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Posted: 10/6/2004 7:26:10 PM EDT
| It was brought up on the Cabelas thread that there's a new polymer wolf 7.62. What is the difference and/or benefit to one over the other? Thanks. |
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The laquer coating of the case had nothing to do with cases sticking in the chamber! The problem was a combo of off brand AR-15's with non mil spec chambers and the excessive amount of case mouth and primer sealer slopped onto the Russian ammo. If you look at the 223 Wolf ammo in the pic the arrows denote where so much case mouth sealer was put on that it ran down the neck and the primer sealer onto the body of the case. The sealer being a different type of laquer than what is used on the cases themselves it would melt in a hot chamber turning sticky. On any brand of ammo that uses a case mouth sealer some will be on the neck but in relation to the total overall surface area of the case it is very small. But none of the other brands of ammo will get any of the primer sealer anywhere but the bottom of the case. As you can see by the pic the sealer is covering 100 times the amount of surface are the case mouth sealer does on other brands of ammo. This resulted in cases sticking in the chamber as the friction caused by the melted sealer was too much for the exstaction power of the AR-15 design to over come. Most AR-15 owners used to shooting brass case ammo wrongly blamed the sticking problem on the only thing they could see different from their normal ammo and that was the laquer coating of the cases. Internet rumors started flying about the laquer coated cases sticking and Wolf got a lot of complaints. Wolf changed the loading technique and stopped the excessive application of sealer on the 223 ammo. But anyone who knows marketing knows that if the problem is fixed but the product looks the same as the old product people will not buy it. They will falsely assume it is the same as the old stuff. Well the damage had been done and the only way for Wolf to get people to buy there "fixed" ammo was to make it look different from the old ammo. So this is the reason Wolf changed the laquer on the cases to a different color polymer. 
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That pretty much sums it up. I originally thought I was having problems with extraction of polymer cases in my Yugo SKS, but I found some older laqured Wolf later and had a difficult to extract with that too. Problem ended up dissapearing after quite a bit of shooting, probably almost 800rnds. That said, I think I prefer the laquered stuff as the polymer cases are fixing something that wasn't broken. Also, IIRC they ditched the neck sealant completely with the polymer stuff. |
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