HOME-MADE AMERICAN VINTOREZ

We Make a VSS Vintorez at Home with a Liberty Suppressors Leonidas on a Saturday

- Dave Merrill

The VSS Vintorez used to mostly be discussed among Cold War nerds and wildcat reloaders - until 2007. It wasn't combat footage, respect for the terminal ballistics, or appreciation of the design that first captivated public attention. Instead, the glory goes to the first-person shooter game STALKER developed by GSC Game World and released that year.

At least one company has been showing off an American-made Vintorez for a couple years, but we've yet to see it come to market. We're also sometimes cautious of one-off production when it comes to firearms. Ultimately, we wanted our build to be inspired by the Vintorez rather than an exact clone. Everything is off-the-shelf, all mods were done with hand tools, and our base rifle can go back exactly the way it was in under an hour. Winning all around.

9X39MM

The real VSS Vintorez shoots 9x39mm. This cartridge was conceptualized in the Soviet Union to be a dedicated subsonic, suppressed cartridge with better reliability and more mass and ass than subsonic 7.62x39mm at the time. Though there were several approaches to this silent sniper round over the decades of development (such as a 7.62x39mm projectile shoved into a 7.65x25mm case), the Soviets landed on a 7.62x39mm parent case necked-up from 0.311 inch to 0.365 inch (about 9.3mm) to accommodate much larger projectiles.

How much larger? Surplus 7.62x39 is most commonly found with 122- or 123-grain projectiles, with heavier loads like 154-grain occasionally popping up for sale, but 9x39mm starts at 248-grain and goes all the way to a whopping 278-grain. The reports on the armor-piercing variants are largely impressive, but we won't see those stateside unless a foreign power is shooting them at us.