Rimfire

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Savage’s hiatus from the lever gun scene lasted about 25 years. Their last model made in the 90s, the Model 99, was hailed as both a commercial and technical success, with many calling it “The Jeep of the Gun World” or sometimes “The King of Lever Guns.” Now, more than 25 years later, the company is three models deep in its rimfire lever comeback, and the newest one is one I think has been long overdue in the rimfire industry. The Revel Tactical was announced on October 8th, and it replaces the walnut of the Revel Classic and DLX with an MDT synthetic stock, a factory Picatinny rail, and functional M-LOK slots. After a handful of range sessions and several bulk boxes of ammo through the rifle in this month alone, I can say Savage got most of the fundamentals, and the requests we’ve all had right. So let's dig into Savage’s new tiny tactical lever gun.

Last time I talked about FarrowTech, we took a look at his Ruger Mark IV 22R PDW Kit back in August. My only real complaint about the Mark IV chassis upgrade had nothing to do with the build itself, but with how far behind the Mark IV is in modern 22LR pistol development. The Ruger Mark series, for its entire existence, can only give you a max of 10 rounds in most cases, and nearly every other kit in FarrowTech's catalog works with a rimfire pistol that holds more. The best example so far is the FT17 PDW Kit for the KelTec P17, the same pistol I used to check out FarrowTech's Halo-inspired FT-M kit in July. Today we're putting the P17 in the FT17 to see what a brace, a top rail, and a charging handle do for KelTec's budget rimfire pistol.

Taurus has expanded its TX22 rimfire lineup with the Brace-Ready TX22, a version of the popular .22 LR pistol built to accept a stabilizing brace. Released in 2019, the TX22 has built a strong following among rimfire shooters. The new model keeps the familiar platform but adds an extra point of support for better stability and control.

Shooting a suppressed .22 LR rifle or pistol is probably one of the more “peaceful” shooting experiences you can have on the homestead or at the range. Today we're looking at a CCI load built for one job: feeding a suppressed .22 without packing the baffles full of lead. CCI Clean-22 Suppressor then, naturally, uses a black, polymer-coated 45-grain lead round-nose bullet with a 1,000 fps load, and it ships in a 200-round paperboard carton about the size of the half-pint milk cartons you got with your school lunch as a kid.

The first rifle I ever really shot was a plain old Ruger 10/22, and the ammo feeding it came out of a brown box that looked like it belonged in my grandfather's tackle shed. Peters. Forty grains of lead, high velocity, round nose, and in my memory it never once let me or my 10/22 down at the range. Every round went bang, every can went flying, my groups were as good as they could be for a new shooter, and I never thought twice about it as a child, just happy to be at the range with his dad. Years and a lot of ammunition later, a friend randomly handed me a near-full brick of the stuff. Same brown box, same old-timey lettering, stored so carefully it could have rolled off the line last week or thirty years ago. Between the sands of time and my slowly deteriorating memory, there's no honest way to tell just by looking at this stuff to tell if it's any good anymore, so today we’ll group and chronograph a box of it to see if its performance lines up with my memories of it.

Earlier this summer, CCI and Henry Repeating Arms teamed up to come out with a special limited-edition run of 36-grain .22 LR ammo said to be “optimized” for cycling within the Golden Boy rifle - which I happen to have handy, as I’m sure many of you out there also do. CCI is no stranger to collaborative ammunition branding deals; we’ve seen that in the past with 22 Plinkster’s “Stanger” Stingers and Steve Rinella's Meat Eater series of .22 LR ammo. The real question I’m sure everyone has is what actually CCI Henry Golden Boy Edition 22LR any different than any of CCI's existing offerings. The answer for today’s example might surprise you, so let's get right into it.

Bosnian company AC-Unity became known in the United States for its AK magazines - cheap and pretty reliable; they became popular with those who wanted newer Russian AK magazines without paying collector’s prices.

Let’s take a look at a military rifle that you can actually buy, and also afford to shoot repeatedly. Tippmann Arms has announced that its M4-22 Elite semi-automatic .22 LR rifle has been selected by the Royal Thai Army Territorial Defense Command for use in the Territorial Defense Student Program in Thailand. The rifle replaces the legacy Armi Jager .22 platform, which has been in service with the program's reserve training units for more than 40 years.

I’ve been shooting rimfire long enough to see more than a handful of rimfire ammo types go the way of the dodo. Today’s is a particular shame, simply because of how consistent and clean the original formula was. I’m of course talking about Remington’s now-discontinued Standard Velocity Target 40-grain round-nose load. Most of you already know that Remington recently gave their rimfire ammo lineup a facelift, and that facelift also entailed removing some of their legacy ammo offerings from the catalog. So today, in honor of the now-dead ammo, we’ll put it through our standard set of tests to see if it's worth holding onto if you’re lucky enough to have some.

I don’t think anyone would deny that rimfire is equally as valuable as a training cartridge as it is as a recreational one. While tracers are primarily designed for military use, most often in automatic guns, they are neither impossible to find nor illegal to purchase in the civilian world. More relevant to this series, I’ve been waiting for a long time to test out Piney Mountain Ammunition Company’s (PMAC) 22LR tracer loads, now sold under the Supernova Brand name. I’ve spent the last month or so testing out this ammunition in a variety of different 22LR firearms, and today I’ll give you my overall impressions of Piney Mountain Supernova 22LR tracers, along with some of my typical range data (velocity and accuracy), to see if this stuff is worth keeping around for some special range sessions.

There is a certain level of quality that I think we all expect when we see the term “Match” attached to a product. Whether that be a component, the whole gun, or the ammo, the word Match typically implies that the item in question is made with high precision, tighter tolerances, and maximum consistency in mind. On the other side of things, the brand name “Wolf” is typically a name I’ve only associated with one thing - cheap 7.62x39mm steel case. Today I simply wanted to take a closer look at Wolf 40gr Match Target, a rather peculiar ammo, and see what one of the least expensive match ammos currently available on the market gets us in terms of “match grade” performance.

FarrowTech, as we talked about a few weeks ago here when we reviewed their FT-M body kit for the KelTec P-17, is in the business of making all sorts of accessories, kits, and conversions for some very affordable firearms. After our article featuring the P-17 kit, FarrowTech was kind enough to send out one of their 22R Brace PDW Kits for the Ruger Mark IV pistol, which is awesome because my personal Mark IV has been sitting dormant in my safe for well over a year at this point. So today we’ll slap ole’ Mark IV 22/45 Lite in this new FarrowTech kit and see if we can knock the rust off the 22/45.

Beretta USA is proud to introduce the new B22 Jaguar Tac Metal and B22 Jaguar Metal Competition, two innovative .22 LR pistols designed to make firearms training more approachable, enjoyable and rewarding for enthusiasts of every experience level. The B22 Jaguar Tac Metal and its competition-tuned sibling represent a deliberate push into the youth and developmental shooter market, which makes sense; if you can build confidence and fundamentals at .22 LR costs, you've created a customer for life.

I was recently able to pick up a handful of sleeves of this often overlooked 36-grain offering from Remington. Their 22 Viper 36-grain Copper Plated Truncated Cone load is primarily intended as a small game load, but according to Remington also serves you just as well on the target board. Today we’ll put this fast-striking ammo through our typical series of tests with the Angstadt RPR to see what it can give you.

Defensive 22LR ammunition is something that I thought might die out, but it turns out I was woefully wrong. Instead, a lot of new cartridges have recently come out from common rimfire offenders like CCI, who are now producing the new jacketed CCI Uppercut 32 gr HP cartridge. After my recent trip to the CCI plant in Lewiston, Idaho, I was able to sneak away with a handful of boxes of the stuff for testing here on The Rimfire Report, so today we’re going to do exactly that. In addition to a test with the routine Angstdt RPR, we’ll also be putting the ammo through an old favorite, the Ruger Lite Rack 22LR pocket pistol.

There's something special about a properly configured rimfire that reminds you why precision shooting is genuinely fun. The Tikka T1x brings serious Finnish engineering to the rimfire game, sharing the same bedding surfaces and ergonomics as its centerfire T3x big brother.

If you’ve been keeping track of my ongoing ammunition testing series, you know we’ve been dabbling a bit on both ends of the spectrum of cost and reputation. On the higher end of the spectrum, we’ve been slowly going through ELEY’s catalog of 22LR offerings; today we’re finally getting into the territory of the truly expensive offerings with ELEY 40-grain Match Flat Nose. This highly expensive and unique ammunition is said by ELEY themselves to be second in the world only to ELEY’s own Tenex match ammo. As is my custom in this series, we’ll be testing a 50-round box of this stuff at 50 yards, out of a precision rifle ( Angstadt RPR), to see what $0.50 per round gets you out of a match-grade rifle.

If you have spent any amount of time on the range with a KelTec P17, you already know it looks like it fell out of a prop bin on a low-budget sci-fi set. The telltale signs of a KelTec’s typical clamshell polymer construction and boxy lines have earned it comparisons to everything from a Nerf gun to a prop from a video game nobody can quite put their finger on. FarrowTech decided to stop pretending the resemblance was a coincidence and leaned all the way in with the FT-M kit. This conversion kit dresses the P17 up as a reasonably faithful (but compact) stand-in for the M6D Magnum, a firearm frequently seen throughout the Halo series. Today we’ll check out this roughly $100 aftermarket conversion kit to see what it does to your P17 pistol.

I'll admit up front that I've become one of those guys who can't stop doing math on the amount of money I haven’t spent recently on tax stamps, which is a strange sentence to type, but here we are. For the last two weeks, I've had a Franklin Armory F22-V SBR on the bench and at the range for a while now, and today I want to share my experiences and thoughts with you, sor far, on this unique platform that just a year ago would have been an extra 400 bones just for the permission to enjoy the 10/22 in what I think is one of its most enjoyable forms - a two stamp SBR.

There are media event trips, and then there are the kind of trips that remind you why you fell in love with this industry in the first place, and continue to sacrifice much to keep working in it. My recent visit to Lewiston, Idaho, to participate in CCI Ammunition's celebration of its 75th anniversary was very much the latter. I honestly can't remember a time when CCI wasn't part of my life as a shooter. CCI Standard Velocity, in particular, has been a constant presence for about as long as I can recall picking up a .22. The brick on the shelf, the box in the range bag, the stuff you grab without even thinking about it because you already know it's going to run. Most of you know that CCI Standard is a staple here on The Rimfire Report, and for almost 7 years now, CCI has been along with me for the ride as I dig myself deeper and deeper within the rabbit hole that is rimfire firearms and ammunition.

When we talk about rimfires today, we mostly think of .22LR, .22 Short or maybe .22 Magnum. In the past few years, we’ve seen .17 HMR and .21 Sharp come on the scene, and the .17 HM2 come and go. All these cartridges have their advantages and disadvantages, but they’re all small-bore rounds. But this wasn’t always the case.

Recently, AllOutdoor Editor and fellow TFB contributor Sam S. passed along a Gunbroker link of an 18-inch top-break single-shot that instantly caught my eye, as it has been one of the many rifles on my list of ones to either find or at least cover here on The Rimfire Report. This is a unique and somewhat primitive looking rifle that features a very unique swinging breech block. The listing called it an H.M. Quackenbush Safety Cartridge .22 Rifle. The bore looked dark, the action a bit tired, but something about it just screamed: “forgotten American boys’ rifle.” It sent me down a wonderful research rabbit hole. Today, we’re talking about   Henry Marcus Quackenbush’s clever Safety Rifle and why these unassuming little guns are actually highly collectible simply for their novelty.

It’s a weird thing, the North American firearms industry. Some guns are so popular they’re practically immortal, with factories around the world turning out copycats. Other guns that are quite interesting, and probably more fun to shoot, are cast the wayside. Here are three rimfires that I’d like to see come back into production, if only the dollars and cents made sense …

The Ruger 10/22 platform, in my book, remains one of the most legendary and customizable rimfire rifles ever made. So it's only natural that the aftermarket accessory giant Strike Industries has decided to expand its popular Strike Modular Chassis (SMC) catalog to include the king of plinking rifles, the Ruger 10/22.

The Ruger 10/22 Takedown is already one of the more cleverly designed rimfires on the market, a rifle that breaks down in seconds and packs into a bag most people wouldn't look twice at. Samson Manufacturing looked at it and apparently decided the only thing missing was a folding chassis that makes it even more compact, more configurable, and, as one media personality put it at NRA 2026, "one of the unexpected hits" of the show. Meet the SAS/22 Takedown Chassis.

ELEY’s line of premium UK-produced ammunition is a pretty rare sight here in the States for most of us, mostly because of its price. In addition to the budget, specialty, and standard 22LR offerings we’ve been checking out, I’ve also decided to start folding in some more premium 22LR offerings, including this week’s offering - ELEY Force 42gr Round Nose. This supersonic load is primarily intended for high-level competitive shooters, and today we’ll be putting it through the Ingegrally Suppressed Angstadt/Ruger Precision Rimfire.

The price of everything is going up these days, but .22LR rifles are still affordable, sort of. Even made-in-America rimfire rifles are now reaching the prices we paid for centerfires not that long ago. But one rifle is still very affordable, and very versatile to boot. The Savage Mk II offers a lot of bang for your buck, as long as you are willing to accept it for what it is.

There are times when I’m surprisingly disappointed by the items I review—and times when I’m just flat-out surprised. This is definitely one of the latter. As most of you who follow the series already know, Remington 22LR ammunition hasn’t exactly earned the best reputation for accuracy, cleanliness, or consistency out of any of my test guns (at least the old formula stuff). Their new  40gr Subsonic Hollow Point changes that. Today on The Rimfire Report, we’re putting a 50-round sample to the test at 50 yards using the impressive Ruger Precision Rimfire paired with the Angstadt Arms Vanquish 22 barrel. Let’s get to shooting!