Sticky bolt on SKS!?!?

Here's one that's good for a laugh.

Last night I had my SKS field stripped when I hear the doorbell ring. One of my shootin buddies came by to do a little virtual shooting on the videogames(Mercenaries- great game if you like Grand Theft Auto or Rambo styled games)

He's seen me strip and reassemble the SKS in seconds before, and wanted to try his hand at it to see how easy it really was. I told him "sure, go ahead, you can't hurt it..." and I went to the bathroom while he worked on it.

When I came back, I see him, with the gun reassembled, and him trying to yank the charging handle back, and he looks up and says "I think I killed him".

I'd never seen the bolt stick forward so I walk over and take it from him and start working on it myself, and BOY, is it ever stuck in there. As I start trying to pull the charging handle back, he tells me "All I did was reassemble it the way I've seen you do, and I wanted to test the trigger, so I stuck that fired brass on the desk into the chamber and let the bolt slam home"

It all makes sense at this point. The "brass" I had on my desk was actually a Wolf steel casing, which, in my boredom, I had stripped the laquer from the day before. My buddy has slight colour blindness, so all he could tell is that it wasn't green, and that it was bright and shiny, and that = brass.

I tell you, I was almost ready to try and stand on the charging handle before I came to my senses and thought about it. After it was clear that neither of us was gonna be able to pull the charging handle normally, I took my cleaning rod and stuck it down the barrel. Well, it's an aluminum cleaning rod, so quickly upon applying some force I decide that maybe it's too long to safely put that much force on the rod(I felt it buckling)

So I think about it some more, and the most obvious thing comes to me. I strip the rifle of the gas tube, piston and op-rod, and stick the shortest length of cleaning rod that I have through the hole in the rear site base. The force from pulling the handle + the force from the rod on the bolt carrier face was more than enough to open her up, and there was my shiny little steel case, looking all innocent.

I tried sliding it into the chamber by hand, and it stuck nearly a half inch from the end of the case. I knew they expanded, but I had no idea they expanded that much.

I don't think I'll be shining up any more 7.62x39 steel casings either, even if they are really shiny and pretty...