Last weekend I had the opportunity to visit the Manatee Gun Club range in Myakka, FL.  Notably they are the only open-to-the-public 1000 yard range in the Sunshine State.  I limited my shooting to 565 yards where steel targets and truck tires live on the berm.  Long story short, I brought my homebuilt AR-15A2 (FN 1x7 surplus barrel) and approximately 500 rounds of various steel cased ammunition. 

Steel is not as malleable as brass and thus does not expand to seal a firearm's chamber as well as brass.  As a consequence, there will be significantly more case blowback than a similar brass cased cartridge.  This is evident in the pictures below as you can see the amount of carbon residue stuck to the side of the steel casing I had to manually eject via cleaning rod. You can also see the nice section of missing case rim material in the approximate shape of an AR15 extractor. This can be a more common problem with uneven case coatings such as "lacquer" found on Brown Bear (not really lacquer) or "polymer" found on Wolf and Tula (who knows what this really is).

The moral of the story is the bring a good cleaning rod when shooting copious amounts of steel cased ammo.

Russian 223 Disassembled

I'm a cheap bastard and like shooting.  This coupled with my affinity for the AR15 platform equals cheap Russian steel-cased ammunition.  On average these rounds cost right around or under $.20 delivered and are accurate enough for my purposes.  Unlike many stories I've read about Wolf and Tulammo I rarely get FTEs or FTFs with my bottom of the barrel ammunition.  With steel cased ammunition not expanding as much as brass cased ammunition; I also scrub my chambers after each encounter in order to remove excess powder residue and fouling. 

On to the actual review.  From the bottom of my range bag, I was able to retrieve a few stray rounds I could identify from previous purchases.  They are (from left to right): Tulammo 55 gr FMJ, Tulammo 75gr HP, Brown Bear 62gr SP, Golden Tiger 55gr FMJ, Federal XM193C 55gr FMJ.

Tulammo has the Wolf-like polymer case coating and both Brown Bear and Golden Tiger have the green "lacquer." Of course Federal is traditional brass.  Additionally, Golden Tiger and Brown Bear both have sealed primers with that nasty red stuff.  Golden Tiger also sports the sealant around the case neck.

Unfortunately, I left my impact bullet puller in another city so I had to pull the bullets the old fashioned way.  Please forgive the vise-grip marks on the projectiles.

 The Federal is the only of the lot with ball (spherical) powder.  All of the Russian specimens have extruded cut powder of some sort.  All of the Russian projectiles also have a noticeably thicker jacket than the M193.  This would seem to support observation by many shooters that recovered steel jacketed Russian projectiles do not readily fragment. My own testing has shown Wolf 55 gr to fragment in the past; albeit perhaps not consistently. All of the projectiles here exhibit a boat tail design including the Brown Bear 62gr SP.  The Brown Bear is the only projectile to feature an enclosed base.  Notably, there is a good amount of lead exposed at the tip.  I'm curious in the performance of this round hog hunting. The Tulammo 75gr HP has what loosely can be described as a hollow point similar to an OTM (open tip match) round.  Unlike American made OTM rounds; I have my doubts as to the fragmentation ability of this round.

 When I'm feeling less lazy, I'll take the time to weigh and measure the projectiles (sans pliers deformation) if I haven't lost them by then.