Range report
boing, it's the... mark that the safety lever leaves on the side of the receiver...
... never as good as the first time...
Now let me tune into my Moving Pictures CD while I try to cut & convert some decent video and a couple of pics. Yesterday's range session was cut short anyway but I took it back today.
I'll be back.
edit to continue:
... and back I am. No luck with video (codec problems, need to re-install editing software, not now) but I have a couple of pictures, a typical group of 6 cm @ 50 meters and another view of the rifle.
So, I got my Saiga M3-EXP-01 this Monday and immediately headed out to the range for my Monday IPSC. I did a couple of pistol stages, cleaned the Saiga of its delivery greases and got a 50 meter range for myself for half an hour for sighting in.
I had a quantity of no-name German (East-, I suspect) ammunition in green casings and had a nice 7-cm group of five immediately, pointing a good 15 cm to the left. Lacking a hammer to adjust them I left the iron sights as is and latched on the Kobra EKP-1S-03 I already got a couple of months ago while waiting for the rifle to arrive.
The Kobra pointed way down left and the rest of the session went into getting it zeroed with three groups of five. The sight performs beautifully, its adjustments are consistent and precise, if a bit coarse. The rifle's trigger was a nice surprise, it has a definite two-stage touch and almost no after-travel. The very short buttstock makes the positioning of the head a bit problematic, the back corner of the Kobra can get a little close to one's nose. This butt is of the non-folding variety and the receiver also lacks all the parts for accepting one.
Today I went out to my sister's place, they've a sand pit out behind nowhere's back. I set up some targets at 50 meters again and got prone with four varieties of ammunition: the German no-name, Czech S&B, Finnish Lapua and Russian no-name from the Tula works. All are FMJ - the German and Lapua said 123 grains on the box, the others nothing on the bullet weight (though the Tulan box says "Hunting Cartridges"
- now what do they hunt with FMJ bullets?).
All grouped the same 6-8 cm from the distance, the groups varying approximately the same in placement. The German stuff I had zeroed with and the rest were a bit above them in a neat row from left to right. Group size is consistent with the proof document the rifle arrived with, saying a group of 123 mm was shot with 4 rounds at 100 meters with this individual.
As only the Lapua is more expensive than the rest of the cartridges I had, I think I'll stick with the S&B or Russian. The German stuff namely blows enormous puffs of smoke... I think I was had as that was sold to me as THE cheap ammo to use. No problem with group size but the others burn cleaner.
Brass quality is moot since the exit of casings is rough. They get banged on the receiver lid for a sharp dent and bulge badly at the neck - that's a Russian Federation law thing, they have to put a groove in civilian rifle chambers to tell the spent casings apart from (maybe once) military-owned rifles. The logic behind this escapes me as most Russian thinking does.
Once I had the ammunition tested and the above conclusions made, it was time for some getting used to the handling characteristics of the Saiga - Kobra - combo. I have experience with the Sako/Valmet 62 series with their aperture sights, milled receivers and considerably longer buttstocks - I lugged one around for eleven months doing my conscript training and have since gotten some serious trigger time with most variants of it with a career military friend of mine and state-sponsored ammo
. Just to stir the pot, I still don't get the fascination of full auto at all.
At first I had problems controlling this rifle going from IPSC target to another to a third at approx. 30 meters. Shooting single shots, double taps and singles stringing through three targets starting quite slowly from low ready, I had 75% of the hits in A zones and just a few in D.
The red dot sight "paints" such an exact picture of the muzzle wobble after each shot that it really seems to require some getting used to. Looking at the raw footage of my shooting today, though, the recoil looks practically non-existent to an onlooker - I guess it's the impression through the Kobra that does this. As a shooter I'm 180 cm and 100 kg with a very decent balance and coordination, so there should be no major defect in form. Having said that, I suspect a tendency to anticipate the recoil a bit now, since there seemed to be a low-left trend to my follow ups.
The rifle arrived without the compensator the previous batch imported had, so a trip to the gunsmith to get a barrel threading for the comp and alternate suppressor is coming up. I'll be shooting in open class in the army reserve 3-gun anyway because of the optics. Suppressors are gaining popularity here mostly because of the slight tightening effect on groupings they seem to have; some help with recoil will also be expected. If that's not enough, I'll just screw on the comp instead. Using ALS ammo is considered baaaad sport...
The magazine catch will have to be altered as well to accept standard Finnish magazines; this will also include a bullet guide installation. Why not have a recoil buffer put in as well, this might also help out the battered casings a bit
? The trigger, it seems now, requires no tuning.
Once I have this done and get half a dozen of magazines, I'll have no more than 800€ spent on this, of which the actual rifle cost 350€. That kind of value is hard to beat: compared to the 1500 to 2000€ a discontinued (and used) Sako 92 would set one back nowadays, I'll have plenty to spend on ammunition and, why not, the third gun in 3-gun perhaps?
Russian kleptocracy wouldn't let the batch out of the country. Now they got in, got sold, fortunately I had one put away for me in time. 
