Nine hour 10,000 round DSA torture test

Guns Magazine, August, 2002

DSA's carbine proved a fine shooter, and hitting all silhouettes in rapid succession from the bench proved a simple task. Recoil was mild and muzzle rise was up and slightly to the right. Trigger pull was good for an FAL. Although a military style single stage, it was fairly crisp. The controls operated smoothly but the magazines fit a little on the tight side for my liking.

As we were using 250 different untried military surplus magazines, I was concerned we might run into some feeding problems. Quality on the Austrian magazines is not the best, so any mags that failed to smartly chamber their initial round were set aside. Rounds were then removed from them and they were tossed in a reject bucket.

Shooting off a Wichita rest, it was a simple matter of indexing onto a target and squeezing the trigger, over and over again. When the bolt locked back the empty mag was ejected and a fresh 20 rounder inserted. The bolt release depressed, and the fun began anew.

Just as your trigger finger began to tire you'd finish your fifth magazine and a fresh shooter took your place. You'd mark down how many magazines you'd fired, and take a break for a bit. After firing a few hundred rounds it became apparent just how much ammo 10,000 rounds is. Piled high in the back of a truck I could tell we had a lot of work ahead of us.

The Pace Picks Up

We kept the rifle shooting and the amount of rounds through it started to add up. After every 300 to 400 rounds we let it cool down for a minute or so. At the 1,000 round mark we stopped and pulled the topcover off and removed the bolt/carrier assembly to have a peek inside. Everything looked good so we returned to our previous abusive pace. At the 2,000 round mark we pulled the optics. The mirage from the barrel heat was so bad we decided to switch to the iron sights for the remainder of the test. With that in mind we pulled the entire scope mount assembly and replaced it with a standard topcover.

A Minor Impediment

We had made a decision to run the Black Hills Match ammo through the rifle first and it ran like a champ. Empties covered the snow and there was the steady sound of lead slapping steel. Then at round number 2,782 the two piece cross pin that secured the front of the forearm to the rifle sheared off. Shooting stopped abruptly as we had a look at the problem. This two piece pin was a new design of DSA's and had not proven to be up to the task. There were no spares available, so we had two choices, call off the test or improvise. We chose the latter, A member of the crew simply pinned the forearm in place with a galvanized nail and bent it over. We then got back to work.

At round number 3,203 we experienced our second problem. The Mil Spec Steyr gas regulator suddenly departed for parts unknown. At this point the rifle could still be fired, but only as a straight-pull. So Giovanni replaced the missing Steyr part with a new Heavy Duty regulator that DSA manufactures. Total time to replace it was 3 minutes. The front handguard was dropped, the gas piston pulled, the regulator screwed into place, and the parts reinstalled. That was it, the rifle was back up and running. The only hard part was trying not to melt our fingers on the hot steel.