The velocities developed by 7.62x39 cartridges work fine with unjacketed hardened cast bullets. This is an important consideration for someone who casts their own bullets. You can easily heat treat cast lead alloy using a normal oven, then add a homemade gas check made from aluminum or copper sheet metal and depending on the care used when making up your own cartridges they are as accurate as copper jacketed bullets.
This might be an important consideration one day if the government starts trying to regulate commercial ammunition. With 7.62x39 you have a much larger and heavier projectile traveling at a slower speed than 5.62x45. The molds I use produce a 155 grain bullet as compared to the typical 5.62x45 bullet which weighs only 55 to 65 grains. The high velocities of 5.62x45 bullets basically means that they must be jacketed which makes them difficult to produce without special equipment.
So what is a 5.62x45 bullet. I think you meant 5.56x45. Just checking.
5.62x45?
LOL!
” ... You can easily heat treat cast lead alloy using a normal oven, then add a homemade gas check made from aluminum or copper sheet metal and depending on the care used when making up your own cartridges they are as accurate as copper jacketed bullets. ...”
One cannot but wonder, what alloys (lead, aluminum, copper etc) fireman15 is using. Not to doubt his word, but if his mixes are that good, he had better patent the stuff before someone else steals his ideas.
If my memory is any good, 7.62x39 o43g muzzle velocities run around 2360 ft/sec - still rather too speedy for any lead alloy that touches the bore, heat treated or otherwise.
Might work tolerably well in bolt actions, but such actions have never been of much interest to American civilians who want to buy SKS or Kalashnikov clones. Firing cast bullets of any sort in a gas-operated system risks some pretty nasty fouling - even in the vaunted loose-fitted systems the Red Army loves so much.
The 7.62x39 o43g cartridge was never anything but a wartime expedient, like its immediate predecessor the 7.92x33 Kurz. Loading the Soviet round with cast bullets does have a certain appeal in survival situations; but all of that entails additional expenditure - negating one of the advantages of buying Com Bloc castoffs (i.e. cheap). Most imported 7.62x39 ammunition is Berdan primed anyway, greatly complicating reloading. Yet more expense.