I just enjoyed watching Paul Harrell pump 3500 rounds of .22LR through nine different firearms in 55 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiMNASuw69U
Great soundtrack to whatever you're doing, but you might want ear plugs
He's trying to determine the rate of duds in modern .22LR ammo.
For those interested, he had an overall dud rate of about one-quarter of a percent - 1500rds of CCI MiniMag had one dud, 1000rds of Blaser had six duds, 1000rds of Remington Thunderbolt had two duds. And he cleaned the firearms after the first 2000rds. I would've liked him to reshoot them to determine if they were duds due to no primer compound, or from poor primer compound distribution in the rim. He did mention that his Remington Nylon 66 has a much finer firing pin than his other rifles, so it might see more duds than other rifles due to poor primer distribution.
It occurred to me that as ammunition here is heavily restricted, we might be a useful case for analysis.
We get a dud round we can't just bin it or leave it on the bench as a curio, or we risk charges over unsecured ammunition. I collect all my brass, and I recover as many of my bullets as I can find for casting, so I definitely am not likely to toss a dud round into the bush (I have almost 30kg of empty .22LR brass, which most shooters I talk to seem happy to spread about the bush rather than clean up after themselves).
I have a plastic box in the ammo safe that I toss any dud rimfire rounds into, so I have a very good record of them. Any dud centrefire just gets reloaded so I don't keep those. I'm almost finished my fourth case of CCI Std Velocity now, well over 20,000rds (I bought lots of bricks before I started buying cases), without a single dud round. Primarily it's been fired in three rifles, Ruger American Compact and Target, and my Norinco JW21 lever-action. It also gets used as the main fodder in six other .22's, and other ammunition gets used in those three primary ones as well as the SV. I do have some duds from other ammo, Remington Cyclones mainly (I think there were five of these last time I looked, of the more than 3000rds I bought), and Highland, but no CCI. Some rifles don't like specific ammunition and will light strike it, but it fires okay when fed back through a different rifle - in particular, the Annie 64 hates Eley ammo due to the thin rims. I will always try dud a round a few more times to see if it'll fire, so any duds I keep are true duds. It is possible, even likely, that if I have had any CCI duds, that they fired okay with another hit - but I can't recall any, so if I did have any, it'd still be a virtual zero.
In the old days, duds were a thing, expected, and common. Although I mainly used one specific ammunition when I was a kid, Aussie Ammo, bought bulk, I also played with whatever else I could find whenever I managed to get into a town. I had a bunch of .22LR semi-auto and bolt-action rifles that ate the Aussie Ammo up like it was going out of style, which it eventually did.
For me, I think modern rimfire ammo is astonishingly reliable, virtually as reliable as centrefire ammo.
Does anybody have any modern horror stories of dud rimfire ammo that can't be attributed to the firearm? I mean that I might get 40% "duds" trying to run Eley through the Annie, but it all fires fine when I run them back through something else, so that's a rifle problem, not the ammo.