Some time back, I did most of my squirrel hunting for a couple of years with a Marlin 57M .22 Magnum. In order to have any meat left on the ones I shot, the rifle was loaded with Winchester .22 WRF ammo.
That round seemed to work very nicely on the big fox squirrels common where I hunted. For those unfamiliar with the WRF, it's a 45 grain bullet at 1300 or so, loaded inside the case like a .22 WMR, and compatible with those chambers, being a bit shorter. The bullet has a little flat on the nose, which is excellent on small game, doing much more damage than a round nose without tearing things up like a hollow point.
The downside was that it just wasn't very accurate. It would shoot five WRF into a bit over an inch at 50, about how it would shoot at 100 with WMR. I'm wondering if that wasn't just that the bullet had a jump to the rifling with the shorter case that caused the accuracy problem.
Which leads me to the crazy idea. Buy a bolt action .22 WMR, either a Marlin or a Savage, and have a gunsmith shorten the breech end of the barrel and give it a proper WRF length chamber.
It would be a ton of trouble to end up with something not much different than any garden variety .22 loaded with CCI SGB ammo. Crazy, right?
That round seemed to work very nicely on the big fox squirrels common where I hunted. For those unfamiliar with the WRF, it's a 45 grain bullet at 1300 or so, loaded inside the case like a .22 WMR, and compatible with those chambers, being a bit shorter. The bullet has a little flat on the nose, which is excellent on small game, doing much more damage than a round nose without tearing things up like a hollow point.
The downside was that it just wasn't very accurate. It would shoot five WRF into a bit over an inch at 50, about how it would shoot at 100 with WMR. I'm wondering if that wasn't just that the bullet had a jump to the rifling with the shorter case that caused the accuracy problem.
Which leads me to the crazy idea. Buy a bolt action .22 WMR, either a Marlin or a Savage, and have a gunsmith shorten the breech end of the barrel and give it a proper WRF length chamber.
It would be a ton of trouble to end up with something not much different than any garden variety .22 loaded with CCI SGB ammo. Crazy, right?
