Not too long ago, saw a post by a member who says he significantly improved the accuracy of his 22lr rifle by using CCI SV that had been sorted by weight - the implication being that variations in individual bullet weight affect group size when using this ammo, and that occasional /lighter heavier than spec bullets can produce the odd flier in the group that seems to be common using CCI SV.

Has anyone done this? When weighing each round, what variations in weight have you found to be acceptable?

A waste of time, I can shoot 50 shots into one ragged hole @ 50 yards. But if weighing ammo floats your boat, carry on !

Some years ago, I bought a Neil Jones gauge - it measures base thickness. Sorting the very cheap, junk bulk ammo showed a slight accuracy improvement over unsorted ammo, but it was still very tedious work and not worth the effort. Buy better ammo to begin with. CCI SV is pretty good ammo for the price. I'd really doubt any benefit to weighing ammo. You'd have to weigh a lot of it and fire many groups with an incredibly accurate rifle to come up with a credible conclusion. Any accuracy advanatge would probably be insignificant.

I had a rifle go to hell a few years ago and started shooting like a shotgun.

I had just bought 2 boxes of Remington golden ammo in the 500 +- .

They were so bad when i got home i checked the rifle/scope and they were fine.

Didn't have much going that day so i brought my scales to the house and sorted them.

I had 3 weights light,normal and heavy.

The next day i shot them sorted into weights and the rifle and ammo went back to shooting tight groups like before.

Don't know what their problem was at that plant but they were screwed up.

I have not done it since but it was eye opening for sure.

Is it the bullet or the casing that's giving you the variance in weight? This needs to be taken into account when weighing.

Everyone is entitled to their notions. Mine is that you might benefit more from learning to read and compensate for wind than trying to squeeze a little more accuracy out of bargain ammo, at least when it comes to hitting what you shoot at. That knowledge would be of benefit with whatever you shoot. For my part, I’m currently trying to become a better shot. As long as my ammunition is accurate enough to hit what I want to hit, it’s good enough, and spares me all the anguish over uncalled flyers that comes with endless bench work. If I miss, I just assume it was me and have at it again.

About 25 years ago I helped my son with a science project in which we sorted the late, great Winchester silver-box PPs by weight, then fired groups with the sorted ammo through his 77/22 Varmint model. No benefit was demonstrated.

That is remington ammo and it is garbage. Most guys know, or should know that. The op was asking about CCI SV, I believe. The effort of sorting that ammo is wasted, as it's generally pretty good for standard/non match grade ammo. Now, if shooting competitions, some guys will sort by rim thickness, but that is because that affects headspace. Nothing more, nothing less. Buy decent ammo and shoot it through a good rifle and you shouldn't need to weight sort your ammo. We've all seen crap ammo that isn't good for much except for plinking at cans, but CCI SV is a little better than that. Picking/sorting the good from the bad may be a crap shoot at best.

There is no way to even tell what the deviation you are weighing. Erratic velocity is going to cause the biggest issue in group size, but the is no way to know if you are sorting by powder charges, priming compound, bullet weight, or a thick case. Basically buy better ammo if better consistency is needed.

Anther idea that is primarily between the shooters ears rather than in the ammo's characteristics whether it be weight or rim thickness. In an out of the box rifle the difference seen for the effort expended will be insignificant.

This. This is Science 101. When conducting a simple experiment, you test only one variable at a time, while holding all others constant. Can't do this with an intact cartridge. As a proportion of the overall weight, the bullet is the heaviest component. A certain variation in the bullet weight will have less effect than the same variation in the powder. This can't be determined by weighing an entire cartridge. OTOH, weighing and comparing batches of cartridges could determine which has the least variation which might affect relative accuracy.

All of that said, the greatest variation is going to be the shooter and the wind. What to do? Study and improve your technique. Buy the best ammo you can afford and learn to read the wind, preferably with good wind flags. Keep good notes.

Have fun.

Added: As a RSO, I can't begin to relate how often I have watched shooters "testing" high end equipment: rifles, scopes, ammo while employing poor technique or shooting from a less than stable rest and/or shaky bench.

Ditto on choosing better ammo. All just 5 shot groups with SK here and none shot bad at 50 yards from my 10-22.

I agree with buying better ammo to get better groups from a .22 rimfire. CCI SV is pretty decent mid priced ammo. Moving up to something like SK Standard Plus might improve your groups without a huge price increase, but of course each rifle is somewhat unique so you have to try different types of quality .22 ammo to find out what shoots the best.

BTW, EdM must have a really nice 10/22, probably with an aftermarket barrel. The groups with SK Rifle Match and Biathalon Sport are very good!

The recommendation to "buy better ammo" is well understood. I actually have Lapua Center-X, SK standard and Norma Tac-22 on hand, in addition to more common, (and cheaper) types of Aguila, CCI, Federal Automatch and "trash" Remington Thunderbolt.

What interested me was that CCI SV has a pretty good reputation as the best of the "cheap" ammo available - except for, in my internet searching, occasional fliers that are probably a consequence of less quality control that is an inevitable companion to lower price.

But put that together with reading a Campfire member's experience with higher accuracy by matching weights, and I just thought it would be an interesting experiment to grab a brick of CCI, spend an hour or two one afternoon watching "Mitty" on DVD while doing some weighing and matching, then run them through my CZ 457 and see how it all comes out.

You might be able to eliminate flyers by shooting the lightest 20% together as one batch and the heaviest 20% together as another batch. In theory, the ones at the lightest end could have more than one component that was lighter than typical, and similar for the heaviest at the other end. As others have mentioned, with multiple components, one component could be lighter and another heavier for a given cartridge, and you can't distinguish between those in a completed cartridge.

If you decide to do your experiment with a brick, I would split them into 5% groups by weight (25 cartridges in each group) for the lightest and heaviest 20% of the brick (lightest 5% in one group, next lightest 5% in another group, etc), and shoot 5 groups of 5 OR split them into groups of 10 if you want to shoot 10-shot groups. You probably need to shoot on a calm morning or indoors to be able to distinguish legitimate differences. I wouldn't be surprised if the groups for the extreme ends of cartridge weights were at least a little better than the average groups for that brick.

I have run a bunch of experiments with various methods of "measuring" and sorting .22 Long Rifle ammo over the years, including weighing, measuring the rim thickness, etc.

The only thing that's made a consistent difference was setting up wind flags and paying attention to them, even on "calm" days.

Probably not much point in buying better ammo if you don’t address the wind.

Yep!

Or learn how to adjust/compensate for parallax in a scope at 50 yards....

Wind, mirage, coffee shakes, and muscle aches: factors on the practical shooting side of the equation that separate the men from the boys. I think what a lot of guys who addressed this thread were doing was thinking in purely theoretical terms. We humans at our shooting benches are hard pressed to emulate a machine rest in a test chamber 50-100 yards long, wherein lies the only plausible way to settle the arguments surrounding weight and rim thickness sorting. I feel these activities have merit, but can't prove or disprove that feeling since I have no access to laboratory test facilities.

Speaking to the practical applications of sorting, I doubt there's any except for a top notch competitor who's looking to shave a couple thousandth's off of group size to claim 1st place instead of 2nd or 3rd - and he's got you and me beat right out of the gate anyway because he's a past master of wind reading.

Sort of in the same vein: how many take the trouble to do chamber casts of their .22 rimfires, to determine throat diameter/length, leade angles, etc. which to a large extent are what makes a rifle "like" certain brands/lots of ammo. We assign a lot of mystery to the "liking thing", when in truth there's a lot of measurable features that determine it.

It was what was in hand at the time.

It worked.

There's also a difference between the .22 Long Rifle "sporting" and "match" chambers.

The match chamber throats are considerably shorter, essentially designed so the "full diameter" portion of the bullet engraves itself into the throat, where there can be a little "freebore" in the sporting chamber with typical.22 LR ammunition.

Somewhere around here I have a gauge that measures this difference, and over the years found that many (ir not most) very accurate "sporting" .22 rifles have shorter throats....

Good info on the chambers, parallax, and wind. Thanks for the posts, John!

A local gunsmith sets back the factory barrels on the 10/22 to achieve a bit less freebore, but does nothing else to the chamber. Claims the Ruger chamber is actually tapered. Does seem to improve accuracy. Of course any form of tight chamber in a .22 must take into account extraction. I've had problems with manual extraction in a 10/22 so modified, a loaded round sticking in the chamber when the extractor lets go before the round is extracted. It's a delicate balance.

Yep - I had seen that so when I rebarreled my 10/22 I chose one with a Bentz chamber. Those are dimensioned between the match and sporting chamberings specifically for autoloaders to avoid that problem. My Cooper and Anschutz .22's are match chambers and include a note not to shoot CCI stingers that are a little longer cased.

I knew a guy who would carry a micrometer with him when shopping for .22 ammo to feed his Model 52's. Whenever he found bullets that mic'ed .225" (which happened more often than you'd think) he would buy all they had. His theory was that a fat oversize bullet cut across the spectrum of brands/types/velocity cartridges to a large degree. It was hard to argue with his success on the targets.