3500rds in 55m - testing reliability

Rimfire bolt action rifles, lever action, pump action and self loading rifles. Air rifles.

3500rds in 55m - testing reliability

Post by bladeracer » 22 Mar 2019, 4:53 pm

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.
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Re: 3500rds in 55m - testing reliability

Post by Ecobogan » 07 Apr 2019, 9:41 am

Interesting on the dud ammo mate. I run CCI subsonic hollow points through my CZ 453 for hunting and Eley club if I'm trying to fill the hex of a batten screw at 50m....which it will if I don't get twitchy.
Anyway after 6500 rounds in just over 12 months I've sure come across some duds. No Eley clubs but a handful of CCI, about 10-12 from memory and most from one particular brick.
Interestingly they all, bar 2, shot on the second attempt...eject, handload into the chamber rotate a little and were fine as you mentioned.
The CCI's are still my pick of high usage ammo for the CZ, very happy all up just interesting on the semi dud business.
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Re: 3500rds in 55m - testing reliability

Post by bladeracer » 07 Apr 2019, 2:12 pm

Ecobogan wrote:Interesting on the dud ammo mate. I run CCI subsonic hollow points through my CZ 453 for hunting and Eley club if I'm trying to fill the hex of a batten screw at 50m....which it will if I don't get twitchy.
Anyway after 6500 rounds in just over 12 months I've sure come across some duds. No Eley clubs but a handful of CCI, about 10-12 from memory and most from one particular brick.
Interestingly they all, bar 2, shot on the second attempt...eject, handload into the chamber rotate a little and were fine as you mentioned.
The CCI's are still my pick of high usage ammo for the CZ, very happy all up just interesting on the semi dud business.


I have some bricks of CCI Sub-HP as well, but I don't use it very much. It only shoots around 2MoA for me at 100m.
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