this incident happened on my Yugo M70 B1 but i would bet it is generic to all AKM's. maybe?

well anyway i had the Yugo out yesterday, along with a Romy folder, and the piston pin decided it wanted to try to drift itself out and got hung up on the gas tube causing a failure to go into battery. the pin is loose enough to move back into place with your finger so i pushed it back in and tried to run the rifle again only to get the same failure.

my question is how detrimental would it be to run the rifle without the pin in place? i have other bolt carriers that don't have a pin in them, like the Romy, and they run just fine. then again the other carriers may have the piston LockTite'd in. in fact i swapped the carrier from the Romy into the Yugo so i could play with it (it's easier for me to bump a full stocked rifle ).

on the other hand how would i go about locking that pin back into place? could i try to center punch it and maybe get the ends to spread just a bit to hold it in? i have a welder but i'm not that precise with it and i doubt standard solder would stand up to the heat.

too bad the old build forums are gone or i probably could have answered this in a quick search.

any ideas guys?