JoeM57 said:
DaveWhite said:
chucknbach said:
CJ6 said:
What ever your rifle likes @ 25-50 yds it'll like @ 100 yds.
For the most part your right but not necessarily. CCI Velocitors shoot the best in mine at 50yds but at 100 yds they were quite spread out. The second best at 50yds was CCI 36gn Mini Mags and had far better grouping at 100yds.
Not even for the most part. I have had many different lots of match ammo that shot very well at 50 yards that did not do well at 100 yards. The only answer is to test it at 100 yards, because if it shoots well at 100, IT WILL shoot well at 50 yards!
Best solution is to get a box of as many different ammos (in your price range) and test them at 100 yards. The high price of the good stuff is the resultant lack of flyers. Even the best stuff will fail you if you don't watch the wind shifts...
I would agree with this. A good example is Federal 510B... Great at 25 yards, so-so at 50 yards, stinks to high heaven beyond that. At least in the rifles I've tested this particular ammo in. Now some folks may very well have better results with it. This however was a lesson learned for me - never buy "cheap-cheap" ammo just to have something to plink with while saving the good stuff for the serious shooting. It's good enough for gongs, but terrible on paper past 25 yards.
I might as well put my two cents worth in here in support of the above quoted posts. Way back when, when I shot a lot of IHMSA smallbore pistol silhouette, it was an axiom that your fifty yard test with all the different single boxes of ammo you could round up at local stores was just a screening test that narrowed the choices down for you to re-shoot at 100 yards. In pistols, just because it shot well at 50 yards didn't mean it shot well at 100 yards, it was just an indicator that it was more likely to shoot well at 100 yards. And as an aside, just because it shot well in my 14" Contender barrel didn't neessarily mean it was going to shoot well in the 10" barrel or in either Hi Standard I had. Lots of testing sometimes, then back to whichever store the "good stuff" came from and by a couple bricks or more of the same lot number.
When I first saw the statement on here that if it shot well at 50 yards it would shoot well at 100 yards, I just assumed that rifles were somehow different in their behavior than pistols, as I hadn't yet gone through the "great search" for any of my .22RF rifles. I still don't have the sheer volume of testing experience with rifles that I have with pistols, but my initial findings indicate that while rifles seem to be less tempermental than the pistols were when going from 50 yards to a hundred yards, good performance at 50 yards still isn't a guarantee of good performance at 100 yards, it just seems to correllate more often in rifles.
And never assume that non-match ammo won't be a winner in any particular firearm. The cheap bulk pack bargain 330 to 550 round promo ammos don't usually offer much promise (too much rim thickness variation and primer variation, including complete lack of primer compound causing a misfire no matter where the firing pin hits, always an indicator that there may be a lot of round to round ignition variation), but regular old standard and high velocity ammo can yield pleasant surprises. I once found a lot number of Winchester high velocity hollowpoints in the nice plastic sliding lid 100 round boxes that my Hi Standard 104 "ray gun" just loved at 50 and 100 yards. In IHMSA smallbore pistol this was a find, as clangers don't count and the velocity reduction in a pistol meant that remaning energy with standard velocity and match ammo did not guarantee that the rams would fall over as required for score even with a solid hit. And on the rams, a dead center mass hit doesn't guarantee it will fall; ironically, a hit high, low, right or left of center mass is usually better. A center mass hit literally tries to push the ram straight back as much or more than tipping it, while an off center hit tends to help by adding more tip or spin to the force vectors working on the ram.
As always when searching for the best ammo for your .22 these are my experiences - yours may be different, but we hope they're not too frustrating.
