What is happening to the quality of .22 rim fire ammunition

[GoGit]

I feel that the quality of rim fire ammunition is worse than ever.
I shoot comp cards at a distance 100 yards.

My practice ammunition is costing me about £100 per 1000 rounds.
The ammunition I am using is made by a supposedly responsible top quality manufacturer.
Not to mix words it is rubbish. Out of a box of 50 rounds an average of 5 rounds will drop 4 inch low and 1 inch right. that's about 10%.
Where is the quality standard, is there a quality standard ??. is ammunition made to an iso 9001 standard.
We are not talking small buck's to a pensioner, £100 is almost a weeks pension.
Looks like another week on bread and water to enable me to try another manufacturer.
I am not sure if it is possible to name a dodgy manufacturer on this site but until we do, and, start boycotting these people they will continue grab our hard earned cash and send all of their off spec ammo to the UK.

I have tried this ammo at 50 yards and as you would expect the accuracy is much better and so it should be . My grandfather worked in the coal mines all of his working life and he could spit farther than 50 yards and produce a good group.
What practice ammo would you recommend for 100 yards.
Best regards GoGit

[joffy]

what ammo are you using ?

[GoGit]

.22 rim fire.
SK rifle match (RANDFEUERPATRONEN)
High quality made in Germany
Batch number.
139 46/2 245 3
Numerous shooters in our club are having the same problem.
The bullet heads when looked at under a magnifying glass looks as though the dog has been chewing them.

[Iain D]

I hear what is being said and in fact to add we have had one batch where more than six boxes of ammo did not even have 50 rounds in it and this was a "Match" grade ammo. The number of miss fires is also on the increase, so I would say at the very least quality control is out the window!

We have a lot at the club now using cheaper ammo as the price is now getting out of hand, but then again no shooting is really cheap if you want to use the so called best.

Iain D

[pennineway.fswo]

I feel that the quality of rim fire ammunition is worse than ever.
I shoot comp cards at a distance 100 yards.

My practice ammunition is costing me about £100 per 1000 rounds.
The ammunition I am using is made by a supposedly responsible top quality manufacturer.
Not to mix words it is rubbish. Out of a box of 50 rounds an average of 5 rounds will drop 4 inch low and 1 inch right. that's about 10%.
Where is the quality standard, is there a quality standard ??. is ammunition made to an iso 9001 standard.
We are not talking small buck's to a pensioner, £100 is almost a weeks pension.
Looks like another week on bread and water to enable me to try another manufacturer.
I am not sure if it is possible to name a dodgy manufacturer on this site but until we do, and, start boycotting these people they will continue grab our hard earned cash and send all of their off spec ammo to the UK.

I have tried this ammo at 50 yards and as you would expect the accuracy is much better and so it should be . My grandfather worked in the coal mines all of his working life and he could spit farther than 50 yards and produce a good group.
What practice ammo would you recommend for 100 yards.
Best regards GoGit

The ISO 9001 standard is a quality management standard that applies to the quality systems applied by a manufacturer. Usually a manufacturer will advertise the fact that they satisfy the applicable part of the ISO 9000 standard as part of their marketing strategy. If they are approved to this standard, it will be shown in their advertising literature or on their website.

Unfortunately these days reliable rimfire target ammo costs have risen so much that you need to pay in the region of £16/100 rounds to get good quality target ammo. The cheaper rounds seem to be OK at 25 yds but at longer ranges can be very disappointing. I am amazed just how much rimfire ammunition costs have risen over recent years. Tenex in particular is just out of reach of most club shooters.
Thank goodness for PCP's.
John

[Vic Thompson]

I get good results with Eley Team at 100x using scoped rifle with a saving in cost between it and the next grade up (Eley Match). I've tried RWS and Lapua but generally stick to Eley because the results are so consistent. Eley Sport gives me good results at 50m but doesn't do so well at 100x. Sport can be obtained for around £70 per thousand, and Team for around £120 per thousand. I've never had any major problems with Sport, I get reliable ignition and fair grouping, but scores are a bit lower than with using Team, but for the money I can't fault it, especially as it gives good results in my sporting rifle at 20x.

About six or seven years ago I used to use Geco which gave excellent results for the cost, but it became unobtainable for a while and I switched brands and haven't tried again it since it became back on line. It might be worth a punt as it's only £59 per thousand, about half of the cost of a decent grade of Eley.

I shoot between 200 and 600 rounds per week, so cost is important to me, but having said that, so are results, hence my use of Eley Team.

HTH, Vic Thompson.

[GoGit]

For the last 2 years I have been using Eley match ( black box) for competition shooting. Not tenex.
It is quite expensive but by miles the most reliable ammo in a variety of rifles.
I have practiced with various makes of ammo and most levels of quality.
The decision I take is to shoot less rounds of quality ammo rather than just shooting loads of what I regard as rubbish hoping eventually to get a good card.
What I would like to know is what is the difference between the types of ammo. According to the box the bullet is coming out of the barrel at 1066.273 fpsec (325 m/s), in which case you would think that if the bullet weight is 40 g they would all end up is the same place.
As the case's, primer,powder,bullet head's are all m/c made you would think that if 1 round was low powered the box of 50 would be the same.
The result being you would still get a tight grouping.
All I can think of it is purely down to poor quality manufacturing, inconsistent powder charge and none existent quality control.
There has got to be some sort of variables going on.
I would be interested to know the manufacturers test procedures. It cannot be in there long term interest producing poor quality products.

Do you have any answers to some of the questions posed. May be together we can help the manufactures to produce a half decent round.
Regards GoGit

[Hemmers]

Aside from very stringent control of the manufacturing process, certainly Eley take samples from every batch and pull the heads, measure the bullet weight, the weght of powder, as well as (most importantly) performing a drop test to ensure the batch of primer is not too sensitive! I'm sure they do other things as well like checking the rim thickness, case dimensions, etc.

Samples from all batches have to be tested as part of the Proofing process - yep, if you've spotted the CIP logo on boxes of Eley you may have realised it's not just barrels that are subject to proofing.
Eley fire a sample from each batch on their proof range to check the breech pressures and muzzle energies/velocities are within spec for what .22lr should produce (and therefore safe to use in a proofed .22lr firearm). The speed given on the end of Eley boxes is the average muzzle velocity from the barrels on the proof range.

It will almost certainly not do the same speed out of your barrel as yours will almost certainly be a bit longer/shorter/heavier/lighter, have a bloop tube or whatever else. However, if you've got a box of 1050, and one of 1070, then the 1070 should go faster than the 1050, but not neccesarily at those speeds!

The consistency of those test samples decides what label the ammo gets. Tenex, Match and Team all start out trying to be Tenex and are all loaded on the Tenex loading machines. Stuff that doesn't quite make the Tenex grade gets downgraded to Match, Team or eventually gets recycled if they have a bad batch.

Obviously they can't test every round, because they need to sell some , but based on their testing, they put an appropriate label on it, and as you go down the grades, you have an increasing probability that there may be an odd round that didn't get a full load of powder if the machining was worn and a casing slipped or got fed through at an angle for instance. They work on the law of probabilities that when you're making a 20,000 round batch, then if it happened to one, it probably happened to several, and hopefully they'll get a duff one in testing and will know to downgrade it.

I know a friend had a genuine ammo failure with Tenex - he was hooked up to a Noptel trainer at the time. He thought the shot was good, the Noptel thought his shot and recoil was good, but the hole in the target was miles away! It's very, very rare though. By contrast I've seen some really cheap stuff where on average pretty much every box contains a "quiet one" that barely makes it to the target! You're trading 1 duff round in 100,000 for 1 in 50!

[$harp$hooter]

We have recently had a lot of misfires per 50 box at our club too. Even had one last week where the bullet head itself was loose in the casing to the point it could be turned in the casing itself.