Yugo M76 Sniper [Zastava] to 800yds: Practical Accuracy - The Bosnian War / Yugoslav War Sniper

This video is brought to you by Slate Black Industries. For grips and accessories, visit slateblackindustries.com. So that is probably not what your stereotypical 90s Bosnian or Serbian sniper would look like. Yes, he is wearing a tracksuit, which is very memeable. A lot of them wore 90s comfortable civilian wear. A lot of them were civilians. But the SSG 3000, shooting 7.62 NATO. Not extremely common, as common in the region of that era. What would be much more appropriate is a Yugoslavian Zastava M76, which shoots 8mm Mauser, which is what a lot of the Bosnian snipers used. Which also, the more appropriate scenario you would expect to see one, instead of tracking an enemy pilot down, is comfortably sitting in a living room, or a bombed out living room, with snacks and drinks strewn around. And yeah, just in civilian attire, maybe a moustache. And that's it. So how would the M76 perform? Let's find out. It's the year 1990. Owen Wilson just got shot behind enemy lines. You were the batting. Let's go. Ready? Yes, sir. Target one. Impact. Target two. Impact. I don't even know where they were. Slightly high. Okay. Target three. High. Quarter target. Impact. On the gongs. Impact. Typical. My bad. Target five. All the way on the left edge. Just off the left, about a quarter target. Great elevation. Okay. Impact. Off the left. It's nine o'clock. About a quarter target. Impact. I think that one miss that I wasn't sure on went in that same spot. Okay. Just off the left. Your elevation was perfect. Of the plate, but on the plate previous to that, they were drifting under the plate, going into it. Yeah. Target six should be about 400 to the left of the pigs. Impact. The next target 450 at the base of the flag. Impact. That was a dead center punch. Nice. I'm finding that it's a favored left a little bit. So I'm aiming on the right edge of it, but I'm not getting a lot of wind reads. Okay. 500. Just off the right. Dead center. Just short a little more. Just to the left off nine o'clock. Scrape the edge. Impact. Okay. So it went back to dead hold. So you're seeing some variability in what's going on here. Yeah. I'm also shooting eight millimeter Mauser. That is not very comfortable to shoot. So you think maybe a little bit of shooter fatigue built in? I do have a little bit of fatigue, but not enough to really vary this much, to be honest. Like when we were shooting the Finnish M39, I had more fatigue than this. I will say that. Got it. And that recoils more because at the end of the day, it is a Mauser, but it is a semi-automatic system. So it's a very... Yeah, you got some recoil absorption going on. On the gong. Just off the left edge, about eight, nine o'clock. There, it's a hit. Nice. All right, I'm there. Just left. That looks like it should have been in. I'm not sure what the elevation is. Can you bring the elevation down just a touch? Okay, off the right. I think those might've been slightly high, the previous shots. That elevation was better. It was about a half a target to the right. Yep, just off the right edge. Just right. I can see Mirage moving left to right. I see that windsock out there going at it too. Oh yeah, that too. I've established that right now with my elevation dial, it's a six o'clock hold. Okay. Ready? Yes. That one was off the left somewhere. Impact. Nice. I saw that little glean of the target move dancing in front of me. Let's see if the aviator fights, lives to fight for another day. I mean, his chances are pretty grim. I've got nine shots and I'm shooting eight Mausers, so. I mean, all you got to do is hit them once, right? Yeah. I mean, 198 grain projectile, still screaming in that distance. So, I mean, you tell me. I don't want to be out there. I'm on at eight. Impact. That was easy. Sorry, aviator, not today. Owen Wilson does not live to see another day. We'll go through this in the debrief, but I think the pairing of a Kalash system with full house eight Mauser cartridges may be a curiosity to some. We'll talk about that. Sounds good. Let's take it over. We'll see you there. This has been a weapon that I've wanted to shoot for a very long time. And one of the big reasons is because I've worked in the past with Bosnians, Serbians, and Macedonians. So the Greek people out there, I know what you're talking about Macedonia. So, you know, I've worked in Greece, too. Okay, so Macedonia is the northern part of Greece and the country of Macedonia, the Greek people would refer to them as the former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia. And the two countries don't like each other. The Greeks saying that that is not Macedonia and the Macedonians saying that is Macedonia. Anyways, so a big symbol of Serbian arms manufacturing or former Yugoslavian arms manufacturing. And rightfully, they make some of the best Kalashnikovs out there. It does not look like the Russian pattern, much like the Chinese. The newer Chinese Kalashnikovs do not look like the Russian pattern. But because of that, when you look at it, like earlier when we shot the, I actually have it right here, the Iraqi. That's a book. It's a book. So the Iraqi M76 that we shot earlier on the show, the factory itself was set up by Zastava and some of the technical engineers at Zastava. So Zastava does make some very well engineered rifles. Now, interesting thing is they're not chrome lined and yet they shoot corrosive ammunition. We'll talk about the ammunition choice in a bit, but the Iraqis chose 76239 to feed through their DMR, which I would argue the barrel is too long for a 76239 because at that point, like at this point, it's burning out the propellant in the cartridge and then the rest is just dragging. And then at that point, it doesn't make it more accurate, doesn't make it better in velocity. It just adds to your barrel length and unwieldiness. However, unlike com-block countries, and Yugoslavia was not a Russian-affiliated Warsaw Pact com-block country, mind you, Yugoslavia was able to do their own thing. And what they did have were stores of 8mm Mauser because of their World War II era issued Mausers. A lot of the Yugo M48s were actually initially captured German Mausers and also domestically produced Mausers. So they had stores and stores of 8mm Mauser. And they also manufactured Kalashnikovs. And so as Russia came out with the SVD and the Romanians worked on the PSL program, the Yugoslavians took the full house cartridge that they had access to and decided to make a Kalashnikov that shoots 190, 798 grain, 8mm Mauser. Absolutely insane for, you know, a modern day standard because, I mean, that's just a massive cartridge. But it does, you know, the cartridge itself, if we have shown in the past, does actually have very good ballistic potential at distance. Of course. I mean, you're shooting a 200 grain projectile. A very sleek boattail projectile too. Right. And we did shoot the Yugoslavian issued sniper grade M95 cartridges from this. But I think largely it didn't have too much of any issue until it hit a roadblock at 700 when we were shooting it. I know in the past we have documented that some of these DMR-sniper doctrine, depending upon East versus West terminology, do have, especially some of the older ones, do have issues with heat and what happens when heat is introduced and whether or not your groups shift in their point of impacts. So that might be something that we have to look at in the future. You know, manual of arms and everything very closely relates to, honestly, more so the PSL than the Dragunov, which the manual of arms is the same between the two. But it's a long stroke piston firing a full house cartridge in a long, it's basically a very long AK. But I would argue to say that the Yugoslavians actually made more of an effort in refining the system itself. Adjustable gas for one. Shooting a full house 8mm Mauser cartridge. And I mean, like, I cannot underemphasize how insane that is to shoot that in, you know, a semi-auto AK. Running the signature Yugo beautifully milled receiver. So full block receiver. Heavy barrel. And this is interesting. You see up here, Josh? Interrupted threads to attach a Yugoslavian type sound suppressor. And the scope is a QD side mounted, however, straight line side mounted, unlike your Dragunov or PSL, because Dragunov and PSL, the scope is off aligned to a side. The Yugos were able to straight mount the Xerax onto their scopes or their rifles. Pretty cool feature comparatively. Now, the one downside, maybe the viewers didn't see, the Yugos are also known for their magazines and their AKs for the bolt open, bolt hold open Kalash magazines. This is basically the same design, just enlarged. But the downside is because the follower is enlarged a little bit, sometimes when the bolt closes, it could shift the follower forward and kind of mangle it a little bit. So it's not a true bolt hold open per se, but it is the follower jamming up the bolt on the feed pole. I want to go back to the adjustable gas real quick. When we were speaking with Rob, I think it was at the Zastava booth, was it? It wasn't for the M76 though, was it? It was for a different rifle. Yes, the M91. It was the M91, that's right. So the M91 is a current Zastava offering that shoots 7.62x54 rim. So that's a direct competitor to your PSLs on the international market. Well, I remember specifically to that conversation that Rob was talking to us about the advantages that he had seen when he added an adjustable gas piston to that particular rifle. It's very interesting to see that going back to this platform, it really does appear to be ahead of its time insofar as the inclusion of that adjustable gas. Yeah, so the PSL that I own, and we'll be showing it on the show at some point, I actually had to buy a new K&S adjustable gas piston system because mine was a 1976 build. The piston on the PSL is a non-adjustable gas, and yes, your soldier doesn't have to worry about it. Your soldier fiddles with it less, and maybe you can get away with it more with 7.62x54 rim, whereas if you do that and run over gas on 8mm Mauser, it will beat your system to a pulp. No question about it. So I honestly feel like that adjustable gas system was almost a must when they rechambered it in 8mm Mauser. I agree though. You sort of can adjust it on the fly, basically you insert a projectile in here and then you can rotate it. But most people, they would just remove the gas tube and then rotate it. But I wish more people came up with an adjustable gas block system for the Kalash's, because a lot of times it's difficult to adjust gas by disassembling the entire system. Of course, it's definitely not optimal, having external access is far superior. I would say too, shooting corrosive ammunition also adds to the complexity. Because then if you're talking about parts of your internally adjustable piston, getting corrosive ammo in it. Especially, as you said, one of your least favorite things to do on the show is to shoot gas guns with corrosive ammo. Yeah, I get it. I mean, yes, you could hose it with a garden hose, but when you're dealing with, you know, like eight rifles at a time, like, just shoot me now, right? Now, one of the things that I also want to just circle back to is the optic. You've already addressed it being in line with the bore, which is an advantage over the offset mounting. But when I look through this particular optic, I can't help but think that it's not the best option for what we might want in a modern environment. Now, I mean, the bullet drop works. I mean, we've cleared this course with a Dragunov, we've cleared it with the FR-F1, I mean, for crying out loud, that's, in my opinion, worse type of optic than this. Maybe it has something to do with the barrel heating up, because I was plugging this quite a bit. An 8mm Mauser is a pretty stout round to push a lot through a system. Right. So at that point, when you're in, like, your 20-some round of 8mm Mauser... Yeah, things are cooking. Yeah, yeah, yeah, things get hot. Because before we shot it, we kind of doped it with one or two shots, just to see if the BDC worked on this one. And it worked. When we doped it, we initially got hits very easily. But once we pushed it through the course, it started to kind of play little tricks on us. So before we wrap this up, let's just take a minute to appreciate the absurdity of putting 8mm Mauser one last time into the Kalash platform. It really is sort of... It's much more potent than the 7.62x51. It's more potent than the .54 rim. Right. It's probably not quite as powerful or stringent as getting into, like, the long-action bolt gun range of, like, .300 Win Mag. We both probably agree it's not quite to that level in terms of what it is. But it's still on the upper threshold of what people put into the average-majority DMR, semi-automatic, SAS-style platform that we've been taking a lot of looks at recently. Right. Well, okay. So there's this way of looking at it, too, though. If you look at it from a pure civilian development perspective, and you could choose the cartridge for a semi-auto sniper system, of course. You know, that sounds like crazy. But if you look at it from a military requirement, having stores of 8mm Mauser stuck in the home bases, already flush in the logistical system to where you don't have to develop a new cartridge for it. You just develop a new item to shoot that cartridge decently well at the target that you want to shoot at, at the range that you want to shoot at. That makes perfect sense for a military employment. Right. So much like many of the things that we look at when it comes to military-based weaponry or military-surplus-based weaponry that we bring on the show, lots of the decisions, and it's not just eastern-bought countries or whatever. I mean, the U.S. is plagued with this as well. Many of the decisions come down to the logistical parameters and costs associated with the decision-making, right? I wouldn't say plagued, but it's a very practical look at a practical solution for a scenario that a country logistically faces. A lot of people, if they're looking at replacing all of the .308s with 6.5 Creedmoor, the guns are an easy part. That's never the issue of replacing the firearms itself. The ammunition is the problem. So this is a storybook of that entire... The example, right? Yeah, and I think that is why it has drawn me to it all these years, because it is a logistical solution that was very effective to what the Yugos were doing, and historically you actually see this reappear in a lot of photos or memoirs or videos during the unfortunate wars up in the 90s. The Bosnian sniper or the Serbian sniper, typically this is what you would associate with that. So they've got a saying about the former Yugos, all the Baltic state countries, that they're very passionate people, their blood burns, and whether it's a good type of passionate to welcome strangers into their homes or the type of passion to defend their homes against those neighboring them, rifles like this were very much put to use in the Baltic... Balkans. Sorry, I said Baltic earlier, I meant Balkans. And yeah, it's certainly not a rifle to be scoffed at. No, no, definitely not. We'll delve into whether it was a heat issue, but I'd like to thank Krill for sending the rifle. He and I are friends online, we message each other about things like this, and this is one of those rifles that actually made two runs onto our show. The first run, it actually did not do too well because a certain company that is 100 years Arms International had taken some Yugo parts and botched the process of combining it into a normal rifle. And initially, the scope was canted downwards. So you remember when we were firing at 100 yards, it was on the 800 meter setting to raise the projectile. Working as intended. Yes. And so thanks to Krill for then taking it and sending it over to one of Brennan Herrera's gunsmiths, Sheffy, and... Got it fixed up. Fixed up with a new Tortort receiver with a chef's kiss. And we have the pleasure of running a historical example on the show. Guys, we'll see you in the next one. Take care. 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