target shooting with a .22

[Old Grump]

Originally Posted by GunHugger

Sorry Old Grump...I have to disagree on ammo.

What disagreement? I said and I quote:

Your gun may disagree, every time you go to your favorite toy store buy a different brand and when you shoot them take notes. That's how I found out what works best in my guns.

Some guns will shoot anything, some are picky. My old 46 year old Savage doesn't care what I put in it, My Marlin 60 is a bit fussier and my (2) 10/22's are real fussy. I have a notebook I bought when I bought my first match 10/22 because my old standby, standard velocity Remington just weren't competitive and I ended up spending over $1,000 finding the best bullets for it. Lo and behold the best bullets were not the most expensive ones so my suggestion to try a different brand or type every time he gets ammo till he finds what his gun likes. At 25 meters it doesn't make a lot of difference. At 50 quality shows up and at 100 meters it shows up a lot.

For close in plinking, 50' to 50 meters anything the gun will shoot and eject reliably will work. Instead of sweating ammo choice I would buy small bore targets and reduced targets. By the time he gets to making one hole groups at 25 meters he will pretty well know what ammo his gun likes and then he just keeps moving those targets back. Nothing happens overnight.

[GunHugger]

I was referring to this, but now see that we pretty much agree after all.

Originally Posted by Old Grump

I also tried some experiments where I just grabbed a handful of miscellaneous bullets and tossed them in a plastic baggie then loaded them without regard for what brand weight or bullet style they were. At 25 meters and to a lesser extent at 50 meters there wasn't a lot of difference between one and the other. To much over thinking about ammunition. Most of our guns and most of the ammo will shoot better than we will till you get down to serious bulls eye shooting.

[Regular Joe]

I agree with that as well. In all of my time consuming tests, I've found that some ammo shoots better than the rest, but @ 50 yards, all of the HV stuff pretty much goes into the same 1.5" or so.
For getting a new shooter thru his first case of ammo, I think the real test is consistency. His interest and confidence stay high when each round is shooting very much like the previous one. Next most important is price. You don't want to call an end to the days' shoot because we ran out of hi-dollar fodder. CCI Blazer works better than Thunderbolt in anything I've seen firing both, and the cost is about the same. Another good cheapie is Federal Champion, in the 50 round box. Federal puts a load number on all of their stuff, and this one is "510" or the numbers "510" with a suffix letter.
50 yards is challenging enough for a new shooter. With iron sights, 75 really is a bit of a push, because after that, drop becomes much more obvious. I hope you're not just limited to paper(?) Shooting cheap HP's at things like key limes and small russet potatoes is a blast, or try ".22 golf", if you have a source of free used balls. Ice cubes. Ping pong balls. Get creative.