When looking for .22LR match ammo question

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grauhanen

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When selecting the best .22LR match ammo for a rifle that shoots very well, does one of the following make more sense than the other?

Ammo that shoots well in one good barrel may not shoot well in another good barrel. Each barrel is finicky and will have it's own preferences as to what shoots. In other words, there is no "best" ammo.

When the rifle/barrel is good, all good ammo will shoot well. That is to say, good ammo is good ammo regardless of the particular good barrel. Good ammos are not all equally good.
 
I'll vote for the First statement, since I have a couple 'good barrels' that prefer different 'flavours' of ammo. That said, I 'feel' that good ammo can improve the performance of a lower quality rifle, but only to some degree. See 'sow's ear'. There seems to be a point of diminishing return which may depend on the quality of the rifle and/or of the ammo.
 
I have to agree with Buck1950.

I’ve had ammo shoot fantastic in my T1X that didn’t in other rifles. It did shoot good but not amazing or fantastic in some and terrible in others. So I think it could depend how well selected that ammo was for the rifle!

B
 
While not taking a position on the topic, this leads to further questions.

If it is true that there is no such thing as a good lot that shoots well across good barrels, are there nevertheless general ammo characteristics that are the same across those lots that do shoot well regardless of barrel? If so, what are they?

If each good barrel has it's own ammo lot preferences, if different good barrels shoot the same ammo lots differently, is it because of unique characteristics of the ammo? If so, what are those unique ammo characteristics?
 
I suggest thinking of it in terms of consistency. Your barrel is generally a constant you have to work with - good or bad. One of those constants is the harmonics of your barrel in response to a given round of ammo.

Ammo is less consistent as it is a new round every shot. Fancy ammo is built to a higher level of consistency and within that rounds within a given lot of ammo are more consistant than those from different lots.

How a barrels harmonics interact with given ammo is unique, but there are trends... most CZs for example shoot SK LRM pretty well (I am sure some don't).

Think about how a cold barrel often gets you a first shot flyer in the same place every time ( mine are high right), this is likely due to the change of harmonics in the cold barrel and not because the ammo is bad or inconsistent. But a flyer outta nowhere is likely a bad or inconsistent round....which is why I get more flyers with Norma-Tac than SK Match... but both generally shoot really well.
 
Change from your cold barrel shot to hot barrel will be due to thermal expansion of the barrel being almost but not quite even.
 
First statement, definitely. When I was on the provincial team, one of my colleagues used to travel to Eley in Birmingham with 7-8 of our barreled actions to do some testing. Some had custom barrels (Hart, Benchmark) other had factory barrels (Anschütz, Feinwerkbau)

The very best batch of Tenex for a given barrel could give pitiful results in another barrel. The difference was sometimes amazing.

So even with top of the line ammo, you never know if you have a good lot until you test it in your own rifle.
 
Can a lot of match ammo that has a wide ES and high SD be "fixed" or "cured" by another barrel? To put it another way, if a lot has high ES and SD in one barrel can it have low ES and SD in another?
 
grauhanen said:
Can a lot of match ammo that has a wide ES and high SD be "fixed" or "cured" by another barrel? To put it another way, if a lot has high ES and SD in one barrel can it have low ES and SD in another?
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Test it, but doubt it will be fixed. It goes back to every gun shoots ammo different and what works good in one, may not work in another. Plus everybody has their own opinion of what is accurate.
 
OkayShooter said:
It goes back to every gun shoots ammo different and what works good in one, may not work in another. Plus everybody has their own opinion of what is accurate.
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When it comes to opinions, opinions about facts seem less important than the facts themselves.

Is it indeed an incontrovertible fact that every gun shoots the same ammo differently? Beyond the idea getting repeated on the internet, how is it known?
 
Simply put . . . there are no guarantees with any rimfire ammunition.
Most of it will go "BANG". Every shot will make one hole but that does not make your rifle a "One Holer"!
With three Anschutz rifles, it would be a safe bet that no two will perform the same with any known ammunition.
One rifle has a preference to one lot of Eley TENEX and has performed admirably at 100 and 200 Metres but the other day at our BR50 match it was not impressive.
At 200 Metres, there were two in the "8" ring out of 60 shots and one high in the "7" ring. The only explanation for that "7" beyond equipment or shooter is that it is rimfire ammunition. Regardless of the efforts to find the best ammunition for a rifle there are glitches.

If it were easy everyone would be doing it. Shooting a match with untested ammunition makes it another test.
Testing ammunition is not everything . . . it is the only thing.
Or as a friend's saying about golf . . . it is not a matter of life or death, it is much more important than that!
 
horseman2 said:
With three Anschutz rifles, it would be a safe bet that no two will perform the same with any known ammunition.
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Why would no two shoot the same ammo similarly? Is there a reason, general or specific?

I ask this because over the ammo I've been using I haven't seen much of a difference between my rifles, Anschutz or other. When differences occur, they do for some very obvious reasons.
 
There are some very simple reasons why the same lot of ammo may perform differently in different good rifles.

One obvious reason is that conditions can easily be different from one day to the next. When wind influences results, they aren't readily duplicated.

Another reason is that there's no such thing as a guarantee that all the ammo in a lot of match ammo, even a lot of top tier match ammo, will be consistently performing from one box to another, from one round to another. Put another way, the same lot number doesn't necessarily mean that all the rounds in all the cases, bricks, and boxes within it must perform alike.

To elaborate, the chronograph shows that boxes of match ammo from the same lot can easily be quite different in terms of ES and SD. Some boxes are better or worse than others. This indicates that the characteristics of a lot are not reflected by one box from that lot. Some boxes from one lot may be more consistent than others. It shows on target even when the same rifle is used. It also helps explain why good results from one day can't always be repeated the next.
 
grauhanen said:
There are some very simple reasons why the same lot of ammo may perform differently in different good rifles.
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Because they are different guns with different barrels. They could be made on a different barrel machine, from a different batch of barrel blanks, tooling can be slightly different. Oh what about barrel length. Nothing in rimfire is exact.

I got 2 64s. 10 years apart, 2 different length barrels, and ones slightly thinner. I don't expect ammo to perform the same between the 2.
 
OK, I do too. the older one has a heavy barrel with flash hider, the newer one is a standard pencil barrel. A couple thou less shots and the newer one is more accurate even using SK-RM in both.
 
For anyone wondering how the same ammo shoots in different rifles, I've put together the basic results for four different lots of Midas + shot with as many as five different rifles. The results shown are ten ten-shot group averages at 100 yards.

The sizes are of ten 10-shot group averages or 100 rounds. Group sizes with the same ammo in the same barrel vary from day to day because conditions -- air movement between shooter and target -- changes. In addition, sometimes some boxes of the same lot had more "flyers" than others.

Differences in results may be affected by the amount of data developed. Some differences may not be sufficiently significant to have much relevance.

Readers may decide for themselves how much any differences between results supports the idea that different rifles shoot the same lots differently.







 
It's come to my attention that there was a mistake on the chart for Midas lot ending 633. With the 2013 rifle, the 30 group average is incorrect. Below is the correct chart.

With this lot, it doesn't seem that the four rifles shot it with very different results. In other words, same ammo with different rifles produced very much the same kind of results.

 
The other lots show something similar -- that different rifles may shoot the same ammo to the same results. While this doesn't prove anything, it supports the contention that different rifles don't necessarily shoot the same ammo differently.

In the case of M633, the results shown above, the comparison is of 110 ten-shot groups. That's a total of 1100 rounds. Two other lots compared the results of 150 ten-shot groups (1500 rounds) each. The smallest comparison was for the lot ending 333, and it had 90 ten-shot groups (900 rounds).

A few years ago, in 2021 when I began shooting at 100 yards, I compared the results of two different lots of Center X and posted the results elsewhere in this forum.

I used two rifles not included in the data posted in this thread. One lot of CX was especially good. Over 58 ten-shot groups with my 1913 it averaged 0.926". With my 1973-made 1411 the same lot over 31 ten-shot groups averaged 0.929". With another lot of Center X, the first rifle averaged 1.225" over 16 ten-shot groups, the second 1.257" over 19 ten-shot groups.

While not conclusive, these results support the idea that different rifles shoot the same ammo similarly.

_______________________________________

This raises the obvious question. Why do many shooters get different results with different rifles with the same lot of ammo?

One of the problems that may cloud the issue is when small sample sizes are compared. For example, on one day a shooter shoots an ammo and gets results that are very different the next time when he shoots the same ammo with a different rifle. Different conditions on the two occasions may be a factor, so, too, is the fact that different rounds were used, even though they were from the same lot.

When an ammo can produce a variety of group sizes, a small sample size can misrepresent results. A larger number of groups will reflect more accurately how an ammo (or rifle) performs.
 
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