It is excellent ammo especially at 100 yards where i shoot Rimfire F-class. The other good thing about it is that it tolerates cold weather the best of anything. I have shot matches with it in high 20’s to low 30’s. Eley is the worst cold. I won’t shoot it below 50 degrees. Center -x is good to high 30’s
David
This is interesting.
This past winter my Dad and I did some pretty extensive testing on ammo in cold weather.
-17 Degrees was as cold as we went I believe. We also played with the same testing up to the mid thirties as days provided.
We would test the following ways:
Cold Ammo, Cold Gun (meaning both had been left in the elements for a minimum of 30 minutes)
Cold Ammo, Warm gun (meaning the ammo had been left in the cold to acclimate, the gun kept at room temp)
Warm Ammo, Warm Gun (both at room temp)
Cold Gun, Warm Ammo
I tested in a Bergara B14r my Dad in a Tikka T1x
He tested Tenex, Match from Eley and then a ton of other ammo from SK to CCI variants. He found that for the most part his rifle/ammo combination was minimally affected by the changing temps. In warm conditions the lot of Tenex he shoots will average .4s. In the cold weather (-10 or below) the group average would open up slightly to .5s-.6s
In my B14r using all the same ammo and procedures nothing would shoot in it once the barrel cooled off below 20 degrees. It would go from a sub MOA rifle to 11-12 MOA at 50 yards with all the ammo I had available to test. If I kept the barrel warm, I would see minimal changes in group size no matter the temp of the ammo.
What I did find was in in cold weather with either the barrel at ambient temp or warm, much of the ammo I shot would not extract reliably from my gun, a problem that did not occur at temps above 35 degrees.
SK Biathlon was the best for reliability and shot very well in temps down to 20, past that it became like the others if the barrel cooled off.
We figured it’s possible that because the B14r is a “match” chamber and the Tikka is not it may have had something to do with the sever accuracy decline in the cold.
It’s interesting reading others experiences with rimfire ammo in extreme temps, I’m starting to believe there isn’t a constant in this situation and the internal temp of the barrel has more to do with it than the ammo itself in many cases.