QBZ-191 service rifle family
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
Good or bad? Im not very knowledgeable on firearms
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Bolt bounce aka over travel is bad if uncontrolled. It’s results are a malfunction. That could take the form of failure to go into battery, misfire due to failure to reset the trigger group, double feed all things that basically make gun go click.
The QBZ191 uses a bolt carrier group that floats in a receiver extension similar to the AR15. Early M16 in combat had an issue of bolt bouncing due to over pressure ammunition and gas port erosion due to corrosive propellant in humid conditions. This was rectified by a number of changes to the weapon and ammunition. To help this one of the changes was replacing the guide rod the operating Springs ride on with a a weighted plunger. This added mass to the BCG dampened the excess energy and help ensured a secure lock. This said all shots looked successful with no signs of editing away or tampering with the video. Though it does have a little over Tavel it’s not enough to cause an issue. Military rifles as a rule are overgassed for reliability so a degree of bounce is common. It’s a question of if that degree goes beyond engineered tolerance.
I'm thinking this could cause issues had he been firing in full auto. That said, looking at diagrams of the 191 bolt carrier group, I think the top lever is a mechanism that prevents firing if it was out of battery. Could be at the end of the day, the guy just needed to change his spring (aka lack of maintenance on the gun). What does trigger me though, is the fact that they decided to use this video to try to show how cool it is (which imo it is), but they do it in such a negligent manner.
It is the norm rather than the exception for Chinese military adjacent media, both state/public and on the ground enthusiast/amatuer
Chinese rifles usually have a gas selector for normal and dirty. Maybe he just put the gas selector is on dirty.
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TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
out of battery failures need not be catastrophic failures. It could literally be just that the bolt is partially open and as such the rifle won’t fire.
as to Springs… the springs on a modern rifle don’t wear out after a day of shooting. If this rifle had fired enough in the space of a day to wear out the operating springs it probably would have melted the handguard. fouling in piston guns is normally limited to the Piston and breach never touching any of the half dozen springs in a modern rifle.
If the rifle was fouled to that degree at the end of a shooting day to require using adverse setting then the ammunition used is really dirty and problematic.
The lifespans on the parts of a military weapon are measured in tens of thousands of rounds even when using very very high pressure ammunition.
Though shooters are encouraged especially in military to clean their weapons as good habits. Fouling conditions are typically not bad enough to cause issues even after prolonged periods neglect.
Sports shooter will often fit civilian iterations of semiautomatic rifles of the same design with adjustable gas systems and then tune the port to a lower gas setting for reduced recoil and faster follow on as well as using precision ammunition which as a softer pressure curve. They will work to find a sweet spot where the rifle has just enough power to cycle reliably but not as much punch with their favored ammunition types.
Military ammunition tends to prefer more mass and energy.
The designer will create a gas system that is over pressured specifically to ensure operation in a combat environment across the majority of situations. When you have a adjusted gas port system on a military rifle. First it’s often not needed as to foil a rifle that bad is a hard endeavor requiring ammunition counts that Hollywood movies don’t reach. Second the preference is still to over gas on the normal setting for reliability.
Next on military weapons the port isn’t something you can just switch on previous Chinese designs you had to leaver it into the new setting by using a bullet case as a wrench. That’s a common mechanism on military weapons to discourage tinkering. Could it have been done? Sure, but why if you don’t need to?
As I said before it seems like there was a little extra umph on the cycle but I am not sure it’s enough to call it a problem as the three shots all cycled without malfunctioning. I generally think a little bit of bounce is bound to happen with modern military ammunition and modern military weapons because of the pressure curve and mission statement.
Reliable cycling across military expectations of extreme Cold to extreme hot and potential for mud, ice and sand. I mean China is a rather large land mass it’s coldest recorded temperature is -53C it’s hottest was 43.7C it goes from the dry of the Gobi desert to the humidity of the Tropical Pacific ocean. A combat rifle of the PLA has to be able to operate from the high altitude of the highlands of the Hindu Kush to the lows of the Turfan depression. As such you want a rifle able to operate within about 90% of those conditions. So yeah overgassed.
Then factor in modern intermediate caliber general purpose military ammunition favors barrier penetration so high mass core high pressure high velocity.