As most of you are aware of, I've revised approx 500 of the NUMRICH drums, and have a pallet with another 100+ to revise sitting in my garage! Interspersed with the revision drums, I have also repaired, re-lubed, or in general, just repaired whatever was wrong with some original drums as well. As fate would have it, for about every 10 or so BING drums to repair, there would be 1 or 2 AEG drums. I'm not a fan of AEG simply because the parts are slightly different, and often times, the BING loading tool fits poorly or not at all!
But, as I'm pretty much game for any drum repair, I took it apart and so the battle begins! At first I'm a little amazed, the outside showed some serious use, while the inside showed non use! None!!! Not cartridge tracks, nothing! So, I'm again, prematurely thinking piece of cake! That was about two months ago, with about 20 hours of bench time and modification and testing! It would feed a few rounds then jam, clear it and go a few more and jam, jam, jam , jam,... I went to bed each night dwelling on my next move. I made fixtures to correct the inside dimension, I polished out any and all bumps, lumps and welds and polished the inside front radius until baby butt smooth! Last night I was pretty confident it would work, load it up, jam!!!
After another night of thought, I determined that in all probability, the follower angle stop was not letting the bullet angle far enough to fit up the tube and was planning on correcting that issue and try again. But then I thought, all I'm doing by tilting the follower is like shortening the cartridge? So, I went to my ammo locker and took out some Fiocch full metal jacket truncated cone ammo and loaded it up! The drum functioned perfectly!!! All 32 rounds without issue! Now you have to remember, I'm a staunch supporter of WW white box target / range ammo! Not on this drum! So, now you know, there are no set in stone ammo types. Drums, like the lugers that use them can be severely ammo sensitive. BTW, the Fiocch round was a full .050" shorter than the WW white box ball... Fiocch 1.100" WW 1.150" Now again, you know everything I know... I wished I knew it two months ago! Best, til.....lat'r.....GT...
