if I am doing a 17 again, I am pretty sure I would do it on a Howa mini. been looking at the howa mini quite a bit the last few days. its an interesting setup. I would like to double check that fireball would feed through one, but they do offer them in 222, the fireball case is only a tad shorter. Another interesting thought is if you could rebarrel a 450 bushmaster howa mini to 22 BR and have a feeding repeater from that.