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Greetings all,
I have made significant progress with my MG34 semi auto but I am needing help with a puzzler..
Previous posts I made had me having problems with bolt retraction and what I ended up doing was putting the original spring back in and now the bolt retracts smoothly but will only fire one round at a time.
What I have done is to manually place a round in the chamber, close the bolt and then position the belt. My reasoning is I wanted to observe how the gun ejected and then chambered that next round.
When the gun fires and the bolt moves forward to chamber another round, stripping it from the belt, it is not going into battery .. It is somehow chambering the round (most of the time) but the cartridges are deformed (bullet pushed into the case about 1/4 inch) or some have been bent at the neck and not chambered... so somehow those rounds are coming into a collision with part of the reciever or barrel at the breech. NOT GOOD !!!
I suspect that it may be one of my rivets on a set of new cams that I noticed still protruded 1/32 or so down from the top in a citical area where the cartridge squeezes through on its ride to be seated. Cartridge may be careening off that small protrusion and missing the direct line up with the barrel. I have dremilled that flush but not had a chance to test it yet.
Reason for posting this is that I don't want to remove too much metal in the wrong spot and maybe its another issue all together different..
Looking forward to some opinions..
Thanks
Bill
PS... Original spring will not fire Yugo ammo. Primers are hard as I understand. but fires FN or original German just fine...

At our local shoot a fellow shot one that he had rewelded for the first time. I would say the main thing learned was oil and more oil and then a few break in rounds were the words of the day. A few more interesting words might have been also used during the first 10 or more rounds. But things seemed to break in and work fine after oil and the first few rounds. I did not follow up as to how things finished but after several hundred rounds sent downtown I understand the firing pin broke. Well he is working on it and hope that we will get to try it out again in a few weeks.

Good Luck to you on yours.

Later 42rocker

I removed the small amount of metal from that protruding rivet and manually cycling the gun, it seems to work !! Thats a stretch from actually putting it to work at the range but it strips the round when done manually and there is no deforming of cartridge so maybe we are rounding third heading for home on this one. I followed the advice of lubing up the bolt and all moving parts liberally and then just manually working the bolt.
Will report progress.

Just got back from range...
Gun took a bit to get warmed up and I applied a generous amount of good old military machine gun lube to loosen things up. After firing one shot at a time, failing to go fully back into battery.. after 8 or 9 rounds that way, I tried lubing the bottom of the bolt through the ejection port.. Then... it just started working !! Fired my remianing belt with not a missfire or jam. Shooting it is kind of like dancing.. Rock and Roll !!
Tomorrow, I am off to fire some more .. I can see my ammo bill going up fast !!! LOL..

Way to go!!! Congrads!!!

Tube and break in time always seems to help out.

Later 42rocker