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By George Wallace
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
You’ve finally decided to buy a high-powered rimfire rifle, but which one’s best for you?
Which rimfire rifle is best for me?
An old mate of mine has asked if I could fit and zero a scope to his new BRNO rifle. Although, of course, I can’t actually zero it for him, I can set it up and make sure it’s shooting accurately.
All my friend will then have to do is make minor adjustments to suit his own technique and preferred zeroed range. For all my recent rifle tests I’ve been trying subsonic hollow point ammunition from Remington, CCI and Eley to see what works best.
The BRNO seems to like CCI and Remington, while my old BSA 12-15 Martini action target rifle prefers Eley or CCI.
GRAPH NO. 1
Shows the bullet trajectories for our three cartridges, from 50 yards out to 175. The .22 LR is zeroed at 70 yards and the other two at 100 and the effect of extra velocity is immediately apparent.
For bopping bunnies out to around 75 yards the .22 Long Rifle still reigns supreme.
Fitted with a sound moderator and using subsonic ammo it’s cheap to shoot and makes very little noise.
The BSA with its Sirocco silencer is, according to my wife, considerably quieter than my 12 ft/lbs air rifle, even though that also has a silencer! The main drawback of the .22 LR is that the bullets are little buggers for ricocheting, so a safe backstop is very, very important.
The velocity also means a relatively curved trajectory so that if you zero the rifle at 70 yards the graph shows the bullet will be 1½ inches low at 80 yards, 3 inches low at 90 and 5 inches down at 100.
With small targets that means precise judgment of range and accurate shooting.
The long rifle’s big brother, the .22 WMR, adds another dimension because it packs a lot more clout; and with a muzzle velocity of just over 1,900 fps it shoots flat enough to reach out beyond 100 yards.
A friend in the Scottish Borders swears by it for shooting foxes. Then there’s the new kid on the block the .17 HMR. This takes velocity to the heady heights of 2,550 fps - which used to be the stuff of dreams for a rimfire - and extends effective range on crow-size targets to 150 yards - or beyond, if you have an accurate rifle and zero an inch or more high at 100 yards, rather than dead-on.
There are some who shoot foxes with the .17, but I prefer to heed Steve Hornady’s recommendation when he launched the cartridge. He said it was NOT designed for shooting animals as large as foxes.
GRAPH NO.2
Shows the retained bullet energy for the three cartridges all the way from the muzzle to 500 yards and it also shows, I think, the truth of the old fable about the tortoise and the hare.
Because velocity is such a major factor in the calculation of energy it’s easy to forget that the faster you start, the quicker you slow down.
So, when it comes to striking energy, at longer range bullet weight becomes more important than muzzle velocity and although the .17 HMR sets off at 2½ times the speed and with more than three times the energy of the .22 LR, by the time the two bullets reach 250 yards the heavier .22 hits harder.
But, having read all this stuff up and down, forwards, backwards and sideways, which cartridge are we going to choose?
My own view is that everyone should have at least one .22 rimfire and possibly two; and then either a .22 WMR or a .17 HMR, or both - because you can’t beat having the right tool for every job.
In both rifles the CCI ammo printed an inch higher than the others at 55 yards. There is no scientific reason for this, as far as I am aware, but it does remind us always to check a rifle’s zero whenever we buy different ammo - or even a different batch of our usual brand.
I was not using my chronograph but since all the ammo is described as ‘subsonic’ the CCI won’t be travelling faster than the others. (‘Subsonic’ bullets usually leave the muzzle at about 1,065 feet per second (fps), just below the speed of sound.)
While the good old .22 Long Rifle has been with us almost since the days of Davy Crockett, there’s now considerable interest in two newer and more powerful rimfire cartridges.
The .22 Winchester Magnum Rimfire (.22 WMR) has been around since 1959 and more recently (I first tested a .17 in early 2003) the .17 Hornady Magnum Rimfire (.17 HMR) arrived like a bolt of lightning.
But which one to choose? I’m often asked the question and, unfortunately, the answer is ‘well, it depends…’
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