Hello Paul, welcome to Gunsnet.
I'm an over 50 guy as well. I don't often bring up a members typing but your posts are challenging to read. At the end of a sentence double space to create a visual que to where one sentence ends and a new one begins. But enough of that on to gun details.
The SAR-3 as already was mentioned by imanaknut doesn't do well with the mags provided by the importer / maker Century Arms. I have a SAR-3 as well, it is my only AK type in my collection though once I owned about 6 more in 7.62x39 chambering and one in 5.45x39 AK74 chambering. I keep the SAR-3 as it uses the same ammo as my AR rifles. The SAR-3 is the most accurate of the SAR series of rifles Century offered and frankly is the most accurate type of AK when compared with all AK types. The round is the reason in my opinion.
I see you're getting one Weiger mag. I can understand why seing that they are $30 bucks a pop now. I paid $10 to $12 max for mine. There are also Bulgarian 30 round magazines available that will fit and work in most SAR-3 rifles. A company called K-Var sells them as they are the direct importers of most things Bulgarian. As such they charge too much as they have no competition. Additionally I would point out that there is a small chance that the Bulgarian waffle pattern magazine may not work in your SAR-3. It is a small chance I'd say less than a 5% chance, but it is possible.
Your last option as ima mentioned is the Robinson Armament magazine followers, if they still make them. Let me check.
http://www.robarm.com/ Ok their web site is a pain in the ass to navigate. Follow the link, give them a phone call and see if they still have or make the conversion follower for the 5.56 round. The reason why your mags don't work well beyond say 20 rounds is the shape of the 5.56 case vs. the shape of the 5.45x39 case.
The 5.45x39 has a lot of taper to the casing where as the 5.56 round is very straight with only a little taper. Because the 5.56 / .223 rounds are too straight the rear of the case sits too low and the more rounds you shove in the magazines the lower they go relatively speaking. If you've loaded 30 rounds you should notice that the rear of the last cartridges are loose as a goose under the feed lips at the back of the magazines. The Robinson followers have a different shape and lift the rim end of the round higher to keep it tracking more parallel to the feed lips.
Members here have built up followers with steel filled epoxy and then shaped them to fit so that they do the same thing, lift the rear of the cartridge up so that you can get a full 30 rounds in and then back out of the mag by firing them out. I've not done that as I was able to source the Weigers and the Bulgarian waffle mags. I probably have 30 mags that fit my one SAR-3 rifle so didn't feel the need to monkey with the follower on the mag that came with the rifle.
On the bright side if you get any AK74 clone that is currently on the market your mags will fit and feed 5.45x39 ammo in those weapons and hold 30 rounds as well. Which is a topic for another thread or post, the merits of the AK74 clone and the surplus ammo on the market for them.
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gundogblue!!
Originally Posted by romak10/63UF
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