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Anybody here shoots 5.45x39 ? or has experience of the caliber ?

Only incoming: a few were around in the Balkans in the 1990s...

And since you survived to tell the tale, was it down to the round, the rifle or the badger hunter's skills or lack of it ?

Is it available in the UK ? From a paper target hunter's point of view, how does it compare with the 5,56 within 300 meters ? Same ?

5.45x39 is very rare in the UK which I believe is the reason that 5.45 chambered Saigas etc have never been imported.When searching for 54r tracer I did come across one specialist company that could supply 5.45 but it was mainly supplied for use in testing body armour and for military evaluation etc and not widely available to the masses so to speak.
I believe 5.45 milsurp has also become quite hard to find in the States, plus the fact that as it is the main current Russian military rifle calibre there isn't a lot of it that is "surplus" in the same way that 7.62x39 and 7.62x54r is.....for example if you notice pretty much the majority of 54r is 1977 dated, you never see any recently produced Russian military ammo on the milsurp market

It is more accurate than 7.62x39 and the one mistake a lot of people make is to generalise about the accuracy of the AK-74, they assume that as it is an AK it is only as accurate as an early AK-47 or later AKM.

Shame - Barnaul makes pretty cheap 5.54x39 ammo

froggy wrote:Shame - Barnaul makes pretty cheap 5.54x39 ammo

The 5.56 they make is cheap too, I'd have thought since the US wasn't getting anymore cheap stuff, there would be more to go around, I guess the world hotting up changed that. Plus didn't 5.45x39 often used to be said to do what 5.56 can do but with lighter bullets?

I think the other limiting factor is the number, or lack of, rifles chambered for 5.45x39.

There is obviously the Russian military rifles, there are some civilian 5.45 AR variants in the US and the old East German SSG-82 sniper rifle (some surplus rifles exported to the States well after the Wall came down). Outside of Russia and former Soviet States, India,China and North Korea there aren't many countries that adopted the 5.45x39 round and that number has declined further with the Eastern European countries that have joined NATO and switched to 5.56mm.
There are around 96 countries that use the 7.62x39 AKM compared to around 22 for the 5.45x39 AK-74 and some of those no longer use it.

Polish Tantal in 5.45x39 is a good choice too.In this calibre all depends from ammo-latest developments confirmed the Russians were right,early rounds had poor reputation-unpredictable results and shortcomings(bush twig was enough to divert projectile-exact words of one Lituanian 90' OMON fella...)