Nylon 66 VS 10/22

tbrwlf, looking forward to reading the results. Should be interesting.

nick237, I kind of agree - there's just something about the 10/22. But as willisjake said, they aren't real accurate in their basic configurations. The one in the pic has had a bit of trigger work done just to lighten it up, and it does have the techsights which are great.

To be fair, the test was done on a (40ft wide at the most) 100yd range with 10ft high berms running parallel and closed in tight at the backstop. The wind was buffeting over the left berm creating a fair amount of downdraft at times, so each grouping was fired into very different and unpredictable wind conditions. I was planning on doing another head-to-head comparison when we get some fair weather. This time it'll be with my basic faux-parkerized and jacaranda stocked 10/22 with standard sights. Was going to make sure to make it out when there's no wind just to see how things shake out with all things being relatively equal.

As everyone who owns one has said, and as Ganderite put it, the 66 runs like a sewing machine. The one in the pic is over 30 years old and shows very little (if any) wear and no sign of anything being in danger of breaking. The rumored 100,000 round tests Remington did on these rifles isn't too hard to believe.
 
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66 all the way, mine is scoped with a Weaver K3 and will shoot 1 hole all day, that is why when they run a 100,000 test through it and it never failed, I do believe there was another test shooting @ wooden blocks thrown in the air and he didn't miss very many out of 200,000.
 
Got a Apache black Nylon 66 thrown in for free when l bought an Ithaca Police Shotgun from a fella. No serial number on the rifle, made in Canada stamped on the barrel. (Probably to avoid some arcane gun regulation at the time.) Shoots like a BB gun, cheap, accurate and practically indestructable.

There are a couple of videos on you tube about take down and reassembly. For all the work that the average shooter will do on one, the stories of the design being overcomplicated are really overblown.
 
My first .22 as a kid was a 66 like the one in op's post for my 12 birthday! Then 15 yrs later I bought an apache black. Sure wish I still had either one. Great little rifles, lightweight,decent accuracy and very reliable.
 
it would have been neat if somebody at Remington thought to give the 66 a pistol grip stock and 25 round detachable mag , ala 10c model.With as many being built as they did nobody in aftermarket tried tried to trick them out a little.
 
If you stick to iron sights the 66 is gonna come out OK.

I watched a guy wrap a 66 around a telephone pole, though, after he finally gave up on it for mounting a scope on it.
The body shell can float around a bit, and the scope will shoot really well until it does. Then it shoots somewhere else. A cantilever scope mount like the one used on the Browning Semi Auto, would be a good cure, but I don't think there is one available.

The plastic body does not appeal to me, though I think the internals are based on some pretty neat ideas.

Cheers
Trev
 
trevj, I had that shifting-shell problem with one of my 66's, never the other one. I tried to "bed" the shell onto the plastic stock, but had problems with finding a bedding compound that would adhere to plastic, and I was concerned about where the stuff would go as I replaced the body shell. Finally corrected it with a couple of dabs of silicone caulking in strategic corners of the shell. Spray the metal with a release agent, experiment with placement of the small dollops of caulking, and if you ever need to remove the shell for cleaning or maintenance, you can pretty much peel or "roll" the cured silicone off with your fingers. It really stabilizes the shell nicely.

Projects like this make the term "bubba" seem high-tech by comparison. :)
 
jjohnwm said:
trevj, I had that shifting-shell problem with one of my 66's, never the other one. I tried to "bed" the shell onto the plastic stock, but had problems with finding a bedding compound that would adhere to plastic, and I was concerned about where the stuff would go as I replaced the body shell. Finally corrected it with a couple of dabs of silicone caulking in strategic corners of the shell. Spray the metal with a release agent, experiment with placement of the small dollops of caulking, and if you ever need to remove the shell for cleaning or maintenance, you can pretty much peel or "roll" the cured silicone off with your fingers. It really stabilizes the shell nicely.

Projects like this make the term "bubba" seem high-tech by comparison. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah. The guy that wrote off his had been through three different scopes, thinking it was bad scopes, when he borrowed a bore sighter (which were not at all common at the time) and found that he could essentially move the crosshairs around at will.
He wasn't very happy about that, and two-handed it against a telephone pole. Done and done.

There is a lot more information available now, than then, and like as not, a fix could have been found, but this guy was done dicking about with trying to get a scope semi-auto that worked, at least on that particular path.

Cheers
Trev
 
Nice. My Nylon 66 (brown one) was my first gun ever. Had it for 30yrs at least now. It was from Collegiate Sports World or Canadian Tire IIRC. Oh how times have changed. I did make the mistake of taking the action/receiver apart. I will never forget that. I took it to a local shop (Al Simmons) to see if they would put it back together, and the guy did not want to touch it. LOL. I eventually got it all back together. I wanted one of those Spee-D-Loaders, but could never seem to find one.
 
My first good gun was a nylon 66 black apache, bought it for around $150 in the seventies.
Great gun overall, but the trigger was very creepy and it was tough to shoot it accurately. Plus, depending on whether shooting off hand or from a rest the point of impact changed a lot. Even changing how you gripped my gun changed the point of impact. I remember hitting shotgun shells at 25 yds off hand with it consistently, but that trigger drove me nuts. That's with a scope. I know with open sights some guys shoot very tight groups with them, certainly just as good or better than the average 10/22.

(My next good gun was a brno model 2. I'm sad to say the nylon became second banana.)

Years later, I bought a 10/22. The 10/22 has a great trigger (yes there was $ invested), and shoots the same no matter how I hold it. You can mount a scope on it more rigidly than a nylon 66. With it's green mountain heavy barrel (more $$), its accuracy is on another level than the nylon 66's I have shot. At the end of the day, if I miss a shot, I want to know it was me and not the gun. That's why I don't shoot nylons anymore. YMMV
 
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My brother had a 66. When he gave it away I guess he forgot I was a gun nut... I bought a chinese knock-off once but it didn't work as well. Sigh.
 
As far as scopes, my 66 came with what appears to be the original 4x (I think) scope that has a focus dial (annoying actually).

It is the first 22 I have found that I can remove the scope and re-install it (dovetailed) and only takes a few shots to zero again.

Stays accurate too. Guess I lucked out.
 
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