETME, or a Galil and just use brass once because of the “positive extraction” 🙂
FWIW: If you don’t expect to get more than 5 or 6 goes with a case, it’s not worth the bother and if you do it wrong you could create a grenade on accident. I like getting 12-20 usages out of cases because I shoot weird stuff where the brass is spendy. Common stuff you can sweep up for free at the range, if you trust it, I wouldn’t bother. Indoor range here actually will revoke your membership for that or at least severely chastise you, because the owner is a Scotsman and he makes a decent couple of nickels on recycling brass left behind. haven’t been there in over a year, because I just shoot on my property or hunting, but I doubt that has changed or will.
Also FWIW, Shotgun Club doesn’t care if you pick up leftovers and Winchester XX seems to go 2-3 loads per hull and a lot of the others don’t.
Could have been something like a .400 Corbon, too, but guys who run boutique guns like that are usually religious about collecting their brass.
I’ve been paying 80 bucks for 20 for properly dimensionally sized .458 Lott and misc. .700s…I don’t leave it behind unless something goes terribly wrong. Same with all the odd antique war rifle ammo.
When I shot my trophy zebra, I used my buddy’s rifle as I was express sighting it that day and had left my scope at camp and he was rigged for a +300 yard shot and only out for an impala and when I jacked the follow up in the chamber in case I needed it, I didn’t pay attention to where the empty went.
He said something like “Nice job, you got your fooking zebra, but you lost one of my reloadable cases and they’re even harder to get here than in the US.” 🙂
heh, yeah I check the headstamps before I toss them in a bag.