Worst bulk rimfire yet?

S

Sevens

New member
I've been shooting bricks & bulk rimfire since 1988, best I can recall. I've spent the first 3/4 of my life pretty dead-sure-certain that the worst bulk rimfire that money could buy was absolutely going to be from Remington, and usually some version, name or iteration of their "Golden Bullet" stuff.

Yeah, bulk rimfire is the low cost volume stuff. I'm absolutely -NOT- talking about (nor asking for!) match accuracy, and I'm not asking for perfection. I wouldn't even begin to suggest that any of this stuff shouldn't be a little dirty or mucky... it's rimfire fodder afterall, and we're getting the "best" priced product they offer.

Well... move over Remington. There's a new "worst" rimfire fodder on the market and it's the Winchester M-22 product. <barfing smiley>

My informal research (hands-on limited experience) comes from this product bought from THREE different places by myself and two other buddies. The basic, common "failure to fire" that usually will eventually go BANG when you clock the round to a different place on the case head? Oh, we've got that a-plenty. If you wanna be the worst, that's a basic requirement.

With these, we've found a helluva time actually pulling the crap dud round out of the chamber so we can 'clock' it and hit it a second time. The different guns? A late 50's S&W Model 18, a GSG 1911-22, a Browning Buck Mark Camper, a 1955 Colt Huntsman and my 5-inch Sig/Hammerli Trailside. Please no suggestions that this is a gun issue. :p NOT!

With the rounds that simply aren't going to go BANG no matter where or how many times we hit it? Of course we pull them down. We want to see if the priming compound was smeared SOMEWHERE in there or forgotten entirely. On the Remington stuff, I could usually count on half the round getting a nice smear while the other half was clean & shiny. Sometimes, the whole inside was clean & shiny and priming compound never got in there at all.

But with these, we're seeing a new one: open the round, dump the powder in your palm and you get to see a chunk of dried, caked priming compound. Oh, it's in there, but it didn't stick to the case head. :confused:
 
This week, I put 240 rounds of this junk through my Trailside. Later in the day, I'm loading magazines with it and I come across an empty brass in my hand. Happens often, a piece of flying ejected brass lands in the box, we've all done it. Except... this piece hadn't been hit! Shiny new brass, no bullet, no powder, no primer hit. A primed case slips through production and QC and ends up in a box of loaded ammo. That's the first time I've seen that although I'm sure others have seen it.

Yes, the times are tough, rimfire is in short(ish) supply and everyone has ramped up production. Quality is expected to slip, I suppose. But this stuff is craptastic. It's also undergone a well known factory recall:
Winchester has determined the above lots of 22 Long Rifle rimfire ammunition may contain double powder charges.
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Winchester needs to get a grip on what they're doing these days before they end up looking like Remington does with everything Remington tries to do. Frankly, it's kind of depressing. These are historic names of the American landscape and their output quality is dropping like a lead zeppelin.
 
The last several boxes of Wuper-X was no good and it isn't cheap. Get CCI if you can find it. So far CCI seems to have maintained quality. Some of the Federal stuff is still good, I don't know about the Fed bulk.
 
I had the same problem. I thought it was my pistol at the time. It might work in my rifles. It must be nice to be able to sell a high margin item and have no responsibility whatsoever to its functionality.
 
i have a couple of bricks of the Golden Bullets that I save for my bolt guns; as my 10/22 hates them with a passion. M22, the 10/22 devours them and asks for seconds. Go figure.
 
Well, I certainly understand how one particular firearm prefers one brand over the other, but manufacturing FAILURES can not & will not be remedied by a particularly gun because of mojo or good fortune. When your 10-22 comes across some Winchester M-22 with the priming compound packed in to a flat cake and laying somewhere in the middle of the powder charge and not smeared on to the underside of the case head to be hit, it's going to ask for less of it. :p
 
For me it was a bulk pack of Federal American Eagle. The bullets were very loose in the case, and they jammed in my Ruger MkII because the bullet kinked sideways on the feed ramp! In the 25 years I've owned that pistol this is the first time it had issues with any ammunition.

Winchester Super X did not work in my Remington 581, the cases get stuck in the chamber after firing and are difficult to extract. After I had to ram one out with a cleaning rod I stopped using it in that gun.

Never had problems with the Golden Bullets, go figure.

My 10/22, OTOH, has never had issues with any ammo, including the aforementioned boxes of Super X and American Eagle. Just eats them up and spits them out.
 
I am in agreement about the Thunderbolts as of late or for the last 5 years. The older Thunderbolt performed much better.
The new stuff shoots dirty and gives pizz poor accuracy in both rifles and pistols. In a Model 31 SW, I get 4" groups and not much better in a match grade Winchester Bolt gun.
 
I may be wrong, but wasn't there just a big recall on the Winchester M-22 ammo?

Worst 22 ammo I remember is the old Thunderbolt, were you could hear the difference in the report of the gun. Stopped buying it years ago, so maybe it's better now.
 
Remington Thunderbolts, hands down the worst. It's excessively dirty, has frequent FTF's, and for some reason was the only rimfire ammo that was rough feeding in my Henry lever action.

I have found the best bulk .22lr is CCI Blazer. I remember being able to pick up bricks of it for $18 just 3 years or so back, and the shops had them stacked waist high in pallets. The used to be packed in 10 individual boxes of 50 too, throw a couple small 50rd boxes in your jacked pocket and your good for plinking for a while walking through the woods. The good ol' days, seems like it was so long ago but it really wasn't.
 
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Interesting. I haven't bought any in years, but by far my worst was Federal 550s in the brown box. At the time, it seemed the same was by far the best in some circles, so we thought it a regional thing. I was always told to try the blue (525) box, but never did, and soon after, the shortage/panic set in. Most of my duds were a snap instead of a bang, and then checking for an empty barrel, just in case my GSG-5 properly (improperly?) cycled a squib. Normally it didn't, but I wasn't risking it. It was getting real depressing, since I had over 1500 rounds of the crap. Last time I started using Winchester Wildcats instead and never had a single failure.

It sucks to think we'll be paying more for crappier ammo.

One thing for sure is it sometimes pays to report this to the manufacturers. SOME have gotten free boxes of ammo, and usually more than purchased. It's always worth a try.
 
Agree completely with Dragline45. The CCI bulk is very good ammo. The Remington is pretty lousy...many malfunctions when I've used it. I've also been quite satisfied with the Federal bulk pack I've used. Any Winchester I've used has been very, very dirty.
 
I have found the best bulk .22lr is CCI Blazer. I remember being able to pick up bricks of it for $18 just 3 years or so back, and the shops had them stacked waist high in pallets. The used to be packed in 10 individual boxes of 50 too, throw a couple small 50rd boxes in your jacked pocket and your good for plinking for a while walking through the woods. The good ol' days, seems like it was so long ago but it really wasn't.
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It's been my experience that the bulk pack CCI Blazer and the bricks of 50-rd boxes of CCI Blazer seems to be the same "quality" but the ammo isn't exactly the same. The bulk pack stuff is far, far more dirty. I don't think it's merely because the rounds are all dumped willy-nilly in a cube-box rather than single-file in a plastic tray... the difference in the crust all over them is far more pronounced than that.

Even still, I have also found it to be a decent product for bulk ammo.

My best experience has been with the blue 525 boxes of Federal Champion, although the red/brown 550 boxes that preceded the 525 blue ones were never an issue for me either.

Back in the late 80s, I basically bought 3 brands-- the Federal Lightning, the Winchester Super-X and the Winchester Wildcat. And I'd rank them in the same order.
 
Originally posted by Sevens:



Yeah, bulk rimfire is the low cost volume stuff.
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Yep, and like most things in life, one gets what they pay for. While it would be nice to get super accurate, high reliability ammo for 3-4 cents a pop, I believe that it's time, like .25 a gallon gas, is over. Logistics, storage and profit by wholesalers/retailers added to the cost of the manufacturer have all but done away with it. I've got so a few "duds" outta bulk pacs from any manufacturer are almost a gimme as is a dirty hand and or gun. I sometimes think the cheaper the ammo, the more I shoot, so it may not always be cheaper ammo is dirtier, just that shooting more of it makes for more dirt and crud. Maybe it's a combination of both. But to shoot a lot of ammo cheaply I accept this. Now if I want something that goes bang every time and hit's much more accurately, I go farther down the shelf where the good stuff is at.
 
I bought two 500 round bricks of Winchester M-22's, a couple of months ago, from a guy on our range, and almost every one of them had a failure to extract from my Kimber {Yonkers, NY} bolt gun. I had to press down on the extractor bar on the bolt, while opening the bolt, in order to get the spent or live round ejected.

I agree...the latest batches of M-22's, are probably one of the worst rimfire rounds around.
 
I agree...the latest batches of M-22's, are probably one of the worst rimfire rounds around.
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Couldn't agree more. Was out a couple weeks back and tried some of this in my 617. More fail to fires than I've ever seen in any ammo. Pure junk in my opinion, will probably end up just giving it away.
 
Yep, and like most things in life, one gets what they pay for. While it would be nice to get super accurate, high reliability ammo for 3-4 cents a pop, I believe that it's time, like .25 a gallon gas, is over.
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I hear ya, but it kind of sounds like you're comparing bulk rimfire to the much better and far more expensive product that is sold in 50 or 100 count packages.

Really, the meat of my frustration is how this Winchester M-22 compares to all the bulk rimfire fodder I've ever shot in the past 25+ years, up to and certainly including the OTHER competing bulk rimfire products (sometimes) available at the store right now.

We've all had our go-round with lousy .22LR ammo, it kind of comes with the package. I'm simply saying that I've seen great bulk stuff and I've seen decades of Remington-bad bulk stuff but THIS M-22 product is lowering the bar. :eek:
 
i have a couple of bricks of the Golden Bullets that I save for my bolt guns; as my 10/22 hates them with a passion.
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Yup, I save it for my lever action. It's just not worth the frustration with a 10/22. I'll shoot the auto match and cci stuff for my 10/22.
 
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