I have often mentioned finding the right combination of gun and bullet for the job you are intending to do whether that is accuracy, velocity, or terminal ballistics.
It can also include performance such as expansion when hunting or in test media, and for self defense it must never fail to function, feed or extract from the gun.We may not be so picky in our everyday plinking ammo for our .22’s and that would be a mistake.
After all: a .22 is a .22, right? Just buy what is on sale and you will be happy as long as it goes Bang! Hold your horses, let me tell you about what I recently experienced during our Women On Target Event.
We used Ruger SR22P training pistols although a few of us brought our Ruger Mark II’s and Mark IV’s as back-up guns.The ammo was Remington Thunderbolts, a high velocity (1255 feet per second) round nose soft lead lubricated bullet that happened to be on sale.
We were rewarded with good reliability however a problem emerged. After as few as 50 rounds down range we began to experience a “Keyholing” in the targets, we could clearly see that the bullet was passing through the paper sideways not straight on. It is called Keyholing because the hole left looks like the old fashioned lock key holes in vintage doors that use a skeleton type key.
At our break I cleaned the guns and found an unusual amount of lead fouling in the barrels. We finish the day with similar results on all the SR22P guns, but we did not experience any key holing on the Ruger Mark II’s and IV’s
Upon closer examination while spending over 4 hours trying to get the bores clean on those 7 guns I noticed that there was big difference between the depth of the “rifling” or spiral in the barrels of the SR22Ps and the other guns.
Most of you are think of rifling as a pattern of groves and lands in your barrel that twist the bullet to give it a spiral for accuracy. You are current an on larger calibers the depth of the grooves can be quite deep. On this new SR22Ps however it was very very shallow and these soft lead bullets were smearing the lead on the surface cause the build up to stop the rotation and actually grab and turn the bullet causing it to hit the target sideways. The build up was so great that I could not get a cleaning rod down the barrel. The older model Rugers did not experience this buildup and remained accurate and precise throughout the day.
This was clearly a case where the guns did not like the ammo we had selected, and may be a consideration when you purchase ammo as well!