update on taccom 22lr frankenupper

[openclassterror]

Figured I had better follow through and write how it worked as I promised. I ordered a 22lr barrel and rimfire bolt assembly from taccom, along with 3 polymer blackdog mags as he recommended. Showed up in a USPS box a few days later. Finish on bolt assembly was well done, looks like nickel or? I measured the barrel extension diameter, as I am somewhat anal retentive, and found that it was 0.996 which is quite a bit under the nominal 1.000 +0/-.001 spec. Fit pretty loose in the mil-spec upper I assigned to this project. In reality, it is probably not as critical as on a centerfire barrel. I doubt it will squirm around with the barrel nut torqued down, but I would have liked a little tighter fit for alignment purposes.

I should mention at this point that I wanted this rifle to run with cheap Rem bulk-pack bullets, partly to keep practice cheap, and partly because I have about 15,000 rounds of it stashed. I know that most rimfire conversions prefer good ammo, so I was prepared for some tuning. I loaded up one of the mags and tried to charge the chamber. Insta-jam. Round got just out of the feed lips and rim popped up in front of the bolt. Ah, crap. I ran the next round slow-mo, same thing. As soon as round comes up, extractor kicks it sideways and it never makes it into boltface recess. I disassembled the rifle, and checked a round in the bolt. The rim on cheap Remington ammo is too thick to go under extractor beak and slide up the bolt face. I compared to CCI mini-mag, and there is a MUCH larger radius where the rim meets the case on the Remington ammo. OK, so I pull the extractor and cut it back a few thou, then re-bevel the bottom of the hook before re-installing. Back together, test again. Now, cases slide up bolt face, but only go maybe halfway into the chamber and get stuck. I attempt to feed a few more, and about halfway through the magazine they start feeding. All right, I have experienced THIS before. As the number of cartridges in the magazine decreases, the feed angle becomes less severe from the stacked rims. I pulled the barrel, and ran a Clymer .22lr chamber reamer into the barrel. It began taking a SMALL amount of material off the chamber walls near the chamber mouth right before full depth. This tells me that the chamber is maybe a Bentz, or auto-match profile, and a little tighter than max. I am not worried about Benchrest accuracy, so loosening it up a little is ok with me. Then, I took a cratex tip on my Dremel, and SLIGHTLY radiused the lower chamber edge down to the feed ramp on the adapter. DO NOT overdo this!!!! After re-assembly, I bench tested it and got full magazine feeding. All right, time to go to the range, instead of filling up my bullet trap.

At the range, feeding was good, but about 3-5 rounds per mag would not fire. Striker indents were severe, so I tried putting the duds back in rotated 180 degrees to get a hit in a different spot. About half fired on the retry. The remainder I re-struck in the same spot until the rim RUPTURED, and no love. So, obviously an ammo problem and not a light strike problem.

RESULT- with some mods, I got it to feed cheap crap ammo. I also get to practice my chamber clearing drills . CCI ammo runs fine, as I assumed it would. Overall, working about as I thought it would. I am just hoping that at some point halfway down the ammo can I will get into some cases that have enough priming compound in them

[openclassterror]

BTW, I should mention a big thanks to Tim from TACCOM (forum handle TRUBL). He supplied the rimfire parts for this project, as well as expertise. Shipping was prompt, packaged to protect the parts from damage. Other than my probably over-paranoid thoughts about the barrel extension diameter, I was well pleased with the quality of the components. Thanks Tim!

[Shooter115]

Yep, getting a .22 auto loader to run on Remington "Golden Bullets" is like trying to get my 540 HP Camaro to run on 87 octane. Results are going to be disappointing at best.

Most reliable bulk ammo I've found for it is the Federal 525 "blue-box" with the 36gr copper coated HP bullets. Ran 500 through my .22 upper last weekend with 2 failures, both of which were stove pipes.

FWIW, I had to do a lot of work on the feed ramp and chamber mouth to get it to feed anything reliably. My barrel and bolt did not come from Taccom, but Tim was good enough to advise me what to do to get mine running even though I was not using his parts. If I were to start over I would have just bought from him.

Edited January 14, 2014 by Shooter115

[Steve RA]

What sort of accuracy are you getting ???

[Thehotrodpig]

Yep, getting a .22 auto loader to run on Remington "Golden Bullets" is like trying to get my 540 HP Camaro to run on 87 octane. Results are going to be disappointing at best.

That is interesting that you say this. Golden bullet is my go to run in any of my guns ammo. It is the only one I've found that works in all my auto loaders, marvel conversions and my newly built spikes 22 upper. I know that marvel and others even recommend GB. It's pretty much the only .22 ammo I buy anymore. Cheap and runs in everything I own, and I have a lot of .22's.

[Shooter115]

Yep, getting a .22 auto loader to run on Remington "Golden Bullets" is like trying to get my 540 HP Camaro to run on 87 octane. Results are going to be disappointing at best.

That is interesting that you say this. Golden bullet is my go to run in any of my guns ammo. It is the only one I've found that works in all my auto loaders, marvel conversions and my newly built spikes 22 upper. I know that marvel and others even recommend GB. It's pretty much the only .22 ammo I buy anymore. Cheap and runs in everything I own, and I have a lot of .22's.

I used to think the same thing. I purchased a couple thousand rounds of it a few years ago to practice for the Ruger Rimfire matches and it ran so well that I decided to run it at the actual match. So I went out and bought another case of it before the match and that entire case was total crap. About 1 in every 50 rounds didn't have any priming compound in the rim. The velocities were all over the place, I had constant cycling problems due to under charged cases. It was just junk and cost me dearly at the match. The rest of the case got burned up as practice ammo and I would use it for practice ammo now since .22 ammo is so hard to find, but I wouldn't buy it if there are other options available.

[Thehotrodpig]

Wonder if you just got a bad batch.

[openclassterror]

The thing with the Golden bullets is that there ARE bad batches. Same with the Federal, and the Blazer. Any of the bulk-pack stuff is prone to bad batches. I always shoot a sample out of any brick I may use in a match, but if the match means anything, I just use good ammo. Assuming I can find some! Ironically, my Ruger MKII pistol will run about 98% reliability with ammo that runs 60-70% in my rifles. Can't explain that with any scientific reason. With the Remington stuff, I have had thousand-round days plinking digger squirrels with my 10/22 with maybe 5 duds, and other bricks I have thrown away after a couple of banana mags with 6 or 7 no-fires in a row. I think out of probably 5,000 rounds of CCI mini-mags I cannot remember a misfire. I am on my 3rd barrel on the 10/22 (receiver has almost 300,000 rounds through it!) and most have been Golden bullets. I have notice a major quality loss over the last 4 years or so. Slaughtering Klamath squeaks gives you plenty of ammo evaluation time, as we usually burned about 4-5 bricks per guy per weekend all spring long back when we could buy as much as we wanted. Now I feel like I'm hoarding nuts for the winter