Think I'm gonna get another plinking semi-auto .22 rifle.

The last few 10/22s I’ve bought were:

$170 carbine, about 3 years ago.
$250 walnut sporter 2 years ago.
$350 TD special edition 5 or 6 years ago.

Scheels and Dicks frequently offer the carbine model at $209-$219 and the above $170 ($169.97) price was a Black Friday Dick’s sale. Generally my only non-DIY cost is a KIDD bolt buffer but I’ve also used their return spring kit as well.

My wife liked her Sporter enough to shelf her beat up Model 60 permanently though for a plinker they can be fun as all get out. One rifle everyone agrees on at the range for fun is my old Savage Model 7 of which there are many variants. The kids will put down their ARs and stand in line to shoot it as do onlookers any time we bring it out. Great fun for a $60 used rifle.

lionking

No experience with the Savage line-up so I can't help you there but I do know that my Ruger 10/22 has always been very reliable, durable, and accurate too! Liked the iron sights with the brass bead but I soon realized that I could greatly benefit from having a scope on it. Found a nice compact Weaver K2.5 for it and have been happily plinking away with it (no problem out to 100 yards with Wolf Match Target or CCI MiniMag ammo), for over 40 years now!

Go big or go home! You went big and took two home! Hope you have a ball with them!

Apropos of nothing special, I just had a very fun indoor range session today with my BRN-22 based 10/22 4 lb. project gun. I zeroed both the iron and RMR sights (a rear peep was added since this photo was taken), then fired off a couple boxes practicing snap shots while quickly repositioning the target back and forth downrange using the electric pulley system -- shoots great!

IIRC my dealer said Ruger did a price increase.
10/22 went up around forty bucks.

Accurate...................pffft.
Had one that was pretty decent.
Still trying to find a 20" GM sporter bbl blued to turn my '70 fingergroove from shotgun to rifle.

Its horrible.

Looks like the kitties prefer the Savage---I had a Marlin 60 a few years ago---ran almost exclusively on Federal ammo---no problems at all---now I have a Henry---always
wanted a lever .22.

My best plinkers: Rem 504 and Ruger 10-22. Both have had "some" work to make them better than they "used to was". Hard to beat the Ruger for pure plinking fun...especially with a large-capacity magazine. Hard to keep the grandkids' magazines full, though.


The 10-22 has a Shilen barrel that's been both very accurate and accepting of all brands of ammo.
jp

I have two 10/22's. Both are accurate. Of course the only thing left that's Ruger are the actions and bolts and the bolts have been trued and headspaced. As they came from the the factory one was really bad in the accuracy department and the other was only a little better. I wouldn't own a 10/22 that had to remain as originally built.

doubleh said:

I have two 10/22's. Both are accurate. Of course the only thing left that's Ruger are the actions and bolts and the bolts have been trued and headspaced. As they came from the the factory one was really bad in the accuracy department and the other was only a little better. I wouldn't own a 10/22 that had to remain as originally built.

Click to expand...

I headspaced my bolt down to rim thickness, using a belt sander and carefully measuring as it went, making sure the bolt face was square with the body. It greatly enhanced accuracy and improved ignition.

Picher said:

I headspaced my bolt down to rim thickness, using a belt sander and carefully measuring as it went, making sure the bolt face was square with the body. It greatly enhanced accuracy and improved ignition.

Click to expand...

I set mine up up in my lathe milling attachment and ground them to a true 90 degree face. It took removing only a very little material after that to headspace them. Both bolts were badly out of square as they came from the factory. I didn't take an actual measurement but there was a pretty good gap on one side as seen by my mark 1 eyeball when set against the grinding stone. It did help a little with the accuracy but Green Mountain 20" barrels were the biggest single factor in accuracy improvement.

I had my Model 60 out at the range last week. I've had it for 6 years and haven't used it much, but I decided to put a scope on it and see what it was capable of. Best I could consistently do was 1" at 50 yards, with a few 5 shot groups approaching 3/4". It seemed to prefer the high velocity Mini Mags and Aguila Superextra. Standard velocity and even target rounds produced group closer to 1.5-2".

The trigger was atrocious though! I don't think I ever noticed just plinking, but it was pretty bad once I had it on shooting bags. I measured it at 6.5lbs that evening.

View attachment 929176

Paid 250 for this clunker (bare rifle)

Might order a match bolt for it.
And a GM 20" sporter bbl...........whenever Rimfire Sports gets some in LOL

If you can find one, Norinco made a neat little .22 auto that mimicked the Browning .22 auto rifle but at a fraction of the price (I paid well under a hundred bucks for one from Wal Mart years ago). Surprisingly well-made and finished (though not a Browning, it does have a hand-engraved receiver). Mine has been very reliable and plenty accurate for a "plinking semi-auto .22 rifle".

I mentioned it before, but elsewhere on this site, but my B.I.L. bought a stainless 10-22 that I worked-over carefully, but it still didn't shoot as well as it should. As a last resort, I bought him an inexpensive target barrel at Cabelas and Voila....perfection!!! Shows to go ya, a great tube makes the whole thing shoot better.

My good buddy's rifle had a great Ruger target barrel from the start and it was AMAZING after I tuned it! It was at least as good as mine!

lionking said:

Actually after watching this vid...



think I'm gonna seek out a Savage 64

Click to expand...

If i were in your shoes I wouldn't get the savage. The bolt beats the crap out of the magazines and causes them to wear out fast. It is also significantly less reliable than either a 10/22 or a model 60 in my experience.

KsSkaEnthusiast said:

If i were in your shoes I wouldn't get the savage. The bolt beats the crap out of the magazines and causes them to wear out fast. It is also significantly less reliable than either a 10/22 or a model 60 in my experience.

Click to expand...

That's what I get for not reading all the way through, the label of idiocy..

I've only personally owned a few .22 auto loaders, a Remington Nylon 66 as a young lad and now several Ruger 10/22 rifles. The 10/22's are easy to tinker with and there's a plethora of aftermarket parts one can choose from, especially barrels and alleged accuracy parts.
Over the years that I've been trying to make the Ruger 10/22 the best it can be, there are some limitations that I have found. For one, it's what I would consider impossible to get a 10/22 to seat bullets into the chamber so that the .22 bullets bearing surface seats into the rifling just enough to align the bullet with the bore. The bolt return spring is not strong enough to do that. I can do that very easily with a bolt action .22 rifle.
As far as squaring up the front face of a 10/22 factory bolt, the best way to get that bolt face perpendicular to the bolt body is by using a surface grinder and an angle plate and then using a 0.0001 indicator to get the set up dialed in. Hey, if you're gonna do a job, try to get the set up done as best you can:

Even after getting the bolt face squared perfectly, if you're lucky, how do we make sure that the back face of the barrel shank is square to the bore line? Once the barrel is installed, it's darn hard to check for parallelism of the back face of the barrel to the bolt face, and also very dependant on how straight the barrel receptacle in the 10/22 receiver has been bored.
So, once a bolt face has been ground as true as it can be and headspace has been set to a certain depth, let's say 0.0440-inch, we can only make the work viable if the .22 rimfire ammunition is then segregated by rim thickness at 0.0440 to 0.0450, and then still, we have no guarantee that accuracy will improve as that lies completely within the barrel quality. SAAMI allows rim thickness on manufactured .22 rimfire ammunition to be from 0.0420 to 0.0530, which is quite a stretch to work with.
Now, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from trying to make any 10/22 shoot better, I'm only posting about some of the loggerheads I've found in seeking the same goal.

If you look at the back end of the barrel, after shooting a few boxes of ammo, it will tell you where the bolt is hitting. If you take a carpenter's "square on the top of the bolt and against the boltface, it will tell you whether the bolt is square. I'd bet that it is, as it came from the factory. If you mill the boltface, check as you proceed with the square to make sure it remains square. I used my belt sander to mill my bolt-face because it doesn't overheat the metal, like other methods might.

It's a good thing to make sure that the firing pin isn't hitting the barrel when dry-firing (and when the rifle is empty after the last round.) The firing pin nose may need to be ground so it doesn't protrude beyond the new boltface. The firingg pin also needs to be ground so it doesn't hit the rim-fold and spreads the flame along the rim, not toward the rim center. Calfee has written a good description of the ideal rimfire pin shape. It really makes a difference!
JP

I always take a 22 to the range to shoot while bigger guns cool off. Often several. I tend to take one of my more accurate 22's and shoot at 100-200 yards with them.

But this is my fun blaster. I put this together with my wife in mind, but I shoot it a lot more. She won't shoot a rifle bigger than 22 or a shotgun. Not crazy about 9mm handguns. But I figure that if she needed something for HD this is better than nothing.

The 10-22 was $179 when I bought it. The lack of irons is fine with me, the 1-4X scope is faster to use on 1X than irons and on 4X is good out to at least 200 yards. It comes with molded in sling attachment points. I already have several 25 round mags along with the light and mount. It isn't the most accurate rifle I own, but is minute of paper plate at 200 yards. The light illuminates well enough to make good hits well beyond 50 yards.




But there are many suitable options. I also like the Marlin levers, but they are too valuable anymore for just bumming around. I simply have no experience with many of the others. The problem today is finding ANYTHING.

I don't like the Marlin 60 though. I got one for Christmas when I was 12 and it has long ago wore out. Not worth the money to bother fixing. Since it wore out I've put far, far, more rounds through various Rugers and they just keep plugging along. About the only thing to break on a Ruger is the magazine. You toss it and buy another.

Picher said:

If you look at the back end of the barrel, after shooting a few boxes of ammo, it will tell you where the bolt is hitting. If you take a carpenter's "square on the top of the bolt and against the boltface, it will tell you whether the bolt is square. I'd bet that it is, as it came from the factory. If you mill the boltface, check as you proceed with the square to make sure it remains square. I used my belt sander to mill my bolt-face because it doesn't overheat the metal, like other methods might.

It's a good thing to make sure that the firing pin isn't hitting the barrel when dry-firing (and when the rifle is empty after the last round.) The firing pin nose may need to be ground so it doesn't protrude beyond the new boltface. The firingg pin also needs to be ground so it doesn't hit the rim-fold and spreads the flame along the rim, not toward the rim center. Calfee has written a good description of the ideal rimfire pin shape. It really makes a difference!
JP

Click to expand...

Once a barrel has been installed into a 10/22 receiver the back face of the barrel is very hard to verify, and then, if the hole for the shank is bored crooked, that issue is hard to reckon with. A carpenters square would be very unwieldy trying to determine perpendicularity of the barrels back face to its shank. Even my small machinists square doesn't provide me with the amount of error I'm trying to find. So, I rely on this set up to give me exact points that are high or low:

One thing many 10/22 owners are not aware of, and probably don't even care about, is how the 10/22 firing pin can rear up when hit by the hammer and smack more of the radius on the rim rather than a direct hit that pinches the rim and detonates the primer mix. A solid cure for that is to install a cross pin that goes barely over the top of the firing pin and arrests any upward movement. When I do this, I make darn sure that the top of the firing pin slides freely just barely under that pin and that top surface of the firing pin is polished so it slide forward unchecked:

When I first tried squaring up the bolt face of a 10/22 on my milling machine, I soon found that these bolts are as hard as Hades, and if I was going to continue with that approach I would need to invest in some expensive "carbide" milling cutters, so instead, light passes on a surface grinder proved to be less costly.
Bill Calfee is an excellent benchrest rifle maker, but he works more on "bolt actions", especially the Remington XP-100 action and turns those into outstanding benchrest specimens. His type and tip style on firing pins works very well in the bolt action rifles he builds, but I haven't found any issues with the Ruger 10/22 factory firing pins, once they are guided a bit better toward the .22 rimfires rim.