someguy2800
Member
Thought I would share this as it might be interesting to some of you 7.62x39 lovers.
I decided last minute about 2 weeks ago that I wanted to take my 7.62x39 AR15 deer hunting. I never thought I would own an AR15 let alone would I be deer hunting with one but quite frankly I’ve fallen in love with it even though I have several more traditional hunting rifles.
I built it off an Anderson lower and Bear Creek Arsenal dual charging upper
The ammo I wanted to use is a 125 gr nosler accubond loaded with hodgdons new CFE BLK powder. The inspiration for this came from my father in law. Back in the early 90’s him and a friend both bought SKS’s for $80 each from a drug store. He said at the time reloadable brass was not available so they bought a spam can of ammo and the two of them in a weekend pulled all the bullets from them, poured the powder back in, and seated new .311 diameter softpoint bullets to about 500 rounds of ammo. He took one deer with it and passed it on to his brother who hunted with that ammo for years.
So I thought it would be fun to do the same. Initially I went and bought 3 boxes of Fiocchi fmj brass case ammo, threw the powder and bullets away, resized the necks to .308 using the expander out of my 300 blackout die, and loaded them up. Results were impressive. I worked from 28-30 grains of CFE BLK.
29 grains yielded 2520 FPS
29.5 yielded 2570
30 yielded 2610.
100 yard group
Problem was the side charging handle on my upper absolutely smashes the case mouths of the brass making most of them unreloadable. So I figured if I can’t reuse the brass I might as well just use steel cases since I have a 1000 rnd case of wolf 124 hp’s.
I pulled the bullets with an impact puller, removed the decapping pin from my size die, lubed them up with Hornady one shot, and full length sized them in the 7.62x39 FL sizing die with a 300 blk expander in place. They sized with almost no effort.
The next hurdle I found was that the steel case mouths shave the bullets when seating, so I put my Lyman universal expander that I use for cast bullets between the sizer and seater and put a very small flare on them. Finally I readjusted my seating die to remove the flare and put in a slight taper crimp.
Shaved bullet on left, flared case in middle, taper crimped case on right.
I shot the same load workup again and noted the velocities were about 75 FPS slower than the Fiocchi cases. I found the wolf steel cases have about a grain more powder capacity than the brass cases.
I worked the load up farther up to 31 grains. I think I will back down on the next batch to 30.5 but these still look okay and netted an incredible 2630 FPS with a 125 accubond from a 16” barrel! Accuracy is not quite as good as the brass cases or factory Wolf ammo actually, but still around 1.25”.
Took this buck with it this afternoon
I decided last minute about 2 weeks ago that I wanted to take my 7.62x39 AR15 deer hunting. I never thought I would own an AR15 let alone would I be deer hunting with one but quite frankly I’ve fallen in love with it even though I have several more traditional hunting rifles.
I built it off an Anderson lower and Bear Creek Arsenal dual charging upper
The ammo I wanted to use is a 125 gr nosler accubond loaded with hodgdons new CFE BLK powder. The inspiration for this came from my father in law. Back in the early 90’s him and a friend both bought SKS’s for $80 each from a drug store. He said at the time reloadable brass was not available so they bought a spam can of ammo and the two of them in a weekend pulled all the bullets from them, poured the powder back in, and seated new .311 diameter softpoint bullets to about 500 rounds of ammo. He took one deer with it and passed it on to his brother who hunted with that ammo for years.
So I thought it would be fun to do the same. Initially I went and bought 3 boxes of Fiocchi fmj brass case ammo, threw the powder and bullets away, resized the necks to .308 using the expander out of my 300 blackout die, and loaded them up. Results were impressive. I worked from 28-30 grains of CFE BLK.
29 grains yielded 2520 FPS
29.5 yielded 2570
30 yielded 2610.
100 yard group
Problem was the side charging handle on my upper absolutely smashes the case mouths of the brass making most of them unreloadable. So I figured if I can’t reuse the brass I might as well just use steel cases since I have a 1000 rnd case of wolf 124 hp’s.
I pulled the bullets with an impact puller, removed the decapping pin from my size die, lubed them up with Hornady one shot, and full length sized them in the 7.62x39 FL sizing die with a 300 blk expander in place. They sized with almost no effort.
The next hurdle I found was that the steel case mouths shave the bullets when seating, so I put my Lyman universal expander that I use for cast bullets between the sizer and seater and put a very small flare on them. Finally I readjusted my seating die to remove the flare and put in a slight taper crimp.
Shaved bullet on left, flared case in middle, taper crimped case on right.
I shot the same load workup again and noted the velocities were about 75 FPS slower than the Fiocchi cases. I found the wolf steel cases have about a grain more powder capacity than the brass cases.
I worked the load up farther up to 31 grains. I think I will back down on the next batch to 30.5 but these still look okay and netted an incredible 2630 FPS with a 125 accubond from a 16” barrel! Accuracy is not quite as good as the brass cases or factory Wolf ammo actually, but still around 1.25”.
Took this buck with it this afternoon
