Had a thougt, Rimfire

[GameHauler]

Why can you not buy rimfire brass and do your own loads?

I understand that rimfire ammo is cheap enough most of the time

but what about playing with OAL and powder charges to make your

rimfire as accurate as possible?

Just thinking out loud.

[willhunt4coues]

Why can you not buy rimfire brass and do your own loads?

I understand that rimfire ammo is cheap enough most of the time

but what about playing with OAL and powder charges to make your

rimfire as accurate as possible?

Just thinking out loud.

 

Man you can't wait to play with your new gun huh?

[firstcoueswas80]

How ya supposed to make it go "pop"

[GameHauler]

How ya supposed to make it go "pop"

 

To tell you the truth I have no idea how a rim fire case works

Is the primer part of the case?

and if so why could I not pour my own powder and add a pill

Please edumacate me so I understand.

[firstcoueswas80]

I aint no expert, but... When I look into a rimfire, I dont see a primer. I dont know how the heck it works.

[BASS]

Yikes! Thats one thing I would not want to reload, or mess with. I don't know very much about it, so maybe that's why I don't think I would personally do it (lack of material out there on it compared to centerfire reloading). But I can see that becoming pretty bad with the small amount of powder involved.

 

I know growing up we used to pull the bullets, and double charge one round, and then make the other one a "silenced" round with no powder that just used the primer (and it wasn't very silenced to any black van driving feds out there) It worked great until we tried it in my friends grandfathers old Sears single shot. It split the stock, and blew the fire control group out the bottom. No real damage to the gun itself, as reassembled it the best we could and still shot it through the weekend.

 

I'm sure you could play around with it the same way we did, but putting a press into the mix to get really serious about it may get interesting should that lever get pulled too quickly. I think with the higher end rimfire ammo out there I would rather just buy the match grade ammo and still be ahead. Pretty interesting concept though. I wonder if you could get more than one "pop" out of the rim if you rotated it, or if all the primer compound is used up on the first one.....?

[Benbrown]

The priming compound is spun into the cartridge rim during the manufacturing process and cannot be replaced once the round has been fired. I have experimented with spent shells to see if there was any priming compound remaining that could be ignited with a firing pin hit on the opposite side and never had one go off.

 

There are lots of ways to kill time with rimfire ammunition without actually shooting it. Target shooters often mic rim thickness and sort by that measurement, as thicker rims presumably have more priming compound than thinner ones and combining the two extremes in one string of fire might result in larger dispersion. Once you have sorted by rim thickness, you can also weigh them and sort by weight, as there is some variation in the weight of powder charges between individual rounds. Pulling bullets and adding powder from another round will eventually raise heck with some of the semiautomatics, especially small pistols. Likewise, firing a round with only the priming compound as propellant can result in bullets stuck in the barrel, especially if the barrel is long and dirty, or just rough. Don't ask me how I know all this...

 

Back when I was using .22 rimfire blanks to propel darts with immobilizing drugs in wildlife research projects, we weighed the individual cartridges and found that there was quite a bit of variation, virtually all of it due to varying weights of powder between individual rounds. If you shot a dart at a deer at say 20 yards and were using one of the cartridges with the heavy charges, there was a good chance that the body of the dart would actually penetrate the animal's skin and end up buried in the muscle, making a nasty wound, instead of just popping the needle in and injecting the drug. Conversely, if you shot at a deer at say 40 yards with a cartridge with a light charge (about as far as we could reliably hit them and have the dart work), the dart would often drop so much that you would shoot under the animal. If you were lucky with your holdover and the dart hit, it often didn't have enough inertia to inject the drug. I have seen darts (fired by others) hit fully grown whitetails in the abdomen and penetrate just like a 20 gauge slug, necessitating that the animal be put down. Even with all of the above, the dart guns using blanks were so much more reliable from shot to shot compared with the versions that used CO2 cartridges that we were glad to have them...