I'm a brass cased snob, but I recently nabbed a half case of Wolf Military Classic.
....
I think the folks at Tula & Ulyanovsk are starting to crank out some ammo
Yes, steel cased ammo tends to be rougher on the extractor and is dirtier so you need to clean your gun more often if you shoot steel stuff, plus you can't reload it. I only shoot steel case in my milsurp and Russian guns, because I know they can handle it the don't need as much cleaning as the other guns.
I suggest reading this entire article. But realize that they left out a very serious variable when they made their 'conclusions'...the spent brass cases definitely have a value that should not be ignored.
http://www.luckygunner.com/labs/bras...el-cased-ammo/
Andrew almost always does a top-notch, thorough job. In this case, my trepidation lies with the firing cadence. If Andy and crew are speedily dumping mags, then their end results will be quite a bit off from someone who fires the carbine inline with the specifications of the firearm.
I don't ever dump mags in quick order. Even when running drills, it's double taps with some break time between pairs. Heating a barrel to cook-off points, as specifically mentioned in the article, is the realm of Squad Automatic Weapons. Now, if I had such a firearm I wouldn't load it up with Wolf, but a semi-auto AR is another realm altogether.
Back in 2001 I pushed a Romanian SAR-3 to the point where the inside of the hand guards started scorching. Obviously well outside the operating envelope, plus the ill-effects you'd expect along with it.
Seems obvious to me that an AR firing Brass cased ammo at a reasonable cadence will have its barrel last well beyond 5k. Whether or not those same results would be proportionately extrapolated to a test with a more realistic firing schedule/cadence remains to be seen.
I don't get the impression that the rate of fire was the problem.
And it's not like this is the only source for tulammo problems. Lots of people have had problems, some pretty serious (terribly-stuck cases for example) with tulammo. If you shoot it, you are taking your chances.
On that I would completely agree. Wolf has a history of being dirty, inconsistent, and in some cases squib-prone. One of the biggest problems is accountability in the event of a failure. If your gun gets a double-charged round or a squib resulting in a catastrophic failure, who do you turn to? Will a company is Russia make any effort to remedy the situation? In my opinion, it's highly unlikely.
I still think the newer Wolf steel case loads are leaps and bounds ahead of where it was 10-15 years ago.