Time for another update. As mentioned earlier, I've installed the Wolff recoil spring. After installation, I ran about 300 dry fire cycles with snap caps just to break in the spring. Results are markedly improved, but still not quite to the point that I'd like. My latest findings from this morning, firing several hundred rounds:

- I'm encountering a failure to feed or a failure to eject roughly 6 out of every 100 rounds. Failures are evenly split between FTF and FTE.
- Changing the recoil spring definitely changed the whole experience: runs smoother with higher reliability (improved reliability from 75% to around 94%).
- After replacing the spring, the rifle does a much better job of eating Aquila ammo. It's gone from just refusing to cycle the stuff to running fine 95 times out of 100. Ditto for PPU, which is now up to working well 96 times out of 100. Roughly the same results for Fiochii.
- Unfortunately, changing the spring also seems to have changed the rifle's taste for Tula. It's now failing around 10% of the time.
- The one ammo brand that consistently runs without any issues whatsoever is Hornady Critical Defense. But it's tough to justify plinking with that stuff considering the high cost per round.

Now let's talk magazines: I've been using KCI 15 and 30 round mags, plus a few generic 15 and 30 round mags from keepshooting.com. It's been my experience that the 30 round mags from both brands are flat-out unreliable. They're better if I only load 25 rounds rather than 50, but they still fail 10 to 50 percent of the time. I won't be buying any more 30 rounders. The KCI 15 rounders are OK, but not great. Ditto for the generic 15 rounders for keepshooting.com. I plan to pick up some USGI mags and try those out in the hopes of getting better results.

So bottom line to this long-winded post (sorry about that) is that the Wolff recoil spring really helped, especially with the Aguila and PPU ammo. I'm pretty happy with the $11 investment. The rifle continues to be picky about ammo though - loves Hornady Critical Defense above anything else I've found. Everything else runs at between 90% and 96% reliability - just poor enough to take the fun out of shooting the rifle.

I'll update again after I obtain some USGI mags. But if I continue get acceptable results only with Hornady Critical Defense ammo, I'll likely sell the gun - just can't afford to shoot it at nearly $1 per round.