Today, I took the FG42 out to the range for the first time this year. As with each of the previous four range trips, I took 100 rounds to put through the rifle. So far, I had yet to actually get 100 rounds through it without something going wrong. Well, today, I came the closest yet with 99 out of 100. I had one failure to extract but the bolt cycled and tried to load a live round into the back of the spent casing still in the chamber. The live one was destroyed (we'll see it in a bit) and the rifle jammed of course. I removed the magazine, pulled and held the bolt to the rear, dumped out the live round and eased the bolt closed onto the spent casing in the chamber. The rifle locked up too tight to charge by hand but placing the charging handle on the edge of the table and pushing lightly unlocked the action and the spent casing was extracted. So, I had 99% reliability this time. That's acceptable to me. Less acceptable to me is the fact that the rifle is still locking up once warm if I let the bolt close (as in easing it, not letting it fly) on an empty chamber. However, today it wasn't nearly as bad as earlier trips. Maybe it's wearing in. I haven't sent it back to SMG to address this problem because I'm testing it. I want to see whether it will self correct or not. If it's still locking up, however slightly, when I finish my tests at 1000 rounds, I will be sending it back to SMG in an effort to see what can be done. So, to date, I'm at 396 rounds fired. Today was also the first time out with the new and 5 Rockwell points harder sear. The trigger pull is still very long and heavy but it's smooth. There are marks on it after 99 rounds but I don't feel any ratcheting so they may just be normal metal to metal marks. More rounds will tell the tale. Time for some pictures.
After the range but before I started ripping things apart:
I fired 38 of the first 40 rounds at an actual target. One of the 40 was the previously mentioned jam and one was at an object in the berm (I like shooting dirt). Of the remaining 60 rounds, 20 were fired at stuff in the berm by a friend who happened to show up and the other 40 were fired by me....again at stuff in the berm. It's no target rifle but then I never expected it to be:
A better trigger would help. I better shooter behind the trigger would help too!
Here are what 9 random spent casings and the destroyed round ended up looking like:
All 99 rounds were 1969 dated Portugese FNM surplus. It's considered to be the best 8mm surplus ever imported. Almost all cases ejected consistently at about 45 degrees and landed about 9-10 feet away.
The blue locktite on the scope rings is holding just fine as is evidenced by the screw heads still aligning with the pencil index marks:
So I might have that problem solved.
As usual, we'll be looking at wear areas so that we can see the ongoing progression from new to 1000 rounds. But this time, I also took some pictures of stuff dirty and after cleaning so that you can see what to expect fouling wise after a range trip.
We'll start with the muzzle dirty:
After cleaning:
The gas block and piston fouled:
I didn't take pictures of them clean...oops!
The bolt and carrier removed prior to disassembly and cleaning:
i would pay more than 5 if it were this quality!
