Thursday, December 29, 2016

Russian Steel


Yesterday morning dawned with a case of TulAmmo 115gr FMJ being dropped off on the front porch. The Gen4 19 had already seen five hundred and fifty rounds of Wolf Polyformance, so this is probably going to be the highest percentage of nasty steel-cased Russkie stuff I've used in a 2,000-round test.

Loading magazines yesterday morning showed pretty quickly that the TulAmmo wasn't going to function any better in the ETS mags than the Wolf did, and it felt kinda sticky in the Magpul mag, too, so I didn't even try it, opting to load a hundred rounds into factory Glock 19 magazines.


On the twenty-third round of the day (#1,290 of the test) I got a click instead of a bang. The slide could not be retracted by hand. I left the pistol in my lane, went and borrowed a rubber mallet from the 'smith, took i out on the range, and (while keeping the pistol with its mag removed pointing downrange) rapped it once on the muzzle end. What came out was what you see above: A round of Tula with a good indentation on the primer, and a primer that was standing well proud of the primer pocket.

Obviously I did not try to fire it again.

Up to you whether you want to count that against the gun or the ammo, but I know where my vote would go.

The other ninety-nine rounds passed without incident.

That makes 1,366 rounds through the Gen4 19 since it was cleaned or lubricated with two failures-to-fire (#205, #1,290) and two failures-to-feed (#814, #864*). 634 rounds to go.
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