This may have been posted before, not sure, but I ran across what I (and my science/engineering type of brain) found truly fascinating and informative. It's an extremely in-depth testing of four different kinds of ammo -- three of them being Russian steel-cased, bi-metal jacketed, and one being Federal brass-cased copper jacketed...10,000 rounds of each fired through four identical Bushmaster AR's...

Amazing findings, IMO...

Brass vs. Steel Cased Ammo - An Epic Torture Test

Sorry if you all have already seen this...

Steve

Yup, I've seen it, but what I would like to see is a detailed brass vs steel (bimetal) round performance/ballistics wise instead of gun wear

Yeah, I hear you, snm. They DID "refer" to some ballistic performance, in terms of bullet speeds, and in terms of the size of their groupings with the various rounds. They said early on that they were having problems with two of the rifles, shooting two of the steel-cased ammo, but when they dug into the "why," they found improperly-torqued bolts (barrel bolts of some sort -- I'm not yet far enough into my "education" to know what bolts/where they are specifically). Anyway, they said the groups were "out of tolerance," but when they properly torqued those bolts, the rifles/rounds fell back to "within tolerance" of what is expected for a factory gun, shooting factory rounds. That's not very specific, I know, but I took it to mean that the accuracy (at least before all of the "wear" occurred to the barrels) was "similar-enough" with all four types of rounds such that it was not a significant thing to bring up...

You probably wanted more specific data, though, than the vague ideas of "similar enough," and "within tolerance."

If you haven't seen it, you should.

Post is THREE YEARS old.

Still good info.

__________________
WWSSD?
What would Skeeter do?

The Bear and Tula were designed to function in a AK battle rifle for rebel insurgents and third world armies and will never perform with the precision of the Federal in a well made AR.

No it wasnt. They have maga warehouses full of surplus ammo for that.





Surplus ammo gets sold off every few decades. We were receiving early 80s 5.45 surplus up until 2 years ago when it was outlawed. You figure Russian supplies a lot of countries with ammo and the 5.45 came out in 1974. So with all the fighting all over the world and selling to the American market the Russians managed to sell about a decade worth of ammo manufacturing.

This is basic commercial ammo ment to sell to a civilian market

I put some Tula steel cased 9mm ammo through my Bersa BP9, a couple years ago. The gun seized up and was never the same. Long story short, after several returns to Bersa for warranty work, they finally replaced the firearm, deeming it unrepairable.
The original gun never had any problems when using brass cased ammo. The only reason I even tried the Tula steel cased ammo, was during the ammo shortage. Steel cased ammo might be ok for AK's, or AR-15's, but I would never again put it through any pistols.

another reason to buy a glock!