Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Just enough hotter, apparently.

So today was the date with the chronograph for the TulAmmo and PPU full metal jacket stuff. How much hotter does a round have to be than the Blazer Brass 115gr to ensure reliable functioning in this C9-A1? If you'll remember, the CCI load averaged 1097fps for a string of ten rounds, with the slowest being a decidedly subsonic 1055.

First, the Prvi Partizan...
PPU 124gr FMJ
LO: 1031
HI: 1090
AV: 1067
ES: 58.38
SD: 16.03
Slower than the Blazer Brass, but not by much, and with a heavier bullet, these rounds functioned the weapon just dandily.
And then the TulAmmo...
TulAmmo 115gr FMJ
LO: 1116
HI: 1201
AV: 1163
ES: 85.42
SD: 24.75
So, a pretty wide velocity spread, but the slowest was as fast as the fastest Blazer Brass, and the fastest TulAmmo round was a good bit faster than that.

It wasn't all sunshine and buttercups, though...
 
Russian primers are notoriously harder than woodpecker lips and striker-fired guns sometimes have issues popping them reliably. Round number 42 of the day (#472 of the test) didn't go off on the first time around, but when reloaded into the mag and cycled into the chamber again, it ignited normally. That goes against the gun, then.

This makes 530 rounds fired through the Steyr C9-A1 without cleaning or lubing, with two failures-to-fire (#8, #472), three failures to extract (#234, #266, #276), and one failure to go completely into battery (#116). 1,470 rounds left to go.
.