Dented Primer

[Silent-Snail]

Last week I was forced to cut short a backyard plinking session due to an attack of "Real Life". After removing the magazine and manualy ejecting the last unfired round that was in the chamber I noticed that the firing pin had left a dent on the primer. That was the first time I had ever had to remove a round that been autoloaded in this rifle.
BTW the rifle was a WASR-10, and the ammo was Brown Bear soft point. I don't think it was the ammo as my SKS has not done anything like this, but you never know.

How bad is this, and what can I do to prevent things like slam-firing or maybe worse?

 

[WeedWhacker]

I believe you'll be wanting a firing pin spring installed. A quick search didn't turn up a source for one, but I'm not sure which parts will fit a WASR-10 as I'm not familiar with that rifle. If you know, google a bit for firing spring pins for compatible models.

 

[iamkris]

Many military arms have inertial firing pins (no springs), ARs, SKSs, AKs and such. Military primers are generally harder and don't react to the very light strike of the pin that happens every time the bolt closes.

Commercial primers are softer and generally if the firing pin is not stuck in the forward condition (like a lot of SKSs because their owners didn't clean out the cosmo) it isn't a problem. Many 1,000,000s of rounds of commercial ammo have been fired through these guns without issues. I wouldn't worry about it...just make sure the firing pin is free moving.

 

[Onmilo]

As stated, most military auto rifles feature inertia fire pins and they will all put a small dent on the primer when a round is chambered.
The semi auto replica rifles are built in the same fashion and will do the same thing.

This is actually a good sign in any of these rifles, it shows that the fire pin is long enough to impart reliable impact on a hard primer.

People who reload for these weapons would do well to use CCI or Federal Mil-spec primers as they are hard enough to prevent slam fire while remaining soft enough to reliably fire in semi auto.