Uzi with suppressor. Fun AND frustrating.

But mostly fun.

I finally got some 147gr. bullets loaded up and went out yesterday afternoon for the first real range test.

I lucked out and got to the range and it was completely devoid of other shooters. I rejoiced.
Let the ear plug/ear muff free shooting begin!

First I chrono'd ten rounds and got a spread of around 900 feet per second, +/ about 20fps either way. It cycles the bolt and doesn't go supersonic, so I'm liking it.

On full auto, it burned through the first mag without a problem, but then on the second and third, I had several rounds that were chambering but not firing, which is kinda odd with an open-bolt, fixed-firing-pin gun. I mean, typically, if the bolt pushes the round into the chamber, the primer is automatically struck. Wasn't the case here, though. I was getting very light primer hits, and stoppages.

I pulled the suppressor back off and got out some older 124gr. and 115gr. mixed rounds that I had a bag of (and put my ear pro back on), and the gun ripped through two magazines of those without a hiccup, although the rate of fire did go up and down noticeably as the gun found +P and +P+ rounds in the mix. But it ate every round.

Then I put the suppressor back on and shot two more magazines of the 147gr. stuff. Three more FTF rounds, all of which fired when I reloaded them into another magazine and tried them again. I'm thinking there might be a mag issue here with a couple of these old 25rd mags that I rarely use, or perhaps the overall length of the cartridges was a bit too long. So I'll be out again next chance I get with some known-quality magazines and new rounds with an OAL right at 1.159. That should get them chambered even if the chamber is getting dirty.

As for noise...definitely not "movie silent", but quiet enough to shoot without hearing protection on. A dump truck driver working on the range about 150 yards away heard the gun running, but said that it was "really quiet". The suppressor seems to be quieting the rounds fine enough, but due to the gun's open-bolt operation system and huge ejection port, there's a fair bit of "chamber bark" as some gas escapes that way during cycling, plus the clatter of that heavy bolt slamming back and forth in the receiver channel. Not much I can do about that, but if I really want to do some silent shooting, I'll go to the .300 Blackout AR or the Ruger 96/44 lever-gun. As it stands though, for full-auto shooting on the less-noisy side, this set-up seems to be doing the trick. Now if I can just get 100% reliability...