7.62×39 and 7.62x54R are famous or infamous for using steel cased ammunition. There is fierce debate as to whether or not there is damage done to a firearm shot on a constant diet of steel cased ammunition. To me primary downside of steel cased ammo is that it is not reloadable. The vast majority of it is Berdan primed, and while you can reload Berdan primed brass, it’s not as easy to find primers, or as easy to remove the primer.
With that said, it’s cheap, really cheap. 40 Rounds of Tula Ammo cost me a little over $12.00 while twenty rounds of the Winchester white box was a little more than $14.00. So having a rifle that can shoot this cheap ammo is important to me, plus, the rifle would have been designed to feed the Soviet Era ammunition which consisted of lots of steel cased ammunition.
When I first loaded a magazine full of the Tula ammunition, the first round wouldn’t fully chamber despite firing all of the brass Winchester ammunition without any problems. The first place I always look when it comes to troubleshooting feeding issues is the ammunition itself.
The marks left on the shell, showed me there was likely a burr in the chamber. An artifact that might have been created when I pressed the barrel out, either to adjust the headspace or when I removed it from the stub. When I looked at the fired brass cases they all had the same marks, that I had missed. The brass shaved offer and offered little to no resistance to closing the bolt. The steel shell wasn’t so forgiving
It took all of 20 minutes and a half round file to fix the issue. Very little material was actually removed, just enough to knock down any burrs that would catch a case as it fed into the chamber. Function testing was flawless with the Tulammo after the burrs were removed. I switch to the Wolf ammunition which had the same grain weight bullet but the bullet had an open tip.
These rifles don’t have feed ramps cut into the barrel or barrel extension like an AR-15. I am not anxious to cut feed ramps into the barrel and potentially leave a portion of the case unsupported. There may be something we can do to the rifle to fix this, if not, we may need to be careful what ammunition we give to the rifle. FMJ, Ballistic Tipped or a ammunition with a “Sharp” meplate will likely feed fine. Since this is a new issue, there may be a new write up on how we solve it, if we can solve it.