Weer'd World

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!