I've recently bought some different 22LR ammo than I normally use and upon shooting it through a modified Ruger 22/45 I've been disappointed with the rate of "duds" in the ammo. I would define a "dud" as a shell that produces reduce report, failure to operate action in a semiauto, reduced velocity and low or strange impact point. I found the rate to be about 3-4% of the shots fired in this different brand.

This was put through a pistol that had about 2,000 rounds through it and has function well with all brands of ammo.

Let me know what your experience and "dud" rate has been.

I find it to be highly gun specific. Remmy Golden Bullets are probably the worst of the common brands across the board. Though I have one Buckmark pistol that has never had but one dud with it. Most rimfires I have had have at least the 3-4% you mention on the Remmy stuff.

I have rifles that never do it with cheap Federal, and others that have 5% duds. I will say if you get a couple steps above the cheapest ammo you normally don't have this unless a firearm has a problem. Then again, cheap ammo is a big part of rimfire goodness.

Esldude

Thanks for your post. It wat the Remmy Golden Bullets that I was referring to. That pistol doesn't have any problems with a whole host of other brands just the Remmys.

I sent a email to Remington about the situation and got a response back that they would look into it. It will be interesting to see if they address the problem in any fashion.

There are certain mods which can reduce the reliability of ignition in 10/22's and I would think the same could be true of any firearm. You might want to check at RimfireCentral and see if anyone there is familiar with ignition issues in modified 22/45's. Kudude

quote:

Originally posted by kudude:
There are certain mods which can reduce the reliability of ignition in 10/22's and I would think the same could be true of any firearm. You might want to check at RimfireCentral and see if anyone there is familiar with ignition issues in modified 22/45's. Kudude

I understand what you are saying and oft times those mods can create problems with ignition. However these mods were done a long time ago and around 2,000 rounds from all different kinds of brands have gone down the tube. Hadn't used Remmy Gold Bullets before this last purchase and probably won't again.

I recall that it seemed like the other brands would produce a dud so rarely that you would sit up and notice it. I would guess that the dud rate in some of those brands was under 1%. Just a guess.

I'm astounded at the quality and dependability of almost any brand and price of rimfire ammunition. The performance difference between the leader lines and the "premium" lines is largely insignificant (although the grouping potential of target ammunition is better).

The one line of ammunition I have consistently had difficulties with, including feeding failures due to inconsistencies in "power" is the Remington golden bullet line. I assiduously avoid buying it.

Despite the escalating costs of metals and transportation, I still find leader brands of .22LR on sale for around 1 cent per round. When you consider that centerfire primers cost DOUBLE this amount by themselves, and the rimfire ammunition contains not only the primer, but the case, powder, and bullet AND bears an additional 11% excise tax that the component primer does not, then either primers are grossly overpriced or rimfire ammo is a raging bargain.

In our ammo testing that is going on right now, we have about 50 different types of ammo.

We have shot over 5,000 rounds so far, and the only misfires we have had was with the same ammo.

A Russian made LVE Junior.

I think I have had about 6 ronds that refused to fire at the first try. I just cocked the bolt and fired again. They always fired on the second try.

I must say that unless one gets a really bad lot of ammo - once we have some Russian made ammo with steel cases. That was extremely bad, and I would imagine at least half would not fire on the first try.

Otherwise 22 rim fire ammo has been extremely reliable, in the firing department at least.

Saeed,

I agree with you when using good bolt action rimfire rifles. Different story with automatics, especially semi-auto pistols like the 22/45.

Between the seven 22's I have I can't recall the last misfire I had.

I typically burn through 4-5 "Bricks" of 22lr ammo a year
and... gee I've gotta say it's been..... 12 years since the
last misfire?

I don't buy cheap import ammo, I stick to "Remfederalchester" for my cheap
"spray it liberally around the countryside" ammo.

AD

i shoot a ruger mark II pistol, and have a ton of misfires with the remmys. so i have switched to teh federal box for the cheap ammo, and have very little problems with it. i think i feel the need to start modifying my lil .22 with new grips, extractor, trigger, and a few other goodies, maybe i can find something to improve the misfires with the remmys.

I have 8 or 9 .22s (all bolt rifles plus 1 Nylon 66 Autoloader) and in the past year have shot a bunch of the bulk-pak ammo. I recall one failure to fire in that time, so either I'm lucky, the local WM gets the cream of the bulk ammo lot - NOT!, or some guns are more picky than mine. Remington Golden Bullets are dirty, no doubt, but until I ran across Rem Subsonics which my CZ and Rem 511 dearly love, Golden Bullets killed a lot of squirrels. That's all my neighbor shoots in his Win 69a, although the Subsonics shoot groups half the size of the GBs.

I think it's more "gun" related than ammo, and with pistols the cheaper bulk stuff does seem to have more duds depending again on your pistol. And often it's brand to brand of pistol, with probably less issue with rifles.

Last year I had 23 duds out of 100 rounds of Remington BLUE BOX Target through my S&W41, and a friend almost duplicated this with his 41. But another guy I know runs it throught his Modified Ruger with no problems.

Lately I'm using Std Velocity CCI and I haven't had a dud in probably 2000 rounds. It costs me about 5.6cents/shot. Right now I can't justify the >10cents per shot that you get with some other target ammo.

I've used the standard velocity CCI's in a surpressed .22 rifle with no duds in probably 1000 rounds. So I agree that this is great ammo.

I've tried this batch of Remmy Goldens in a 10-22 that has around 40,000 rounds through it and have found about the same dud rate of approaching 5%. I don't think this batch of ammo was sensitive to pistols or rifles just crap.

I've heard back from Remmy. I ended up emailing the president as I couldn't find anyone else that had a email listing for customer complaints. After about three weeks of duplicated emails and having the issue transfered to three other guys there still is no resolution, explanation, or remedy.

I'm continuing to get the "run around" from Remmy after spending way too much time on the issue. I thought that they would be interested in some feedback about some quality issues with their "Golden Bullets". One has to wonder how many other shooters out there have had problems with the Goldens and just simply decided not to purchase them anymore. From some of the comments on this thread and throughout the forums here there appears to a forming consensus that their 'Goldie" are to be avoided.

In the past I've been a pretty active supporter of Remmy products but will not support anything they manufacture in the .22 ammo line

I have probably fired in excess of 100,000 22 rimfire rounds of mostly the cheap varieties.
This is with bolt or pump rifles. The only misfires were rounds that went through the washing machine.
A large percentage of the ammom I have fired was the Gold Remington beginneing about 1960 or so.

I get a lot of squib loads and misfires in GB rounds. I tried firing the SAME cartridges in a 22/45, a 39a, and a Savage bolt, and ended up with duds with 3 dents on the rims.

I still use GB for tin can rolling and the like, but I use CCI SGB for squirrel hunting.

The Winchester cheapies consistently won't cycle the 22/45, but they work great in my buddy's old, grey Ruger auto, so I figure my springs are too new.

We have been using lapua CLUB ammo, that comes in 500 round tin cans, for quite some time and have never had any problems with it.

Last week, out of one can, we had several squibs, the bullets barely making it out of the barrel. We still have some left of that can, so there might be more.

Bad quality control, it would seem.

Quality control in ammunition manufacturing is very good. If not either your customers are injured or your factory goes up in smoke. Either way you are out of business. You might read about the demise of Dan Pawlak the inventor of Pyrodex.
One mistake and poof he was gone.

Went out this past weekend and popped some ground squirrels with some Federal Bulk Ammo in a EAA Biatholon and the 22/45 pistol.

I ended up shooting around 750-800 rounds with the Federal stuff and had a ball. Also no "duds".

Helped to make up my mind to never again buy the Remmy crap known as "Golden Bullets"

I have been playing with several 10/22's and shooting various ammo. I cannot remember a failure to fire with any of the ammo. I have had failures to extract, but no failures to fire, and I have shot a couple of hundred rounds each of Aquila, SK, Wolf, Federal of several kinds to include the Am Eagle brand, Winchester and Remington. I do periodically clean the rifles.

When I shot .22 in competition, I noted the face of the barrel would get really nasty after a couple of hundred rounds. Would this have an impact on your failure rate?? Kudude

quote:

Originally posted by kudude:
I have been playing with several 10/22's and shooting various ammo. I cannot remember a failure to fire with any of the ammo. I have had failures to extract, but no failures to fire, and I have shot a couple of hundred rounds each of Aquila, SK, Wolf, Federal of several kinds to include the Am Eagle brand, Winchester and Remington. I do periodically clean the rifles.

When I shot .22 in competition, I noted the face of the barrel would get really nasty after a couple of hundred rounds. Would this have an impact on your failure rate?? Kudude

I understand what you are saying about the face of the barrel getting nasty but unlike some others, I do clean my .22's often. I've heard one school of thought in that you never clean a .22 once it is sighted in and the other school was like my dad said " Don't let the sunset on a dirty gun". I fall somewhere in between those two approaches and clean my shooters when needed.

I think the situation with the Remmy Golden Bullets was just a bad batch that got through QC. From the other postings on the board it seems like other shooter have had similar problems with the Remmy's.

At our house the .22 get used a lot and quickly have many thousands of rounds put through them. The problems with the Remmys that I had were with guns, a 10/22 and a 22/45 that had many thousands of round down the tube.

The only thing I can chalk the whole experience up to was a bad batch from Remmy.

quote:

I think the situation with the Remmy Golden Bullets was just a bad batch that got through QC. From the other postings on the board it seems like other shooter have had similar problems with the Remmy's

I shoot alot of types of .22 and The Golden bullets have always had a higher percentile of duds for the most part. Although I got a horible batch of Federal a few years back.

The most reliable i have found are the CCI
in any version.

Cal30

Remmy Golden Bullets always had the highest dud rate in my semi automatics..I shot a lot of Sellier & Bellot recently, I was surprised by the consistency lot after lot. I did not run them through my Chrony yet but I get outstanding accuracy in both by pistols and 10/22.

We had a few more of those Lapua CLUB ammo misfire, so I pulled the bullets out.

There was powder, but there was NO PRIMING compound in those cases!!

Saeed, after reading this I've been sitting here speachless for 10 minutes. I use a similar type in a tin called "magazine". Not especially cheap at $A60.00 for 500, where bricks of Federal can go for half that.

So I suppose this is the new impact implanted primer. . . works if any goes in.

Are you going to complain to the factory?
Someone there should be interested.

I have also had duds in the remington gb's. Never in any other. I'm shooting the rest of the rem's up and switching.

i think the federal lightning is the best cheap practice load out there. never had a misfire.

i also have sworn off of rems, three .22 autos have about a 5% misfire rate. have pulled bullets and not found any priming mixture present.

I got so frustrated with a brick of Remington "Target" ammo misfiring in a Hi-Standard pistol that I complained to Remington and sent some of the failed to fire rounds back to them. Got a check for the brick's price, which I quickly used to buy some Federals. End of failure to fire problem.

Apparently they are scrimping on the priming compound and it's not filling the rim, so there are unprimed spots. Sometimes, if you rotate the cartridge, it fires; sometimes it doesn't.

I've had rare failures to fire from Winchester bulk .22s, but on the order of 1 or 2 per brick. That @#$% Remington ammo was averaging 2 or 3 per box.

Could failure to fire with .22 rimfire ammo be due to either a short firing pin (i.e. it does not compress the rim deeply enough) or a weak spring?

If that is so, might the failure rate depend on the hardness of the rim in whatever ammo is being used, and on the way the firing pin of the gun (long gun or pistol) being used actually strikes the rim of the cartridge being used?

That would explain why the failure rate varies with the gun being used.

I'm sure the gun can be at fault a lot of the time. Another story is that some shouldn't be dryfired as some dent the barrel end which can cushon the pin strike.

Crud in the action and chamber also comes to mind.
I can't remember a dud in my 77-22, which gives the rim a hell of a whack.

my dud rate with rem. golden bullets exceeds .05%., but not anymore because i don't buy them. wow, you would think rem. would wake up, they're sure loosing a lot of business.ps. same mis-fire rate with their standard velocity, which was excellant ammo for the price 20 years ago.

At least in my case, the Remington failure rate was fairly consistent across several uses and two extensive cleanings of the Hi-Standard pistol. During the same time frame (and after the first occurences, during the same shooting sessions) I was also using Winchester bulk ammo (the 525 to a box hollowpoints), Federal standard velocity, and Fiocchi standard velocity. Not one of them failed on a single occasion.

The feedback I got from Remington suggested they'd tried to get by with less priming compound than was necessary and were not completely filling the rim. However, I was turning those cartridges and trying them 2 or 3 times without getting them to fire, so I'm guessing they were without priming compound at all. I doubt that Remington would have sent me a check for the brick price if they'd thought the problem was gun related.

Have you all found the problem in the Rem Golden Bullets to be tied to specific "Lot #s"?

I can tell you that shells can have the priming compound get seperated from the rim in rimfires buy riding around with them on a 4 wheeler and having the rattle around also.



Cal30

Another Federal Lightning fan, it shoots well in every .22 I own.

Stepchild

I have a brick of Aguilar hyper velocity 32gr stuff that will only shoot 1 out of every 5-10 rounds. Finally I cut a few open and there is virtually no priming compound in the cases, and if any at all it's in maybe 1/4 of the rim. So possibly if you re-index a case it will finally fire...it's just shit. Favorite ammo is Win 40 gr HP power point.

At one time some British rifles had two firing pins, one on each side , to deal with this.

Some match rifles also have that.

quote:

Originally posted by mete:
At one time some British rifles had two firing pins, one on each side , to deal with this.

Eley Tenex gave me a squib in two matches. Took me from first to last in one match as I watched the projectile lob down range and plunk in the 15 ring. Has happened twice now.

Dutch