sharpshooterassassin

I am hoping that it's just needs to be broken in more. Although the first couple hundred rounds that I put through it, they all went through it with out any hiccups whatsoever. I would think that if it just needed to be broken in, i would think the problem would've started at the very beginning. But we'll wait and see what happens.

AquaHull

Good find. My SR-22 is covered in 3in1 oil. I just reformed a holster and I lubed the crap out of it before putting it in the plastic bread bag.

moakes58

Listen to the advice from all about loading the Mags, they are correct.
Also, when you are done loading them, smack them lightly in your palm, on the primer end. This is something I got in the habit of doing in the Navy with the .45's. I'v always done it since. It seats the rounds against the back of the mag, where they should be. It seems to help solve the problem for me.
The SR22p is a lot of fun.

JONDOUGH

I bought a SR22 Ruger for my wife a few months ago. Long Story Long…(lol) We are really pleased with it.
My wife has always been scared of guns…not comfortable around them at all. I’ve always been around guns…have always had them and they are a big hobby for me. She shot a couple of mine a few times, but wasn’t comfortable at all. She Sure didn’t like the “carry caliber” guns…the recoil and all that just made her cringe, which was a side effect of being scared of them in the first place.
Well through a couple of years of gentle teaching and slowly letting her get used to firearms at her own pace and letting her shoot the .22’s and letting her get comfortable with them, she is now an enthusiast!! : ) She loves going to the range, looks forward to gun shows and all that! She still doesn’t “like” the bigger guns, but she’s coming around to even that now, getting more curious about shooting the 380 and 9mm stuff…so she’s coming along.
We bought the sr22 because she even wants to get her carry license now…and still isn’t quite comfortable enough to practice with the bigger ones enough to feel good with them. The SR22 fit the bill for a rimfire gun and she wanted “her own” gun. She was torn between the walther p22 and the ruger, and after handling both, the ruger won out. (As a note…I really like the gun too..I enjoy shooting it!!)
All that said, here’s a rundown on how everything worked out for us…it’s a bit lengthy, but maybe it’ll help someone out along with the other posts on this thread.

Got the gun home…pulled it apart and cleaned, lubed and reassembled. (Note …the guide rod spring was NOT “retained” at this time)

Outing 1: I took the gun out with me to a friend’s place and fired 2 mags worth of Remington Golden Bullet ammo through it. No problems at all. 100%. (20 rds )

DID NOT CLEAN OR DISASSEMBLE

Outing 2: Wife and I took the gun out for her to shoot. She went through about 200 rounds of RGB (Remington Golden Bullet) ammo. The only problem we had this time was a couple of failure to fires caused by bad ammo. Good hard pin hit on the primer area, no bang. (It’s a 22 thang..lol) (200 rds)

Brought it home, did a complete cleaning. (again GRS was NOT in the “retained” position)

Outing 3: We went out for her to shoot again. This time we brought Winchester Bulk 555 standard velocity ammo. Boy, the SR22 didn’t like THAT at all! All sorts of failure to feed from the mags (both mags) and a few failure to fire (ammo ) We babied it through about 160 rounds and called it a day for that one. (160 rds)

It seemed to me in checking everything while she was firing that the failure to feed problem was that those rounds just didn’t have the ass to send the slide back enough to cleanly strip another round off the Mag…it ejected the spent case fine, just didn’t pick up the next round. This wasn’t the old “second round from the mag” problem, this was hit and miss all through the mags…never one particular round number.

I took it home, did some investigative reading and then came upon the guide rod spring issue. The GRS was NOT seated all the way and of course I hadn’t read the “instructions” that came with the gun stating that the spring should be retained, etc…. So anyway, I did a complete cleaning and lube and seated the GRS on the guide rod and put’r back together. The GRS being off the "seat" makes the gun think the spring is stronger than it is..therefore not letting the slide go far enough with the less powerful ammo.

Outing 4: We hit the range again. This time we had the GRS seated and brought CCI Mini Mag ammo and Winchester Super X HV ammo. Things went much better this time. Had TWO failure to fires (good Pin Hit…just no bang) from the Mini Mag ammo, none from the Super X. What we did run into is that when dropping an empty mag and inserting another full one with the slide locked back, DO NOT just release the slide with the release lever. We had THREE instances of rounds jamming when doing this. This was NOT during firing, just when putting a full mag in the gun and hitting the release lever. I ASSUMED that there is a length difference in the Mini Mag ammo (I haven’t put a caliper on them, but I will) and that was causing the problem as we didn’t have this particular problem on any of the other ammo to date. When she pulled the slide and released it instead of using the release lever, she had zero malfunctions….so now she does this automatically instead of using the lever. – 180 rounds-

So..NOW we felt pretty good about things.
Back home for another clean, lube and reassembly. (With the GRS RETAINED!! )

Outing 5: Went to the range again and took some 50 round boxes of Winchester Super X HV ammo and also some 50 round boxes of Remington Thunderbolt, as it was cheap and I wanted to see what it would do. We were set at 12 yards. We ran 150 rounds of the Super X through the gun with TWO failure to fires…not the gun, it was ammo.. good hit, crimped primer area, just no bang. NO other problems what so ever. Then we decided to feed it some of the cheaper thunderbolt ammo. This gun LOVED those! The first thing we both noticed is that the groups tightened up noticeably as soon as she started firing these. We ran 100 through it with absolutely no problems at all..no failure to feed or fire. ZERO malfunctions of any kind. The Remington Thunderbolt is a round nose, NON plated lead bullet round. -250 rds-

I haven’t pulled the gun apart yet this time, but I did check the barrel and saw no visible lead fouling or anything like that, so it looks like we’ll shoot more of the Remington Thunderbolt through it and see what happens.

Things we learned:

1.Make sure the guide rod spring is in the retained position! Yeah, it takes a little “convincing”

2.DO NOT use the slide release lever after inserting a new mag…pull the slide back and let it go to load the first round off the mag.

3.No matter how much you THINK you know….READ THE INSTRUCTIONS!!! : )

4.So far OUR sr22 likes Remington Thunderbolt ammo the best. Your Mileage may and probably will vary.

5.Teach the shooter to NOT depend on the “second strike” on a misfire…just use that time working the slide and getting another round in the chamber. If that .22lr Round didn’t go off the first time, it’s probably not going to the second time. PRACTICE PRACTICE so that they MAKE SURE they operate the slide hard enough!!! (You can use dummy rounds for this too!!)

Total rounds through the gun so far, 810. We’re convinced that we’ve worked out any problems, the gun is broken in and now we can just go fire it and build on the info we have. We’ll keep testing before she actually carries it…but we ARE confident now that it’ll work when/if it needs to. Is it the ultimate? No….but it’s better than throwing a shoe!! I have complete confidence that soon she will want to practice with the larger caliber centerfire guns, and that she will switch to one of those for carry…but for now I’ll be glad to have SOMETHING with her rather than nothing. AND…before she carries any other gun regardless of caliber we’ll go through the same process with It.

For all the .22 naysayers out there…my philosophy is… “If you start shooting someone in the face with a .22 they are more than likely going to STOP doing what they were doing!!”

All in all...great little gun! We really like it! Thanks ya'll for a really good forum here!

Twoboxer

Nice report, very useful. All of your findings - including the Winchester debacle - are consistent with my own lol. I'd add to your advice to "read the instructions" . . . you'll find one instruction calling for "a light coat of oil". I began to run the pistol a little wet, and my results improved across the board.

The only residual issue I face is a stubborn tendency to FTF - maybe 2 out of 15 times - on the second round of a new mag of 10.

gmsoapy

If your wife is going to use it as a cw I'd recommend loading it with CCI Stingers. The blast out the muzzle alone will scare the crap out of someone. Try a box at the range load one mag with what ever your usually shot and then one with CCI Stingers you'll see what I mean. I checked with Ruger and it's ok to run them in the SR22's. But not MKIII's. I've got two of them. I did the samething you did bought one for the wife. I liked it so much I bought one for myself. Great little guns. I've run 550 rounds thru one of them in one session with only 5 fail to fire with Federal bulk Walmart.

JONDOUGH

Yeah Gmsoapy, I actually looked for stingers yesterday at the local WM, but they didn't have any. I'll track some down today somewhere.

I really like the gun too...i WILL buy one for me also as it's really fun to shoot and it fits in my pocket too. I love my 22/45 but this sr22 is just NICE.!!

Twoboxer...I'm glad we've logged the same issues...at least there's a pattern that folks can look at to fix thier problems. I write down EVERYTHING when i'm at the range...LOL...some people think it's goofy, but it sure helps fix problems. I can't rely on memory hahaha : )

I've run this one on the wet side too.

I haven't had the 2nd round out of the mag problem (yet) like some of ya'll have. 22plinkster on Youtube has that problem with his too. I'd like to figure out what's causing it, but i sure don't want the problem to pop up if i don't have it.

Maybe it has something to do with the takedown lever problem that some of them had...i dunno. Maybe someone will figure it out and release the info. Is yours one of the first ones out with SR22 PISTOL on the side or the second bunch with just SR22?

AquaHull

I haven't seen Stingers in awhile. I have no fear of carrying the SR22P, but I always have a BUG when I do.

gmsoapy

My Walmart always has CCI Mini mags and Stingers but never any Federal bulk 550. Which is what I run most of the time. I just got a 1000 rounds of a new load from Wincester M22 Black plated round nose aa little more kick then the Federal bulk. It was $47.00 for the 1000 at Walmart it had just come in.I'm going to try it in my KImber Pro carry with the 22 coversion which will usally only run CCI mini mags. Run some thru my MKIII hunter nice rounds no failures at all.

rimshaker

Velocitors will outperform Stingers for self defense purposes. Both are in the hyper velocity range but velocitors are heavier 40gr, which makes them penetrate deeper and do more damage. Theres good ballistics test vids on youtube that show this.

JONDOUGH

We're heading to the range again tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll have a 100% sucess rate with the sr22 this time out. I'm looking forward to this trip. : )

P.S. When i cleaned it after the last trip, there WAS a little bit of lead fouling in the barrel. Not much at all, but the thunderbolts did leave a bit. They sure shot good though.

I've decided not to try the stingers yet. (I did get some tho)We're working on reliability and etc and have enough irons in that fire with this gun already. So maybe in a month or so, once we've put a few more miles on her and are able to say without doubt that all the bugs are worked out, then we'll try some more ammos.

Talk to ya'll soon.

Storm40

.22 LR for Self-Defense? | Shooting Illustrated

JONDOUGH

I just put a caliper to some random .22lr rounds...here's the results. Now this wasn't my best caliper, but it's the one i use for measuring while reloading and it's consistant. Also, this was one cartridge pulled from the box and measured...i'm sure there's small variations within a box.

The issue i mentioned about pulling the slide back to strip the first round off of a mag after a "last round slide locked back" mag change makes sense, as the only time the gun failed to load the first round after a mag change with merely moving the slide lock lever down WAS with Mini Mags, which happen to be the longest round measured as i kind of suspected.



Overall Length From Shortest to longest.

Remington Gold Bullet......... .960

Remington Thunderbolt....... .972

Winchester Super X........... .981

CCI Stinger ..................... .981

CCI Mini Mag ................... .989

gmsoapy

Jondough
You shold realy sling shot the slide don't use the slide stop as a slide release. I know we all do it. But the right way is to pull the slide back and let her rip. I've never had any problems with any ammo in either of my
SR22's. CCI Mini mags are always the fall back to ammo when nothing else works. Stingers the overall length is the same but the casing is a 1/10" longer then LR's
PS great range report

JONDOUGH

Outing #6

Went out again today with a few pistols...didn't get to last week like planned due to other priorities. The SR22 Worked flawlessly today! Fired a few types of ammo... Had two FTF's and that was ammo with Winchester Super X's ...strong firing pin hit, no bang.

Other than that....absolutely no problems what so ever. No failure to feed a round out of the mag, nothing! (Hopefully we won't have that problem start) Gun is working great and we're really happy with it.!!!

Fired 150 rounds through it today.

Total rounds through gun to date...960.

Next we'll start concentrating on higher quality ammo and figure out which ammo itsself is most reliable, being as she'll carry this gun for a while.

Ya'll have a great weekend!!! : )