Hi Everyone! I'm from Czech Republic and new here, so please, be patient with my poor English. I found this interesting forum quite accidentally while searching with Google and because I have some knowledge about our guns, I would like to answer some of your questions.
...Now some claim that the CZ is built stronger, others point out that the bottom of the chamber is much thinner then the Tokarevs and you need to be careful with your ammo selection. are the CZ's OK with shooting the surplus ammo out there?
AFAIK the bottom of the chamber is not the problem, but the slide is. Pistol was originally constructed for 9mm Parabellum cartridge (9x19; 9mm Luger), but later was rebuild to stronger 7,62x25 for compatibility with russian weapons. See the picture.
Slide has a weak spot under the ejection port. One of the locking rollers is pushed here and material is bent. You can see little rounded peak, if you look along the slide. Mostly is it only bent, but I have seen cracked too. But the gun was still working.
I can see it very often (peaks) because ammo originally produced in Czechoslovakia is very powerful and it is only used here because of low price of the army surplus. Good cleaning is necessary, because surplus ammo primers are corrosive. I had three of these pistols. They were cheap here, so expendable too. I sold them all, but I love to shoot this cartridge, so now I have chinese TT-33 from Norinco. It is very well built copy of the russian TT-33, which was originally constructed for 7,62x25. Nice strong weapon.
I like to shoot this ammo through the old vehicles and old military helmets. It penetrates better than 9x19 or .357 Magnum, but it depend on material of the bullet. Some of them have hardened steel core. They was intended also for submachine guns Sa. 24 and Sa. 26.
If you shoot russian surplus, it could be OK, because it's not such strong as Czechoslovakia surplus. New Czech ammo from S&B is less powerful too and non-corrosive.
Viking, some of the bullets have tombak-plated steel jacket but not steel core.
GhostWarrior, these white grips with Czech lion are amazing! I like them a lot. It's nice to see somebody who is taking such a good care for these guns. They can be very precise. Even at 50 yards I was hitting 8" diameter steel plates. Some of my friends couldn't shoot well with them, but I had no problem. It takes a bit of trigger mechanism adjustment to get a smoother trigger.
Oh, I wrote a lot! I hope some of it might be useful for somebody.