Saiga 12 Reliability tips, fixes

hey YouTube this is Karstens XDM 45 here going to make a short little video on my Saiga 12 and some tips and fixes for reliability these are courses Saiga 12 is is a ak-47 platform shoots 12-gauge rounds and a lot of fun to shoot as something you have to remember about these guns they were designed they were they were come back guns military guns from from Russia they're designed to shoot the big stuff they are designed to shoot the double-aught buckshot and the magnum rounds so we'll do a final now but of course not a lot of us have a whole lot of extra money these days to buy the expensive stuff which so everybody wants to try to fix these guns so they'll run on the cheap Walmart hundred pack rounds that you can get and so this is what I did for mine if you've got one that will right out of the box that will run the the cheap birdshot that's good deal but if not here are some things that I've done to kind of get my gun to run and I shoot this thing all the time first thing I did is I cleaned out the I made sure that the gas tube and the gas port was all cleaned down let me kind of show you here zoom in a little bit all right see if I can do this with a camera this here you've got the you got the bolt you got the bolt carrier and of course that's going to sit on on top of the gun and you've got the shaft here that goes inside the gas tube and it right here you're going to have right here you're going to have the gas puck okay then you're going to have your plug what happens is if you look up here on the on the on the tube okay this carrier runs about right there okay it actually runs a little bit further in when the bolts closed and then what happens is you got the you're going to have the ghast the the plug right up to it and then you're also going to have the plug itself alright what happens is if you know think about Sega's all right they've got two fittings on there if you can see that they've got a fitting want a setting one and setting to a setting one what happens is if you look at the guess block you see where the pin is this little pin right there a little pin right there what happens is you turn that you you adjust this block to one of those settings now if you put on setting one that's for your Magnum loads buckshot slugs that type things the more powerful loads because what happens is see if you see this or not let me show you here get it in the light see how it's beveled what happens is if you're looking lengthwise down the gun and if it's on setting one what happens is it's going to be turned you start got it right here yeah it's going to be turned where it shunts some of the gas it doesn't allow as much gas to come through and the reason is is because those those heavier loads are going to have more force behind them but if you rotate it down to our setting - you see that see setting - is going to be sitting on the bottom you notice that belt this bevel right here is going to sit right on top of the gas port and we see if I can zoom in a little bit here okay see that see the hole this for this right here this is the gas block okay if you look inside there see if i zoom in a little bit you look inside you're going to see the hole in the gas block and in that smaller hole right there that's one of the gas ports got a little bit of crud and they're going to clean it out later on but that's one of the gas ports what happens is when the gun fires gas comes through the little hole okay come through the little hole and this this setting allows the gas to take that puck and to push that and it pushes that puck and which in turn pushes the bolt carrier all the way back and which allows it to chamber the round so what you want to do is you want to make sure something getting closed up in there you want to make sure that that is nice and clean inside are to clean that out a little bit but a residue inside there it's not bad for running about 75 rounds the other day but you want to make sure that that's nice and clean okay now look at your puck now make sure that the puck is nice and clean okay there's noted by the way don't oral your puck okay made that mistake now you all this thing up and I'm telling you after 25 rounds you'll have so much gunk up in that thing it's not even funny and so that's that's what happens all right see if I can get it closed up in there what happens is the puck goes right inside gets right inside there a big thumb out away goes right inside there then want to put that we'll put that plug in here we go and we're going to screw that plug in you want to make sure that that's dry that's going to be just like a Stryker Channel on a striker-fired gun you know a bunch of oil and lube and gunk gun in it because it'll just gum up the whole thing so what I do is I'll turn this thing down now you can feel it see where it clicked okay that's setting 1 see if I can get it closed up that's setting 1 and so what happens is what you'll do is you'll depress this little pin and you'll spin it one more time to put it on setting to can't do with just one hand so I'm just going to leave it as this anyway we've got city we've got the setting on there we've got the gas tube cleaned out all right let me come in here to the other end and show you a little bit about the bolt carrier basically what I did is I went through and polished everything I could I took the bolt carrier and I polished this I polished the top here on the side I notice that there was a lot of wear right here so I polished this down the daughter's coming home polished this down if you turn it over you're going to see you see the bottom of the bolt carrier and you notice I've taken all the sharp edges off of it polished it down and the reason is because this part right here is going to slide back and forth on the hammer okay all right and I went through if you let's see here we go and throw in here and I I tried best I could that the grooves on both sides of the bolt carrier a groove right there I smooth that out the best I could some real fine sandpaper and smoothed it down and then I went in here with the rails the rails all the way up and down and I smooth both sides of those rails smooth those all the way up and down all right let me see if I can get it closed up let me bring this over in the life where we can see it a little bit better here what I actually did with a bolt okay and this is the position I should say right like that that's going to be the position right there I've have an upside-down riding back and forth in the receiver what idea is I took I didn't take a lot of material off but if you'll notice it took all these sharp edges all these sharp edges and I just smooth them out all these sharp edges and then and then the the the tabs here on the side these ride on the actual rails inside the receiver so you see that I did both I polished those down best I could I even took the shaft with the shaft of the of the bolt itself and kind of smoothed it down a little bit with the sandpaper now be very careful okay turn this over so you can see it see this upside here there we go do not mess with the firing pin or any this area down here don't fool with it because you may see gun up okay so don't do that that will help that will smooth out a whole lot and in one more area that I wanted to show you because what happened was as I had some I had some some failure to feed and what what happened was that the shells were getting stuck just like that okay they were getting stuck well what it what happened was these edges right here you see if I get me a pointer over here do a little bit better okay these edges right here and then that edge right here if I could turn it down what you can see that or not I don't know anyway what I did is I went through I went through and I beveled just slightly these these these points right here I bevel just slightly okay and I got those points that kind of rounded off and took all the sharp edges off of them now when the when the shell goes in and it hits right here that shell slide right in shell slides right in so that makes it a lot easier for it to feed ah so that's that's basically what of what I've done you know keep your gas tube keep it clean keep all the parts dry get my parts back over here keep your parts dry all right one thing you want to go through and especially any any Allen head screws you know make sure you keep those all tight keep them keep them tightened up and so forth kind of show you a little bit of my setup here but this guy won't run I shoot slugs and buckshot of course I got buckshot that's my home defense right there twelve rounds of buckshot and it'll it'll shoot that like crazy but the cheap Walmart stuff the bulk ammo it'll also shoot it it'll shoot it really well so I'll tease these little tips maybe some little fixes oh by the way one more thing I almost forgot is you you know I also had some problems with it feeding and another thing that I looked at is I looked at my I looked at the recoil spring okay let's get these Springs over here and I've heard both sides of people saying it that you know spring being compressed it's not going to make it weaker okay what I'm telling you the spring bottom was the one that was in the gun the spray on the top is the brand-new one I got from Carolina shooter supply and when I put I've got about two of these when I bought the new factory spring and put it back in the back end the gun my issues with feeding feeding the cells ceased okay so I don't know you make up your own decision I know that this ones this is this this recoil spring here it seems to be a whole lot weaker because what I did is I kept I kept this gun next to the bed with a bolt open okay I didn't I didn't load one I had the bolt open so if I ever had to grab it at least the bolt would be ready to go well that made my spring weaker in my opinion and so something you might want to think about if you having problems might want to replace it that we call spring so anyway that's my Saiga 12 and some tips on how to make it a little bit more robot reliable by the way let me just one thing for maybe some of the new guys now this is a box of the of the Magnum stuff okay that's what this yes but this is what you this is what you want to look for okay you want to look for you wanna make sure you got your right the right length okay but the main thing that I look for when I'm looking for four rounds is I look for the weight one and a quarter then you'll one of the eight well that's going to be lighter and if you have one ounce that's of course that's going to be lighter than that the less weight you have the less energy you're going to have to operate the action to send that a sin that bolt back and forth and so these one and a quarter ounce rounds that they're good now this is number two shot this is some of the Magnum stuff I've shot up on my my cheap ammo but look but this is what I do I look at the weight and the heavier that is now you can get some of the Remington the Remington I forget that exact name of it but it's a 12-gauge two or three quarter inch and it's a it's let's see what was it was one a quarter I believe but it was number six shot and AD Academy I think there's six ninety nine I believe that's what they are for twenty five rounds has still pretty cheap and it'll run this gun really well so just another thing to look for so hope you enjoyed the video you know by the way I'm not a professional gunsmith this is what I've done to my gun you have some of this stuff that you uh that I've talked about makes you nervous or you say well I wouldn't do that to my gun okay well then don't okay figure out something that will work for for your gun you know do what you need to do this is what I've done and my saiga-12 is extremely reliable it's my home defense weapon and that's uh that's the way it is so appreciate you watching

Channel: carstensxdm45

Views: 91,242

Rating: 4.8175673 out of 5

Keywords: Saiga 12 reliability tips fixes

Id: 7xQlHkyocsc

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 01 2013