Boredom, Draco Time

  My wife is in florida getting a tan without me. The bad part of this is she keeps texting me pictures of beautiful weather, I like the ones with her in them (she's a hotty). With her gone I am stuck with the kids, Matt Lauer and Prudence. They take up a lot of time with Matt crying to go out side and Prudence always wanting to be in my lap. I usually end up yelling at them a little then kicking them outside. They are dogs after all.
  I picked up a Draco AK47 pistol a little while back and have a couple things I want to change on it. The barrel nut was spot welded so I used a dremel to free it up. An RPK flash hider will be going on it in a couple days. I will be changing the sights and furniture at a later time.
  I usually have some regular FMJ 7.62x39 sitting around but picked up four boxes of hollow points because it is illegal to hunt with FMJ in my state. I wanted to make sure they would function, loaded up a mag and tried chambering a round. CHUNK, right into the base of the barrel it went. It really isn't too uncommon for this to happen with AKs I guess. If you run a search pages of posts on forums addressing this will pop up.

  I am sure most of you know why this happens but I will touch on it real quick for those that do not. Hollow points are cut down slightly and then recessed in the center. This creates a flat nose on a shorter bullet causing the tip of the bullet to hit the barrel throat at lower point. On most weapons this is not a problem but on an AK the feed ramp is a metal piece that sits right in front for the mag well extending out from under the barrel. There is also a small ramp ground into the bottom of the barrel. The hollow points make contact right below the small ramped area in the barrel causing the stoppage.

  My first thought was to just widen and lower the ramped area on the barrel a little. So I did. This helped some but I still had failure to feed every once in a while with the tip hitting low and to the left. AK mags are double stack feeding from the left and right side. All the failures were coming from the right side. I was a little confused at this point so I pulled out another AK I knew fed HPs fine for a reference. I was looking at the actual feed ramp and comparing the two. The one that worked was shorter and the total distance the hight from the ramp to the bottom of the chamber in the barrel was less. It was at this point I realized the feed ramp on the Draco was not straight across, it was canted slightly, the right side sat closer to the mag than the left. This caused the rounds to angle left and down. Simple fix, I filed the feed ramp on the right side making it flat across. So far it has cycled fine by hand all the way to the last round. I hope to get out to the range soon to test it once more.

As an added note everything I ground or filed I finished with 600 grit sandpaper to give it a more polished end product.