Remington Thunderbolt .22LR Quality

G

Gary L. Griffiths

New member
Just shot a couple of boxes out of the brick of .22 LR Remington Thunderbolt ammo I bought some time ago.

Wish I hadn't. (Bought it, that is!) :(

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Third time wasn't charm for this round. Experienced 4 failures to fire out of the first box in my Ruger MkIII. Three of them fired with the second strike (on a different section of the rim). This one didn't. :mad:

Moreover, had a good half-dozen "ploops" instead of "bangs" which didn't cycle the action. Never understood why people consider the .22 LR to be unreliable for defense. Now I do. :rolleyes:

But I still don't understand why people would carry cheap bulk ammo for defensive use instead of top quality ammo like CCI or Super-X. :eek:
 
I've been working my way through a couple of bricks of Thunderbolt I bought on-line awhile ago. I grabbed it for the price, looking for inexpensive plinking fodder. It seems to have a VERY high percentage of dud rounds. My experience has been that, if the first strike doesn't set it off ... no number of additional strikes, anywhere on the rim, is going to light it up.
 
I'm not a huge fan of Remington rim fire ammo. As you noticed the priming is not very consistent. I have had up to 5% FTF rate with it.
 
I'm not a huge fan of Remington ammo at all, and I simply won't shoot Thunderbolt in any of my guns.

The stuff is absolute crap.
 
I have always been a huge Remington fan. I love their Cor-Lokt ammo. For the price I think its hard to beat, but..... the quality of their rimfire ammo the past few years has suffered for some reason and I hate that for them because you hear it alot these days. Maybe someone at Remington is listening.
 
I tried some Remington match ammo (rimfire)

Shot it - once - in my league Bullseye match.

I had a ten percent misfire rate.

One round in every other string would not fire. Doesn't matter in Slow Fire, but it uses up alibis in the Timed and Rapid Fire Matches instantly. I used up the rest for practice and Slow Fire only.

Same for the Federal Match 22 ammo. Wretched misfire rate.

The most reliable .22 lr ammo I've found is CCI standard velocity. The Green Tag is good as well, but more spendy. Also reliable is the Wolf .22 lr - actually made by German company.
 
For what it's worth, the owner's manual that comes with Marlin .22 rifles specifically says not to use Remington Thunderbolt. I called Remington and asked if that was a misprint, since the velocity is similar to other high-velocity .22LR choices. The woman at Marlin basically said, "No, it is not a misprint. We don't want our customers to shoot Thunderbolt in our rifles."
 
Frankenmauser and I went through a box (500 rounds) of Remmingtons this last Saturday......and had about a 30% failure to fire rate (went through 500 rounds........150 or so duds)

Shot them out of a Browning Buckmark, Ruger MKIII 22/45, and Ruger 10/22 for the most part, with 20 rounds or so going into my dads P-22, and 50 or so into my uncle's Bersa .22.

I had two magazines that had 10 rounds fire, one in the 22/45, and one in the 10/22. All the other I shot had any where from one to six failures to fire out of 10 rounds per magazine.

We picked them up on sale a couple years ago........and are finally getting around to shooting some. Remmington ammo from 5 years ago was decent stuff, but the stuff I have picked up in the last couple years is absolutely horrible in terms of reliably igniting..........should have have ponied up the extra $5 a brick and got some Federals, I only get 1-2 duds per carton from them.

Between Frankenmauser and myself, we still have about 2,500 rounds of this crap ammo left to burn up..........maybe it will go to use with the nephews, give them lots of practice for clearing malfunctions.
 
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I've fired off maybe 3 bricks worth of the stuff and have one left that I've barely touched. Definitely lousy stuff, about 10% misfire right for me... at this point I probably wouldn't shoot the stuff even if someone gave it to me for free.
 
i bought 2 boxes of 500 a few weeks ago and know it was new production,since the shelf at the store was empty for a while.
went through about 200 rounds with no problem.i do have a box of old
thunderbolt and compaired them-it seems as the new stuff is slightly different bullet or coating,and the bullet is very solid in case.i heard someone say that
remington made some changes because of problems in past. hope thats true.
still got 800 rounds to go.
 
I've got a brick of Thunderbolt that I can't shoot, because NONE of them will fit in the chamber of my rifle. I can shoot them out of my Winchester 250 lever-gun, but I have to really crank on the lever which makes me nervous. They wouldn't fit in any of my dad's .22's either (and he's got quite a few), so I think that was the first and last bunch of that we ever bought. It's simply horrible.
 
I only buy CCI MiniMags for my .22's.
It's a little more expensive but it's extremely rare that I get any failures.
Once I find something that works well, I tend to stick to it.
 
Same for the Federal Match 22 ammo. Wretched misfire rate.
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Very surprising, your gun might have a light strike issue. I've had good luck with both the Federal auto-match and the cheap stuff for Bullseye, having used it in dozens of matches in my Ruger MK II and my S&W Model 17. The Model 17 has a very light trigger and I shoot DA for both Timed and Rapid Fire.
 
I've had good luck with both the Federal auto-match and the cheap stuff
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Same here. I've used a bunch of Federal rimfire, both the bulk packed cheapo and the Automatch, and all of it ignites when it should. I've also used Centurion, CCI, and a few others, and all of those work fine. The Remington stuff, however, just doesn't work well at all. About the only Remington rimfire I buy is their subsonic stuff (because it's one of the few subsonics readily available) and that still has a high failure rate- nowhere near as bad as the Thunderbolt stuff, but still pushing one in every 20-30 rounds.
 
I brought my buddy to my rifle club yesterday, and we were having a mostly rimfire day.
I had my 10/22 shooting MiniMags and Blazer. He was shooting his Charter Arms AR 7 with thunderbolts.
I thought they sounded weak...
During a break I walked over and noticed his front sight was gone...he had been using a scope, and hadn't noticed.
Looking closer, we noticed that the front half of the sight ramp was gone, revealing the barrel liner....and we could see a slight bulge, and some more cracks in the aluminum shroud.
Seems he had a squib that left a bullet in the muzzle. He had been shooting slow fire at steel plates we have at 40yds and thought he had missed.
Friends don't let friends shoot thunderbolts.
 
Bought a couple of boxes (50ct) of this stuff and I wasn't happy. Performed poorly (lots of mis-fires) and has to be the dirtiest stuff I've ever shot. No good. In general, I've been disappointed with Remington's .22 ammo.
 
Seems he had a squib that left a bullet in the muzzle.
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That's the reason that I wont use it. The ignition problems are a nuisance, but squibs cause damage. I'd gone through a box once in which about 20 of 50 were noticeably light. This may have been due to a light charge, or the fact that the bullets were practically falling out of their cases.

There must be old beat-up loading machinery dedicated solely to Thunderbolt. Because I've never encountered ammo so poorly manufactured. Even the cheapest alternatives are an order of magnitude better than Thunderbolt.
 
Wow!
I must be the only guy in the world who hasn't had a problem with the stuff!
My 10-22 prefers it over everything else I tried in it so I bought nothing but for ever.
Other than the dirt, which I agree with, is this a new problem that I'm just not seeing because I'm still wading through a stack of older ammo?
 
Reliability issues aside the Thunderbolts are a very dirty round. They also seem to have problems with consistent loading. Last time I used any probably 5% of the rounds had a noticeably weak report.

I pretty much exclusively use the Federal cheap stuff now. Just ordered 7000 rounds from Cabelas, in fact.
 
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