Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Rimfires is winchester "wildcat" .22 LR notoriously lousy ammo?

Hiya,

Was thinkin' the other day that I just don't enjoy shootin' the .22's like I used to. I don't get that much chance either... but even when I do get out, it seems that my rifles don't shoot like they used to, and my cooey semi has become "so-so" with regards to reliability. I have got another .22 a couple years back, and it's never shot great (I blamed what I thought were poor sights).

I realized that maybe this coincides with having picked up a could bricks of winchester .22 wildcat ammo a couple years back. Since I get out so infrequently, I still have quite a bit of it.

I will pick up some other ammo (I had been shootin' remington's of some flavour before), but is wildcat ammo notoriously lousy??

Does it fail to cycle other semi's reliably? Inaccurate in general?

What .22 LR ammo has the best reputation?

thx

My 22's don't shoot like they used to either. But then, I get a little older and more out of practice every day.

Don't remember anything remarkable about Wildcats good or bad.

That Cooey wouldn't be a Model 64B would it? I had one of those for a number of years and actually just sold it last fall.

I found Wildcats to cause some issues in my 10/22 and the Cooey. They don't seem to be the most accurate out there either, but they are cheap so I don't feel bad shooting off a ton. They do foul up the barrel though.

SS

I use wildcat for bird hunting ect.Have never found any issue with it.Seems alright for the amount i use.

Not in my experience either.

Although I haven't bought any lately, I've been shooting Wildcats for about the past 25 years in a variety of rimfire rifles and revolvers.

When my kid was a little twerp, that's about all he got to blast away with, in a bolt rifle or my 10/22. Anytime he went to our cabin with my parents, he got a brick of Wildcats to take along, seldom ever brought any back.

Don't know about current production, but they've always shot fairly decent groups in most of my rifles. The Romanian trainer really likes them cheap ol' things. Cheap rifle likes cheap ammo, great symmetery.

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I used to win .22 rimfire silhouette matches with a Kimber Model 82 wearing a Leupold 4X compact scope and shooting Winchester Wildcat ammo. Half the fun was pissin' off the guys with the Anschutz's with all the sillywet bells and whistles shooting $5.00 a box Eley stuff.

The Kimber just liked that particular ammo.

Had a case of 5000 of that lot with the older white box which is all but gone now, but I still have 10,000 rounds of the newer boxed Wildcat under my bench. Guess you could say I do not find it to be notoriously lousy at all. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

hey Sam, yup a 64B.... a fine little rifle IMHO.... I used to be able to zip through clip after clip without a misfeed or jam. Now (with the wildcats) I don't think I can get through a clip. They don't seem to have enough jam to cycle the action completely. Sometimes they'll feed the next round, but it won't be cocked. Other times it is neither cocked nor the next round fed. Can happen up to 2-3 times out of 10 shots. So, how does your 10/22 compare to the 64B? The 64B is gone, so I guess you prefer the ruger... the thought of picking up a "nicer" semi has crossed my mind.

This is part of the reason why I still have so much of this ammo hangin' around (can't blaze it away fast)... after a couple targets I get tired of using the semi like a straight pull bolt <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I think if it was a bolt gun, I might just think my shootin' was out of practice (cause accuracy seems poor too).

thanks for the responses.... so it seems wildcats are not notiorously lousy... just maybe lousy for my cooey... a box of different ammo should tell me something.

Brent,

Have you tore it down and cleaned it out really well? I was having feeding and cycling problems until I took the whole thing apart and cleaned it out. There was a lot of carbon build up on the feed ramp and also on the bolt face. Once it was all cleaned up it fed and cycled much better. The extraction issues I had were also fixed. Give that a try and see how it does.

The reason I kept the 10/22 over the 64B was that I have a Boyd's thumbhole stock on my 10/22 and I really like it. I also like the rotary mag since it sits flush. I don't think that the one is more accurate then the other factory, but you can get new barrels and stocks and stuff for the 10/22 that you just can't for the Cooey. I found a guy willing to give me $150 for it and seeing how you can buy the Savage 64 F or G (I can't remember what they are now) for $180 at Wholesale I figured I couldn't go wrong. I may regret it later, but you can always find another 64B down the road. As an aside, my best shot with a .22 was with that 64B. I was trying to impress my cousin when we were shooting gophers one day and I said that I would shoot that gopher way over there. I shot and the thing disappeared. Figuring that I missed I paced it off anyway (100 yards). When I got there I found him shot through the head. I couldn't pull it off again in a million years, but I bragged it up and I had a witness to prove it. The same one that saw me shoot a pigeon out of the air with that same 64B. He seems to have a higher regard for my shooting abilities now. One of these days he will find out that they were both flukes. Until then I'm not going to tell him.


SS

Brent:

It's notorious in my household. I used to own a S&W revolver in .22lr. Whenever I used the Wildcat ammo, I would have to push the ejector rod against the wooden edge of the bench to get the empties out. That didn't happen with ANY other .22lr ammo.

The Wildcats didn't shoot that well in my rifles, either. This was about 10 years ago, and I haven't tried any since.

The good stuff isn't expensive.

- TJM

Sam,

Yes, as soon as the feeding problem started I took it all down and cleaned oiled etc. etc. No difference, so I don't think it's a crud/cleaning issue. I've had it apart a couple times, to crisp up the trigger, and just see if something's amiss in there. Probably should've suspected the ammo long ago. Good stories about your 64B! Nope, it's never a "fluke" when you call it!! No, it's not a real purdy gun, but it's the only one I own that I got brand spankin' new, as oppossed to the "new to me" variety (a very good xmas... probably about 1978)... it (was) plenty accurate with the iron sights. More than a few grouse were decapitated. Someday maybe one of my munchkins will be shootin' it. I redid the stock got rid of the cheesy dark stain. Looks much better now I think. They must've sold boat loads of them up here. Just picked up a set of rings for it.... for fun I'm gonna top it with a 2.5 weaver that I have around. I've accumulated a few centerfires in the last couple years, but want to get some more trigger time with a scope etc... so I want to get the ole .22 back on-line.

tjm... thanks for the input.... let's say I'm suspicious.

I agree price isn't a big deal... but I remember thinkin' "$17 for a brick, oh yeah I'll grab one of those." Like buying a pack of gum at the checkout. Now I've got at least one (probably two?) unopened bricks plus most of another.

Brent

Old Wildcat.........? not bad, went through a case of it , one year...........

Recent mark.........? sucks, and the vels. are all over the place.

No biggy , the next batch will orobably be great, again.

GTC

The only ammo that ever jammed my old 10/22, was anything that said Remington on the box. Granny bought my kid a milk carton full of econo-Remmies one summer when he ran outta Wildcats. That stuff would flat-jam the 10/22 after about 20-30 rounds.

Don't know if it was the lube itself, or if the ammo picked up wax from the inside of the milk carton, but that rifle never liked anything from Remington.

Don't recall any cycling problems with Wildcats and that rifle didn't get cleaned all that often back then either. It was my Daddy's truck/cabin/grandkid gun for years.

Although Wildcats aren't particularly clean nor super-accurate, they're better than most Remington ammo at this point.

I really like Dynapoints. Sometimes they're extremely accurate, then other batches are just good, but they burn clean and feed well. I use them for indoor gallery and offhand plinking, but not for serious target work.

Picher

Same here. Dynapoints are usually my benchmark load for comparison purposes in judging the accuracy potential of various rifles.

No doubt that there are more accurate cartridges, but nothing much in that price range that shoots as well in most of my 22s. When I was spending lots of time shooting 22s, used to get the heebie-jeebies if the local Kommiemart was out of Dynapoints, even if I still had a coupla thousand rounds in the cupboard.

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Brent:

22's are as finicky about ammo as the high strung centerfires are. Recently it seems that Win 22 LR Powerpoints vaporized from the earth's surface. They happend to be the cat's a_ _ for an Anschutz and a Ruger 77/22 I use on ground squirrels. I visited 3 stores and came up with about a dozen different makes and models of 22 LR ammo. It is absolutely amazing how differently the various brands performed in both of my rifles. At 50 yards and with 10 rd strings, the largest groups were about 2.5 inches and the smallest was about 0.30 inches. For both rifles my alternative is now the Federal American Eagles. A friend did the same run with his bull barreled 10/22 Ruger and settled on one of the Remington makes. If you truly want performance out of your unit, spend 10 or 15 bucks picking up a variety of ammo and give them each a run off the bench. You will most likely find that accuracy of yester-year in one brand of another. Just for the record, none of the really ultra-speedy stuff gave me any accuracy at all. It was all about 150 to 200 fps faster, but was all over the place. If the Powerpoints come back and still give me the performance of the olden days, I will buy several cases. With my luck, it seems that anything that really works well, soon goes off the market, so stock up if you find a good one. Best of luck, 1Minute.

Funny, TJM10025 mentioned his problem with S&W revolver and the wildcats. I found that my old S&W J frame 4" barreled revolver just absolutely loved the wildcats and grouped them tighter than any other ammo. As far as jamming? None in my 10-22, CZ452, Marlin 39a, Ruger Mark II, etc. Cheap, but good, if not a little messy, ammo.

Thanks for the replys...

Well, I tried some regular winchester "super-X" LR (dunno if these are called powerpoints or not)... look the same as wildcats but with copper covered bullets... my cooey jammed with those just as bad as with wildcats. I agree, I'll try some other brands too, but that's all that particular store had.

Aside from the jamming, the wildcats shot OK for about 19 shots out of 20. About 1 in twenty would produce a flyer that was waaaay out there. The flyer always seemed to be something like 8" high. Happened consistently enough to be noticeable.

Oh well, managed to expend about 250 LR rounds... so was time well spent. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> I got a blister on my finger from pulling the bolt back and manually loading it. I'm gonna take the rifle apart (again) to double check it.... One thing, I'm not sure the clip(s) are fitting as snuggly as they used to. That might be part or all of the problem (?).


On the plus side, I tried out a new-to-me Savage 99 in .308... made an 8" pattern with winchester 150gr pp's .... but put 180's into just over 1".... Would work fine for deer, but I want to find (or brew) a 150 gr load that it likes. Funny how finicky these things can be. Keeps it interesting.

22 rimfires are funny about ammo brands. My target pistol shoots Winchester Super X better than any "target" ammo. My BearCat loves Remington sub sonic and my 10-22 is scarry accurate with Stingers. I never would have dreamed of Stingers being the most accurate load in any rifle.

Every time I get a new 22 I buy a pay checks worth of different ammo and test them all. Eventually, the kids shoot up all the left overs.

Back in the late '60's and early 70's, I shot competitive NRA pistol. I tried to shoot 1000 rounds a week in practice and matches. I bought Winchester T-22 by the case (5000 rounds) every 5 (or 6) weeks. That's all I've ever used and while I only shoot about 100 rounds a month now (22 LR), I still use the T-22 - if it's not broke, don't fix it. I keep meaning to try something new, but I don't.