You suck.
I bought one of your 1,000-rd cartons of that M-22 "black bullet" stuff at the last gun show, and on my last trip to the range, I was getting misfires at a rate approaching one round in ten in my 22/45. I have in front of me on the desk a round of the stuff with a nice, neat firing pin strike at the 9, 12, and 3 o'clock positions. That's three times I ran that particular round through the gun, setting myself up for disappointment each time like a loyal Star Wars fan buying the latest Ultimate Special Director's BluRay SE.
When I bought the ammunition, I thought "Wow, this is a pretty good price!" Now I know why. I guess when you leave the priming compound out of a tenth of the ammo, you can pass the savings on to the customer.
Seriously, Winchester, there are more duds in that carton than there are in the closeout bin at the local Blockbuster.
Sounds like my one and only interaction with .22 Remington Yellow Jacket rounds.
ReplyDelete1/10 failure rate - luckily I had only bought 100 of them!
I've been really unimpressed with Remington and Winchester's rimfire ammo recently. Federal, CCI, and something labeled Centurion (I don't recall if this was Eastern European or Aguila) has been reliable for me.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there are any BB brick and mortar stores anymore...
ReplyDeleteI see what you did there.
Send that little lovenote along with a "P.S. Do you know who I am on the intertoobz?" then sit back and wait for the Winchester truck to show up with your swag...
ReplyDelete@ the pawnbroker -
ReplyDeleteForget getting swag. How about getting not only a replacement box of match grade black boolits but an improvement in QC so that nobody else has to request a return tag to ship back defective products?
stay safe.
...people still go to Blockbuster?
ReplyDeleteYes Remington Yellow Jackets seem to be unpalatable to my Ruger as well. Failure to feed as well as failure to go bang.
ReplyDeleteGerry
I am not a cyborg either.
Winchester is repackaging their .22 Wildcat brand stuff?
ReplyDelete-SM
Huh...I've had sort of the opposite experience. My 22's eat the Remington stuff (from the 525-round loose-packed boxes) just fine. I have a problem with the dud rate on Federal Lightning bulk-packed stuff.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty much the same whether I'm feeding them through the 10-22, the 22/45, or the Taurus revolver. The Federal stuff gives a dud rate of at least 1 in 50, while I don't have enough of a failure rate on the Remington to really notice.
On the gripping hand, all of the stuff I'm shooting is at least 7 years old. I use "FIFO" (first in, first out) for inventory, so the stuff I buy today won't be shot for at least 5 and sometimes 10 years.
I guess I better check one of the most recent bricks to see if they go "bang" reliably.
Yeah, Centurion is Aguila from what I'm told; I've had quite good results from it, both accuracy- and reliability-wise.
ReplyDeleteLast time I bought a brick of Winchester it was their Wildcat stuff; flat horrible, lots of FTF. The Remington GB- which I buy because I've got a couple of things that prefer it- has improved over what it was a year or two back, it got pretty bad. Federal HP bulk-pack has been fairly good for me, so far.
The last winchester stuff I bought (the 333 bulk packs) was about like that, but I've been using the federal 555 bulk stuff for the past year and I can't remember having a single problem with it.
ReplyDeleteJust for the heck of it, Matthew at Straight Forward in a Crooked World is looking for people to keep track of their .22 duds. You may want to pop on over and view the details.
ReplyDeletehttp://straightforwardinacrookedworld.blogspot.com/2012/02/duds-apply-here.html
"Winchester Black Bullet-
ReplyDeleteit's just like a blind date!"
I was thinking more of Charley Brown, Lucy VanPelt, and the football.
ReplyDeleteTam;
ReplyDeleteHave you ever heard of a hang fire?
Just my way of sayin that I'm not sure I'd be putting a dimpled misfire back into my firearm to try and run it through again.
There're still Blockbusters around?
ReplyDeleteTed N
ReplyDeleteThere are! Most are pretty sparsely stocked, but there is one near me. Used to be two, but the older one got torn down and now there's a bank where its parking lot used to be, and parking where part of the store used to be.
I got some boxes of 9mm that had 99 rather than 100 bullets in 'em. Winchester kindly sent me a coupon for $30.00 which was 2 boxes at the time. I cashed it asap as the prices were still going up!
ReplyDeleteThey might send you one if you complain on their website!
Didn't Winchester-Olin just shut down their Alton, Illinois Plant because the Union refused to give in on a Contract? Think you wrote about it. NOT saying that only Union Run Shops came make good products, not at all. But it looks like they are now having their Ammo made by Fudds Reloading LLC out of Shanghai China.
ReplyDeleteAnd it looks like Winchester hired the same QA people who came up with this new %^%$^&&^&^ Blogger Log-In system also!
ReplyDeleteYes, Les, the new captcha, unlike the old one, is more often annoying than amusing. Google, however, does not care what we think.
ReplyDelete1) M-22 stuff has never given me a problem at all. Both the H&R Model 151 and my CZ-452 shoot this stuff like gang busters. Weird... what lot # you using?
ReplyDelete2) 9mm WWB had 1 round that had the rim squared off so the case wouldn't come out of the Glock 17 by normal means. I guess the people were having a break when they were making this stuff that day. I should have caught that one but didn't...
3) Federal Auto Match .22 out of my Ruger MK 1 had the last round out of the mag deposit the bullet 3/4th's the way down my Tactical Solutions upper Sunday. Federal Auto Match is supposed to be right below GMM in the food chain. I guess it happens to the best of companies...
Joe R.
Winchester sucks because they don't make an AR. They made a magnificent M1 Garand and a mighty fine M1 Carbine, and they could have sold twenty truck-loads of black guns with that gunny-riffic Winchester script on them, but they lost their way and any spark of creativity - even if that creativity was bought like a Browning High-Wall - amid the bean-counters and plodding hacks who based their retirement plan on selling cheap Model '94's with flappy levers and near plastic-wood...
ReplyDeleteGoober,
ReplyDelete"Have you ever heard of a hang fire?"
Seriously? You're seriously asking me this?
Is it even possible to have a hang fire with a rimfire cartridge?
ReplyDeleteI don't think I've ever seen or heard of a hangfire with any modern primer, rimfire or centerfire.
ReplyDeleteIf it were corrosive-primered Turkish surplus that had been stored underwater since the fall of the Ottoman Empire then, sure, I'd be worried about hangfires.
I've never seen a hangfire.
ReplyDeleteThey fall in the realm of "my buddy's cousin's friend of a friend's sister knew somebody who had one".
Never knew anybody in second or even third hand who actually has seen one in modern times, though they are warned of in about every firearms instruction manual I've ever read.
I bought a Beretta Model 21 mousegun new, and on the first range trip it misfired quite regularly, sometimes twice in a magazine. I tried 8 different brands of 22LR in it, recording each for misfires. The gun ran the bulk pack Remington Golden Bullets without fail, while all others including CCI gave misfires. At least during the initial testing. So I got two boxes of 500+ rounds of RGBs. While the mousegun did not get used much at the range, eventually it got to about 2000 rounds. I then retested it with the same brands, sometimes from the same boxes of ammo as the initial test. Everything fired just fine this time around, with very few misfires at all. I never would have thought a break-in period would be necessary on a 22!
ReplyDeleteGo figure.
Tam - it was a rhetorical question. Sorry if i offended, i probably didn't word that real well.
ReplyDeleteAs for hang fires in modern ammunition, I've seen it on three different occasions. Once, the delay in firing was by nearly 10 seconds. i kid you not. It scared the bejeesus out of me because i had already removed the round and thrown it away. It was a .30-06 round, so it went boom ina big way. So it does happen. It isn't common, I will absolutely agree to that point, but for a penny's worth of .22 ammunition, I'm not sure I'd be interested in taking the chance by reloading it and firing it.
You know, on further rumination, that .30-06 round was korean war surplus...
ReplyDeleteIs it okay to call that "modern"?
The other two hangfires I've seen were much shorter duration (about a second or two) and were both from a 20 gauge shotgun that was malfunctioning and not hitting the primers hard enough to ignite solidly. Still have it. Haven't fired or fixed it since.
Only ones I've ever had were some old .303 ball.
ReplyDeleteWe have settled on CCI Standard Velocity ($25/brick) and CCI Blazer ($16/brick). MUCH better than the M-22.
ReplyDelete