The Rimfire Report: New Budget Turkish Plinker - TriStar/KRAL KR-22

Throughout the years, Turkish firearms have fascinated me in the same way that LADA vehicles from Russia do - they’re typically simple, have straightforward engineering, and best of all, they’re incredibly affordable. Unfortunately, that price drop usually comes at the cost of long-term durability - just take a look at any one of our Turkish shotgun burn downs. However, occasionally, a Turkish firearm like the BRG9 Elite will surprise me with its level of reliability and durability, and thus, I like to try out what the manufacturers in Turkey are up to with their latest offerings. Today, we’re going to test out another example of that with the recently released TriStar Arms (KRAL Arms) KR-22 semi-auto rimfire rifle.

More Rimfire Report @ TFB:

• The Rimfire Report: Remington Magnum Rimfire 22WMR 40gr JHP Tested
• The Rimfire Report: Henry’s Golden Boy Revolver
• The Rimfire Report: Smith & Wesson FPC 22LR First Impressions

The KR-22 is currently only offered in a synthetic variant, indicated by the TriStar Arms website here for the US, as well as the original manufacturer, KRAL Arms, over in Turkey. The rifle is incredibly light and balanced well. It’s equipped with virtually everything a modern rimfire shooter would want to get into some serious budget-plinking. A threaded barrel for a suppressor, reversible cocking handle, included tool-adjustable iron sights with a picatinny rail for mounting optics, an adjustable cheek riser, and of course, 100% compatibility with Ruger 10/22 pattern magazines - all of them.

On the Range

First order of business is “does it work?” Semi-auto rimfire rifles are somewhat notorious for being unreliable due to a combination of subpar or incorrect ammo, cheap construction, or improper tolerances. Rimfire is not an easy cartridge to get to work reliably when things start getting dirty, and unfortunately, the KR-22 falls into that same trap. The first 50 rounds through the rifle with CCI Standard velocity went great. Then I tried a handful of slightly spicier Federal Champion 36-grain, and after a single mag, the rifle started to have malfunction after malfunction. It didn’t help that the rifle is completely incompatible with the aftermarket Butler Creek 25-round magazines, which, to be fair, are notoriously unreliable themselves. Both together were a frustrating disaster.

However, when replaced with BX-1s and or BX-15s, the reliability didn’t improve much after the rifle had gotten past the 150-round mark. Even hotter CCI mini mags were not enough to cycle the action or ignite reliably with budget ammo, since it was apparent that the firing pin channel was so gummed up that it was producing extremely light primer strikes. I tried lubing the gun a bit more and wiping it down, and then blowing it out, and it improved reliability for a magazine or two, but once the rifle had a chance to eat more fouling, it went back to being a frustrating mess.

The KR-22 didn’t do much better in the accuracy department either. When trying to put together some groups with my gold standard - CCI Standard 40-grain, the KR-22 only managed to print one decent 15-round group at 25 yards, and that was with 5-7 fliers. Changing ammo types didn’t help either, and I saw fairly consistent inconsistent results from both Remington Golden Bullet, as well as CCI Mini Mags, and Federal Champion. For what it's worth, when you’re just plinking at steel at about 25 yards, this really isn’t an issue. However, if small game hunting and or accuracy are important to you, this rifle might be worth passing up in favor of something more refined and more reliable.

Worth Tinkering With?

Unfortunately, I think the TriStar Arms KR-22 is another heart-ripping rug pull from another Turkish manufacturer, not fully testing their product before putting it out to market. As I said earlier, semi-auto 22LR rifles are hard to get right, and even though TriStar/KRAL is offering a compelling package in terms of overall features and price, they aren’t really delivering on the all-too-important reliability part that makes plinking with a cheap 22LR fun. I can’t really have fun if I’m clearing malfunctions every other round, and I also can’t have fun if I am spending 5-10 minutes cleaning the gun every hundred rounds or so. When the gun is running properly, you can rip off some pretty impressive splits, but the caveat there is that it has to be pretty clean and use fairly hot ammo like CCI Mini mags. I tried cleaning the rifle and using a few boxes of CCI Clean 40 grain, but the improvement to reliability was only by 50 rounds or so before things started going wrong again.