Original 2-Piece Blank Barrel & Egyptian Wood Tip Blanks

[hatrick]

I have a semi-auto MG34 that I use original WWII German 2-piece blank firing barrels in. I use 17grain crimped blanks or Swanson blanks which are right around 17 grain and it always works great. I was wondering if the Egyptian 8mm wood tip blanks will work properly with the original 2-piece blank barrel and cycle the gun properly or are they too hot or not hot enough. Anyone have any experience with the Egyptian wood tips?

Thanks,
Eric

[cptdarling506]

Don't do it!
If you want to use the wood bullet blank, use a live barrel.
The idea of wood bullets is so you can blank fire without any adaptor/mods.
Wood bullet blank is also loaded to a much higher pressure, to powerful for any plug in the
barrel BFA.
If you want to use wood bullet blank for re-enactment, you may find its not allowed as the wood bullets
don't always break up like they are meant to.
You could modify a muzzle cone with a solid piece to catch/stop/breakup the wood bullets...

[hatrick]

The original WWII German 2-Piece barrels don't have any plug or restrictors in the end of the barrel.

[cptdarling506]

I sit corrected, kinda.
I had a quick look in the thread
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2151&start=60
and found this
"the "Original" 2-pcs. Blank-Firing-Barrel is made up so that you can adjust it for different Blanks "Great"......most (if not all) of these were made to fire the then available "Wood-Tipped-Blanks" which are really not avaiolable in bulk now.
"
So it appears you can do it!

[hatrick]

The 2-piece barrels they are talking about in the thread you posted are newly made 2-piece barrels that have set screw restrictors in the muzzle and are thus adjustable. The original WWII German 2-piece barrels like the ones I use have no restrictors and were originally designed for German wood tip blanks and have no way to adjust the pressure as far as I can tell. The real question is are the Egyptian wood tip blanks the same load as the original German wood tip blanks?

Thanks,
Eric

[amafrank]

The egyptian blanks are not the same as the WWII or postwar german wood bullet blanks. They are really hot and may cause some problems. I set up my MG08/15 to run the normal red wood bullet blanks made in germany for their military and the gun ran great. I was about the same speed as the original ammo. I ran a belt of egyptian wood bullet blanks in the gun and the rate of fire just about doubled. I never ran any more of them in that gun. We tried running some egyptian wood bullet blanks in an MG42 that was setup to run normal blanks and had the same results, it sped up incredibly. That tells me that the powder in these blanks is either faster or has something that makes it higher pressure. Not a good thing...Both of the noted guns had adjustable blank adapters and despite adjusting as slow as they would go they were still unreasonably fast. These blanks are not good for the guns.
If you're running them in a semi auto than you may have no issues and who cares if you damage it....its just a semi right? There is a reason the other blanks cost what they do and why you can find the egyptian blanks cheaper.

Just my 2 cents.

Frank

[junglewalk]

The couple thousand of Egyptian wood tip blanks that I have used, had too many primers that did not detonate, no matter how hard the primers were hit. That was my main problem with them.