Yeah, come to think of it, I don’t think my 10/22 (bought in 1994/95) has ever choked on any ammo using the factory magazine.
Same here. My 10/22 from the mid 80s has never had a problem with ammo fed from the factory magazines. I have had problems with aftermarket magazines, and because of that I bought several of the 10-round rotary magazines. With the simple modification of adding the better magazine release, it takes seconds to swap out the little rotary magazines.
One interesting point: it is possible to put one in backwards. I found this out once when I invited a friend to go shooting and he reloaded and said the rifle wasn’t working–he had put the magazine in backwards, and it was a sweet pain in the backside to get it back out. I think I had to disassemble the rifle.
I just bought myself a Norinco copy of the KKW! Haven’t shot it yet, but the finish is incredibly Chinese. I think the distributor put a slip on putting head on the bayonet lug and played some full-contact mini golf before shipping it to me. Oh well, $200 CAD flat, what do you expect? Hope it shoots well.
I am a bolt guy, I’ve always told myself that the action on a semi-auto soaks up too much energy when cycling, which is already pretty low for a .22LR. I went down the Youtube hole, looking for someone to do a back-to-back semi and bolt test with the same ammo, and the only one I found showed the semi to have similar or even better FPS out of the barrel as compared to the bolt gun. What gives?
First paragraph – it will probably shoot fairly well. Those tend to be like the Chinese Coach Guns; poorly finished but mechanically sound. If I ever get a chance to snag one at a good price (say $100-150) I have considered ripping it down and finishing it better both wood and metal. Just because I can.
Second - what I have been told is that the semi’s often being shorter barrels and fairly strong (for the caliber) bolts you don’t lose much FPS and since they are machined to be operated by the gas trapped in the barrel as much as the recoil (even though they are not a true gas-operated) you get a slight sling-shot effect as the bullet leaves the barrel. I never cared that much to actually do a detailed study but if you compare the average 10/22 or Winchester semi to larger caliber semis, it makes a sort of sense.
well, keep in mind the .22s are straight blow-back action, while typical semi-auto centerfires use some sort of gas operations which bleeds some pressure from the barrel. But the gas port is usually pretty close to the muzzle so the effect isn’t likely to be significant.
Are you trying to imply that somehow a semi-automatic action robs the bullet of velocity?
I don’t think that’s the case- when you fire a bullet, the pressure builds up, and the bullet starts moving, and accelerates until it leaves the barrel. Newton’s 3rd law kicks in immediately, but the actual force isn’t significant until the bullet’s really moving, so in effect the gun doesn’t really recoil until the bullet leaves the barrel.
So it stands to reason that the bolt doesn’t actually start moving until the bullet is out of the barrel in most cases- definitely for locked-bolt firearms, and most likely for straight blow-back ones like the 10/22.
So in essence, what the 10/22 is doing is using some of that existing recoil to move the bolt back in the receiver, eject the spent case and compress the recoil spring. The muzzle velocity of the bullet is going to be dependent on chamber pressure, which shouldn’t be affected by some kind of recoil mechanism in normal operation.
Gas operated weapons do tap off a *TINY *bit of gas to cycle the action, but like **jz78817 **says, that’s almost always near the muzzle where the bullet has likely done the vast, vast majority of its acceleration already.
It’s good you mention Newton’s third law, because that the one that states that if you’re going to do work on a bolt and carrier, that means there’s less work to be done on the bullet.
The semi-auto system isn’t some sort of free energy device.
My 10/22 is the exact opposite. It chokes on Stingers every time, but that’s okay with me because who can afford to shoot Stingers all the time?
No, it’s not, but it’s also not taking that energy from the bullet.
Blowback weapons like the 10/22 rely on the inertia of the bolt, the resistance of the recoil spring, and friction to prevent the cartridge case from clearing the chamber until after the bullet has left the barrel. I suppose it’s true that the moving cartridge case may lessen the chamber pressure by less than one cartridge volume, but that isn’t likely to actually diminish the velocity hardly at all. I’d imagine variations in individual rounds would account for far more velocity difference than that.
So for the time period while the bullet is in the barrel (and accelerating), we can consider the gun to be one unit, and the cycling of the action happens AFTER the bullet leaves the barrel. If anything, the energy required to move the bolt and eject the round is likely to result in less felt recoil, not in a slower bullet.
Not coincidentally, that’s also why straight blowback weapons are limited to relatively low power cartridges; above those, and the mass of the bullet and required spring strength start getting absurdly huge and unmanageable in order to keep the cartridge in the chamber for the requisite time.