Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Why No Match 22 Magnum Ammo

A lot of discussion over at rimfirecentral.com - it does seem lack of QC, very large deviations in fps shot to shot, in many 22 WMR.

It is a Ray-Vin made in florida. I traded into it with no thought of keeping it, then I mounted a scope and shot it. If I ever have to go to a one rifle battery that is going to be it.
Everyone I let shoot it finishes with a huge grin on their face.
I have gone through several bolt guns in 22mag that didn't come close.

Paul,

You might want to read the article I wrote on the subject for RIFLE magazine maybe 3-4 years ago.

I currently have (2) .22 mag rifles, a 55 year old Anschutz 141M and a Sako Quad (that also has .22 LR, .17 M2 and .17 HMR barrels.) Both rifles shoot around 1 MOA which is all I need in a .22 Mag.

Post up a pic!

I vaguely remember that John. I can't stir it up online though.

Don't know why but my Winchester lever rifle likes the CCI ammo and the Winchester second.

Have not shot in years because the price went bonkers years ago.

I am in good shape because the dead father in law had a stash of CCI ammo and the Mother in law gave it to me.
Over her son.

Jackrabbits didn't like it.

If you compare 22mag ammo cost and 22LR ammo cost, then extrapolate what really good match grade 22mag might cost compared with 22LR, I think the cost would be prohibitive and you'd be better off with a centrefire as more cost effective. That plus as others have said not all 22mags would be good enough to use the better ammo.

Paul,

Neither could I. Here's a somewhat condensed version:

THE MYSTERY OF THE .22 MAGNUM

The .22 Winchester Rimfire Magnum appeared in 1959, filling a gap created by the demise of older, larger rimfire rounds. Since then the .22 Magnum has seen both ups and downs, and to understand why we need to examine rimfire history.

Rimfires first appeared in the mid-1800’s, among them the oldest cartridge still produced today, 1857’s .22 Short. By the 1860’s much larger rimfire rounds appeared, the most popular the .44 Henry and .56-56 Spencer, chambered in early lever-action rifles, but the advent of smokeless powder pretty much killed them off. While a few .25-32 caliber rimfires lasted until World War Two, after the war only .22 rimfires remained in production.

By then telescopic sights were becoming more popular, and some shooters wished for higher-velocity rimfires. The easiest way to increase velocity was a longer .22 case, but instead of stretching the Long Rifle, Winchester based their new round on the slightly larger .22 Winchester Rim Fire cartridge, introduced in 1890. Also loaded by Remington as the .22 Special, the “High Velocity” load featured a 45-grain bullet at a listed 1450 fps, plenty for iron sights but not enough to satisfy scope users.

The original .22 Winchester Rimfire Magnum load featured a 40-grain hollow-point bullet at an advertised 2000 fps, which promoted the .22 Magnum like 3000 fps promoted the .250 Savage in 1913, and 4000 promoted the .220 Swift in 1935. (Later the listed muzzle velocity was reduced to 1910 fps, but by then it didn’t matter.) The new cartridge became immediately popular in both rifles and handguns, and I bought my first in the late 1960’s while still a teenager, a Savage Model 24 combination gun, with a .22 Magnum barrel on top of a shotgun barrel also chambered for a relatively new “magnum,” the 3-inch 20-gauge.

I hunted a lot with the Savage over the next few years, taking animals from prairie dogs to sage grouse. However, the 20-gauge barrel shot so high only the bottom fringe of the pattern hit where the gun pointed. I got used to that, but the barrel-selector button on the action tended to get stuck halfway. The first time this happened I scattered some #6 shot at a coyote over 100 yards away. The coyote was alarmed but unharmed, and eventually the Savage ended up with my first wife’s youngest brother, whereupon I forgot about the .22 Magnum until 2003.

That fall I hunted deer in Texas with a friend during a high point in the jackrabbit population. After getting our deer, the landowner/outfitter loaned us his .22 Magnum to thin out the jacks. The rifle was a Winchester Model 9422M, which dropped jackrabbits quicker than any .22 Long Rifle load I’d ever used. Soon after arriving home in Montana I stopped by Capital Sports & Western Wear in Helena, by some odd chance finding a brand-new 9422M.

It proved accurate with the original Winchester load, putting five into a little over an inch at 100 yards, but I’d also purchased several boxes of a new Remington load featuring a 33-grain AccuTip spitzer with a higher ballistic coefficient. This seemed ideal for smaller varmints like prairie dogs, but a pair of 5-shot groups measured over three inches. Montana’s jackrabbit population was at a low point so I used the 9422 on prairie dogs with the Winchester 40-grain JHP’s—and the rifle started spraying them a little as the barrel warmed up, not uncommon in tube-magazine lever actions.

That same year I’d purchased a CZ 452 in .17 Hornady Rimfire Magnum, the .22 Magnum necked down. Five-shot groups went well under an inch with any ammo, and the 17-grain bullets not only shot flatter than the Winchester .22 Magnum load but drifted noticeably less in the wind. This seems counter-intuitive to the average shooter, who believes heavier bullets should drift less because heavier stuff is harder to move. In reality wind-drift is controlled by ballistic coefficient and velocity, and the BC of the .17-caliber V-Max is higher than all but the very heaviest .22 Magnum bullets, which start out almost 1000 fps slower. (Despite this, a few Montana prairie dog shooters still claim they “prefer” the .22 Magnum because its bullets drift less in the wind, a sure indication they’ve never used a .17 HMR.)

A few years later I went on a prairie dog shoot with some Remington and Marlin people, and got a chance to try a Marlin bolt-action .22 Magnum that shot consistently even after the barrel got warm. So I sold the 9422M and bought a Marlin, but its best groups at 100 yards were twice the size of average .17 HMR groups. Many shooters said CZ’s .22 Magnums were very accurate, and based on my .17 HMR this seemed a reasonable assumption. I traded the Marlin for a CZ, but it shot about the same way.

By this time I was getting somewhat stubborn, so continued to ask other shooters about .22 Magnums. A few advised buying an Anschutz, a temptation because I owned an Anschutz Model 54 that shot very accurately with a wide variety of .22 Long Rifle ammunition. But even used “Annies” in .22 Magnum cost far more than I was willing to pay after some experience with my $400 .17 HMR.

The consensus was that .22 Magnum rifles usually “liked” one or two loads, so a varmint hunter should accept that fact and shoot those loads. This made sense, so I sold the CZ and looked for another 9422M. (Nobody ever claimed being a rifle loony is rational.) The second Winchester, a used rifle from the 1970’s, shot Federal 30-grain TNT loads as accurately as the first had shot Winchester 40-grain HP’s—and shot the Winchesters all right too. However, it sprayed the Remington 33 V-Maxes into even larger groups. I’d learned to accept that from .22 Magnums, so decided to stock up on 30-grain Federals and 40-grain Winchesters.

Unfortunately, about then the Obama Reelection Shooter’s Panic began. Suddenly rimfire ammo became scarce, with .22 Magnum ammo almost non-existent. Eventually the panic changed how Americans buy rimfire ammunition: Instead of being able to walk into stores and buy whatever ammo they desired, smarter shooters searched the Internet, pouncing on any good deal.

Eventually I got smarter too, and after a couple of years had ample supplies of 10 kinds of .22 Magnum ammo, along with a brick of CCI .22 Winchester Rimfire hollow-points. This may seem excessive, but my wife Eileen and I own three other .22 Magnums, an 8-inch Krieghoff shotgun-barrel insert for my Sauer 16x16/6.5x57R drilling (a far more satisfactory combination gun than the Savage 24) and a pair of Ruger Single-Six revolvers with interchangeable cylinders.

During this period Ruger American Rifles appeared. I tried a .22 Long Rifle and a .308 Winchester, both confirming the RAR’s reputation for accuracy. One day in 2015 a .22 Magnum RAR appeared at Capital Sports for about a quarter the price of the average Winchester 9422M, and a few days later the rifle went to the range one afternoon with my wide variety of .22 Magnum ammo, just to see what it liked.

Like many Montana afternoons it was breezy, so the shooting was done at 50 yards. (Another fact unknown to casual shooters is wind-drift doesn’t double at twice the range, but essentially quadruples.) The largest 5-shot group measured an inch, with the rest between .5 and .8 inch—which converts to 1.0 to 1.6 inches at 100 yards, confirmed a few days later on a very calm morning. Even the Remington 33 V-Max load grouped very well, a decade after I’d bought the ammo.

Why are .22 Magnums so mysteriously fickle about ammunition? I started asking not just other shooters but shooting-biz professionals. One magazine editor said he’d always suspected the standard rifling twist of one turn in 14 inches was a little too slow, but I knew that wasn’t true. During the height of the rimfire shortage I’d developed several rimfire-equivalent loads for my Ruger No. 1B .22 Hornet, also with a 1-14 rifling twist. All shot very well with bullets similar to those in .22 Magnum ammo.

One gunsmith thought the chamber throats in .22 Magnums were too short. A check of the SAAMI website, however, listed the standard .22 Magnum throat as .06 inch, shorter than the throat for any other rimfire cartridge except the .22 Short—and considerably shorter than the .22 Long Rifle “Match” chamber.

What really puzzled me was the difference in accuracy between the .22 Magnum and .17 HMR, its direct descendant. Perhaps the rims of .22 Magnum ammo weren’t as consistent? Many .22 rimfire target shooters sort ammo by rim thickness, figuring it can make a difference not only in headspace but ignition. This has been contradicted by at least two people who tested a LOT of target ammo and couldn’t find this accuracy advantage, but I’d acquired a Neil Jones rimfire gauge somewhere and decided to use it. It turned out there wasn’t any significant difference in the rim-thickness between .22 Magnum and .17 HMR ammo, which wasn’t surprising.

I also e-mailed Ruger’s Mark Gurney, Ruger’s product manager, describing the accuracy of my American rifle and asking why it might shoot so consistently. Mark had been forthcoming about Ruger manufacturing techniques before, but this time his response was one word: “Luck?”

Eventually I suspected the mystery might lie in the wide variations of .22 Magnum bullets, so used a Starrett digital micrometer to measure bullet diameter just in front of case mouths, and also measured the cases just behind the mouths.

All this measuring revealed several factors I hadn’t previously realized.

First, two kinds of bullets are loaded in .22 Magnum ammo these days—what might be called “traditional” rimfire bullets, such as the original Winchester 40-grain JHP, with a full-diameter, cylindrical section in front of the case mouth, and “modern” spitzers, with the cylindrical section inside the case mouth. Bullets with outside cylindrical sections varied in diameter from .223 to .226 inch.

All .22 Long Rifle bullets have an outside cylindrical section, and the .22 Long Rifle “Match” chamber is short enough for the rifling to engage this cylinder, much like cast bullets in black-powder cartridge rifles are often seated firmly into the rifling. Also, all .22 Long Rifle match ammo uses plain lead bullets, in order to eliminate minor bullet imbalances possible from copper plating or jacketed. All .22 Magnum bullets are jacketed.

In contrast, all the bullets loaded in .17 caliber rimfires are very similar jacketed spitzers. These are seated very similarly to jacketed bullets in centerfire rifle cartridges, close to the rifling.

The .22 Magnum’s present loads include several where the bullets have to “jump” quite a distance before engaging the rifling. Over the years I’d found the original Winchester load with the 40-grain JHP the most consistently accurate in various .22 Magnum rifles, and other shooters confirmed my observation. This made sense, since it’s a traditional rimfire bullet with a cylindrical section in front of the case mouth, very close to the rifling.

At this point I used my Hawkeye borescope to look inside the American Rifle’s 6-groove barrel. It wasn’t quite as smooth as some recent Ruger barrels (they’ve been nicely hammer-forged since the 1990’s) but still very good. Slugging the bore indicated the dimensions were very consistent, with an average groove diameter of .2239 inch and a bore diameter of .2193, both slightly under nominal SAAMI specs. Slightly tight bores often shoot more accurately.

However, cartridges fitting loosely inside the chamber won’t line up bullets very consistently with the rifling. I thought about this for a while, then painted the front of the case of Winchester 40-grain JHP round (the ammo with the largest case diameter) with some polyurethane-based wood stain. After allowing the stain to dry thoroughly, the round’s diameter increased only .0014 inch—but that was enough to make it stick slightly in the Ruger’s chamber, indicating the front end of the chamber is only about one-thousandth of an inch larger than the Winchester ammo. This combination of a tight chamber and bore is probably what allows the Ruger to shoot a wide variety of ammo accurately.

RIFLE # 290, The .22 Winchester Magnum Mystery

January 2017

Ray-Vin is Ray Brandes. Ray is a retired tool and die maker, highpower shooter and all around mechanical genius. All that means is that Ray likes accurate stuff and figured out how to make the 22 Mag shoot accurately and reliably. I'd guess he applied some of the same principles he applied to the CLE AR22 like a 22 Mag analog to the 22 Bentz reamer. ...which means that the 22 Mag will probably respond to standard Rimfire accuracy tricks. My guess is that it's mostly in the throat.

Because match rifles chambered in 22 Mag are not at all common. Quality match ammo in 22rf can run up to $20/50. Don't know, but cost for true 22 Mag match ammo would probably be twice that.

I will tomorrow. Tonight I am on a tablet thingy😁

Thanks John. I do remember much of that article. I just could not remember the punch line.

here is the ray-vin


now i have it out i will have to shoot it!

AFAICS, there are few .22 Magnum rifles capable of producing match grade accuracy.in the same way that there are dozens rifle chambered in .22 Long Rifle that are capable of producing match grade accuracy. This may be a chicken and egg situation in that without a market for rifles capable of match grade accuracy, there isn't any market of ammunition capable of match grade accuracy. One has to come first or neither will come.

I have owned a couple dozen firearms chambered in .22 Magnum over the past 50 years and still have 18 rifles, 6 revolvers, and 3 Savage 24 combination guns. I've shot a wide variety ammunition and found that like many rimfires, they often shoot their best groups with a particular brand, bullet style, and, sometimes, production lot of ammunition. The ammunition that I use to set the base line accuracy in all of my .22 Magnums is from an old cache made by RWS.

Sweet!

I have made accurate 22 mag out of Remington 580, I know it's only a single shot, but you only need one shot. were talking 1/4" groups at 50 yards and 3/4" groups at 100 yards

yes it is. 12 rounds of Hornady 35g. 100 yds. off bag. it likes this ammo the least. need to adjust the scope i guess.

I do not know if i would use match ammo other then to say i tried it. I just shoot hornady V-max and it is minute of ground hog in my savage 93. I do wish for another 100 FPS (2300) and a 40 grain tipped bullet But, that puts me in the low end 22 hornet arena. I can only dream for those specs in 22 mag. Plus the 22 mag seems to a waning thought in the rimfire ammo development world. I will not stop using it. I like it alot and as long as stay within 100 yards.it does the job! I do love stalking the g-hogs. Getting close is exciting for me.