Worst 22 rifle you've ever shot?

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Stay away from the Chiappa Firearms M1-22 carbine. This is supposedly a replica of the M1 carbine that shoots .22 lr. I took a young friend of mine to the range where he shot my CZ-452 and Remington 512. When he asked about what kind of .22 rifle he should buy, I suggested a CZ 452 or 455, a Ruger American rimfire, a 10/22, or a Savage bolt action rimfire. Instead he went to a gunstore and was talked into buying this Chiappa POS.

When we tried it at the range, he was having a hard time hitting clay pigeons at 30 yards from a rest with the Chiappa. Hitting my 2" and 1" spinners was out of the question. It wouldn't cycle any standard velocity .22 ammo either. I loaded a magazine with Mini-mags and tried it. I had difficulting operating the trigger and thought the safety was still on. Checking again, the safety was off. I estimate the trigger was around 14 to 16 pounds of grit and creep before a shot finally went off. I had a hard time keeping shots in a 4" cirlce at 30 yards with this piece of junk.

After my friend got used to the 2.5 pound Yo-Dave trigger and Tech Sights on my CZ-452 Lux, he was breaking clay pigeons into little pieces and hitting the 2" spinner with ease.
 
My bud had an AR-7 that I ended up with and couldn't get rid of fast enough. It shot all over the place. It was supposed to be a "Survival" rifle. And it was. Anything you shot at survived to escape and get away. I have a Charter Arms Explorer pistol and it is surprisingly accurate. Go figure.
 
I’ve never met a 22 rifle that wasn’t accurate or reliable. Remington, Marlin, Ruger, Mossberg, Savage, ... they’ve all been accurate and reliable.

Maybe I’ve got the touch.

If I had to pick one I disliked the most, it was the Remington 597. I tried hating that Mossberg but the damn thing was too accurate.
 
Bobson said:
I’ve never met a 22 rifle that wasn’t accurate or reliable. Remington, Marlin, Ruger, Mossberg, Savage, ... they’ve all been accurate and reliable.

Maybe I’ve got the touch.

If I had to pick one I disliked the most, it was the Remington 597. I tried hating that Mossberg but the damn thing was too accurate.
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Own Marlin, Ruger, Savage, and CZ here... I agree- all accurate and reliable (with decent ammo). . I'm sure there are examples, but I think it's kind of hard to screw up a 22LR.
 
Was shooting for kicks along the Kiwalik river once with a friend, we were both using .22's and shooting odd chunks of mud onthe far bank.

After awhile, he handed me a tubefed semi of his, Im not sure of the brand, but it was a S.L.LR. and had several 'vents' at the rear, and a plastic knob dealie that closed the rear of the reciver tube.

First shot and the bolt hit my cheek like a bat.

''***!!!????'' says I, and my friend had the gall to say ''better you than me'' with a laugh.
Well, he wasnt laghing whenI threw that rifle down as hard as I could,with both hands, so hard it BOUNCED off the cobbles and back up and if he'd had his hands out he could have caught it.....and I walked away , looking for a mirror....
 
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I bought a used Savage .22lr bolt rifle at a gun show couple years back, it was a really looker, stainless, laminate stock. The seller was FFL and said he took it on trade. Well, it didn't take me long to figure out why someone traded it; I think I could throw rocks at a target more accurately than that one could shoot. I paid $325 for it, another dealer gave me $125 on trade for it, best $200 I ever lost.
 
Had an old 10/22.....not very accurate, nor very reliable. My kids hated it as they couldn't figure out the bolt hold-open or manipulate the mag release easily. Got sick of clearing its jams and sold it- but not before stealing the neat cast aluminium butt plate- which fit perfectly on my Mini-14!
Just in case I'm out of ammo and need to finish off a zombie.
 
My neighbor gave me a rifle that had once belonged to my grandad. It was a mod 63 Remington pump take-down. I was thrilled. The neighbor said that my grandpa didnt like the rifle, and sold it cheap. The neighbor bought it to shoot skunks in his barn. He left it hanging on a nail for about 50 yrs.
I cleaned it up and took it out to shoot. It was horrible. It heyholed. It wont shoot even a big group. Not only that, but it also dumps the entire magazine every so often.
My dad is in his 80s, i told him the story. He said that he remembered that rifle because he couldn't hit anything with it, and occasionally it would dump the magazine..... go figure....
 
It's not a bad gun I guess but the most disappointing 22 I've ever shot is a ruger 10-22 international with the full length manlicher stock. I lusted after one as a kid for years. Father in law won one at a banquet and I was excited to get to shoot one finally. Accuracy is terrible, mabey 4-6" at 50 yards. It's the only 10-22 I've ever shot that wasn't acceptably accurate.
 
Armored farmer said:
My neighbor gave me a rifle that had once belonged to my grandad. It was a mod 63 Remington pump take-down. I was thrilled. The neighbor said that my grandpa didnt like the rifle, and sold it cheap. The neighbor bought it to shoot skunks in his barn. He left it hanging on a nail for about 50 yrs.
I cleaned it up and took it out to shoot. It was horrible. It heyholed. It wont shoot even a big group. Not only that, but it also dumps the entire magazine every so often.
My dad is in his 80s, i told him the story. He said that he remembered that rifle because he couldn't hit anything with it, and occasionally it would dump the magazine..... go figure....
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That would be a fun one to fix the mag and get a liner put in the barrel to make it a shooter again. New lease on life 50 years later
 
A Remington 597. I've never been able to get through a magazine without a jam or FTF of some sort. It is really accurate though, that's the only reason I still have it. Maybe one of these days someone will find the cure to problem.
 
ih772 said:
A Remington 597. I've never been able to get through a magazine without a jam or FTF of some sort. It is really accurate though, that's the only reason I still have it. Maybe one of these days someone will find the cure to problem.
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Its usually how the magazine presents the rounds to the chamber. I found 2 mags (luckily the one that came with the gun) that worked perfectly pretty much every time, i tried a couple others that would jam the bullets square into the top of the chamber pretty much every time. If you carefully lowered the magazine and droped the bolt they went in fine.

I think i still have 1 of the good mags (at least in my gun) sitting somwhere in my spare parts.

the other thing you had to be careful of was getting rim lock when loading the dumb things.....








Honestly i dont think ive ever shot a "bad" .22. Ive shot alot of old worn out ones, including the aforementioned Nylon66, with the wobbly receiver cover (two small screws thru the cover into the receiver its self fixed that, but it still shot 6" groups at 50yds most of the time)
Pretty much every magazine fed gun .22 ive shot, including the 10/22 would jam from time to time, most often it was a magazine or loading issue, sometimes it was just the gun.
 
My dada bought me a $30 pawn shop single shot 22 for my 9th birthday. I wanted to shoot it so bad, but he insisted that he needed to test it first. Long story short, he test fired it only to have the bolt fly back and smacked him in the cheek as he got a nasty powder burn all over his face.

To this day I don't know what the make of that POS was, but it had a brown plastic stock. My dad went back to the pawn shop and returned the thing. He then spent $40 on a Stevens single shot bolt 22 that I still have to this day.
 
ih772 said:
A Remington 597. I've never been able to get through a magazine without a jam or FTF of some sort. It is really accurate though, that's the only reason I still have it. Maybe one of these days someone will find the cure to problem.
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Have you checked over at Rimfire Central? I'd be surprised if that problem hasn't been discussed over there.

LoonWulf said:
Honestly i dont think ive ever shot a "bad" .22. Ive shot alot of old worn out ones, including the aforementioned Nylon66, with the wobbly receiver cover (two small screws thru the cover into the receiver its self fixed that, but it still shot 6" groups at 50yds most of the time)
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Other than the one whose stock broke in two, I haven't had a bad one, either. I've got an old Winchester 1906 Winchester Expert which looks like it has about 5% of the original rifling left and still shoots good enough to hit 20 ounce plastic bottles at 60 yards or more.

The Nylon 66---I don't know why they put grooves in that sheet metal "receiver." Other than that, the 66 is a really cool .22.
 
I want to also vote Marlin. Mine was the weird 989M2 (the one that deliberately apes the look of the M1 Carbine) but I gather it was mechanically a model 60.

It. Was. Awful. The best ammo, and the best of the mags would have some malfunction or other every 4th or 5th round. When dirty, it might not fire when you stuffed a case into the chamber. I treated it well, and it bit me.

However, I got it in trade for a SMLE III* which had been poorly sporterized, then disassembled, then left in a box to rust, and I put together and refinished minus a few parts (but otherwise effectively stole from a friend's basement I guess), and if memory serves I got good money for it and it paid over half of the Howa AR-180 I wish I still had (shot it in classes and all but got frustrated with spares, accessories, and even mags).
 
cp1969

Have you checked over at Rimfire Central? I'd be surprised if that problem hasn't been discussed over there.
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As soon as I had problems with the 597 I went online and leaned of all the "fixes" that were out there for it (there were a lot too). Tried them all and none of them worked. Still wouldn't feed properly (even with Remington's own ammo, go figure), or when you did get a shot off, the case would still get hung up somehow. Group size was impossible to estimate because out of a magazine you might have only 2 or 3 shots downrange on the target.
 
My worst was an original Armalite AR-7.

I bought it new back around 1976/77,,,
I even purchased an extra magazine for it.

It didn't matter what ammo I used,,,
The most I could get was 2 or 3 shots before it jammed on me.

Those cartridges that did feed and fire,,,
Who knows where they went,,,
Not on target that's for sure.

I tried for a year to make that gun work,,,
Two trips to the dealer/factory,,,
I finally gave it away.

Aarond

.
 
I am convinced that Charter Co (Charter Arms during the bad years) did more to sully the repretation of the AR7 design than anything else.

A friend had an Armalite gun and it worked fine ecept once in a wile the reat aperature screw would ork loose and you lost your zero. He actually carried it behind the seat of a Luscombe 85E on flights around the south east and you got to admit that poor little screw got a pretty good vibratory treatment every hour of flight. With the original magazine it shot reliably and no less accurate than most Nylon 66 rifles I have shot. Lack of tension on the locking ring can cause the AR to do odd things. A lot of folks tweek the magazines with needle nosed pliers and there are instruction here and there on the Gore inter web for doing so.

Worst I ever shot were absolutely reliable, but wholly inaccurate Winchester 1890 pumps at a state fair once. Turns out the Carnie would move the rear sight during reloads to lessen the chance of getting your girl a teddy bear. Ammo was that nasty old .22 short gallery compressed clay stuff. Later I would see one at Chucks Gunshop in Waldo FL that even with cleaning a look down the barrel was like looking down a very old sewage drain pipe in an area with high lime content in the water and the outside was not much better. He reworked everything and relined the barrel and it was a thing a beauty afterward.

BTW 10/22 haters, it appears that tension on the retentions screw is a major factor in 10/22 accuracy. With out good after market bedding or a pillar changes in humidity and temperature cause the wood to make variations in that tension. Some guys go so far as to buy a torque driver that measures inch pounds rather than foot pounds and use them to check even when they do not disassemble the rifle. I just used the "Armstrong Method" of tensioning the stock screw and seem to get it close enough to right to not mater.

-kBob
 
I have this love-hate thing with the AR-7. Love the concept, but the execution was flawed. #1 wasn't that bad a shooter, but is was minute of rabbit for me a few times and wasn't overly fussy with what I fed it. I figure I got lucky with it, and #3, which was a little pickier but not by much. #2 was the real stinker of the bunch.
Now watch, I'll get a deal on one I can't pass up...
 
RedlegRick,

This new Henry incarnation is looking tempting. Like the new stock design mainly.

BTW I used to wear red socks under my dress blues after I became a 13A. People with Eagles and Stars On Thar's failed to see the humor.

-kBob
 
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