A Varmint Will Never Quit. Ever.

I’m going through a wave of firearm enthusiasm. It hasn’t passed yet.

A few years back, I consulted the most hard core gun nerds I knew, asking if it was possible to shoot well with a .22 rifle. To me, that means 20 consecutive sub-MOA shots at 100 yards.

A lot of people will shoot a hundred bad groups in a day and then go to the web and post a photo of the only three-shot group that came in sub-MOA and say, “Wow, this gun is a tack-driver!” I think most of them don’t realize they’re lying, because before they decided to lie to the Internet, they lied to themselves, successfully.

A monkey can produce a one-hole three-shot group with a horrible gun. You just have to give him enough time and ammunition. When you go up to 20 consecutive shots, the monkeys slink off and find other things to talk about.

Very knowledgeable people convinced me it was not possible, because rimfire ammunition is so poorly made. It’s inconsistent. I decided to quit and accept what I had.

Now I’m thinking about it again.

There is a niche-famous Internet thread about .22 accuracy. People post their achievements, and they have to prove them. To make it, you have to produce 30 consecutive shots at 50 or 100 yards. A surprising number of people have broken the MOA barrier at both ranges.

For reasons unknown to me, a gun that shoots sub-MOA at 50 yards may not do as well at 100. It’s not because they’re trying to hit the same circle at a longer distance; they’re not. At 50 yards, 1 MOA is about 0.525″, and at 100, it’s about 1.05″. The definining measurement is an angle, not a diameter.

Anyway, the list people shoot at two distances. And they do great.

This puts me back in the hole I dug out of. Maybe rimfire ammo is inconsistent, but if other people can shoot into half an inch at 50 yards, consistently, I should be able to come up with a rifle that will do humane squirrel head shots at 100 feet and humane body shots at 50 yards. I can no longer throw up my hands and say the quest is unrealistic or a waste of time.

Right now, with semiautos, I can shoot two MOA all day at 25 yards, which is a distance some squirrels will allow you to close. I have seen guys on Youtube showing groups worse than mine, with bolt-action rifles, and talking as though they were doing great. I find that hard to understand. I think anyone who holds himself out to be a great shot should be able to shoot into a quarter-inch. I’m merely pretty good, so they should be doing better than me, not worse.

My Savage A22 shoots about the same with Mini-mags as it does with CCI Standard Velocity, which is supposedly more accurate. Go figure. I have no reason to give up velocity and hollow bullets if the accuracy is the same. Standard Velocity only comes in round nose.

I have a silencer now, so things are getting complex. The silencer is 6″ long, so it’s desirable to have a short barrel. Obviously, the barrel has to be threaded. When you look for short, accurate guns that have threaded barrels and don’t cost a fortune, the field narrows fast.

I looked at the list to see what other people used. There are a lot of Anschutz rifles. Forget that. I’m not blowing over a grand on a rimfire. I don’t care if it wakes up before me every day and makes French toast. There are other expensive rifles on the list, and they don’t interest me either.

There are a few Ruger 10/22’s on the list. Surprising, since they are generally considered less accurate than the Marlin Model 60. I’ve only seen one Model 60 on the list.

CZ guns appear frequently, although some have very expensive Lilja barrels. If you’re going to spend that much, why not start out with an Anschutz?

I’ve studied up, and there are a few rifles worth considering.

1. Tikka T1x MTR. Not too pricey. Appears frequently on the list. Comes with a threaded 16″ barrel. If you decide to upgrade later, the barrel comes out when you loosen a few screws.

2. Savage Mark II FV-SR. Downright cheap. An MTR runs $650. I don’t think Tikka allows discounts. I can get a Mark II for $269. Being a Savage, it may be a little rough. Savage puts all the money into accuracy.

3. CZ 457 Scout. This is a fine gun with a short threaded barrel, but it comes with a tiny stock for children, so you have to spend over $200 on a real stock or slap some kind of clumsy attachment on the butt. It also comes with a 1-round magazine, so you have to upgrade that. The other CZ 457’s don’t fit my specs.

4. Bergara BMR. This is a Spanish gun with a great reputation. Not too expensive, and the barrel is threaded, but the shortest one you can get is 18″ long. Not a deal-killer. Not that far from 16″, which is the length I want.

If you own a Bergara, and you eventually decide you want to spend more, you can add a target trigger made for a Remington 700.

At the moment, my plan is to cut up my Savage A22 and see what happens. It has a 22″ barrel, which is too long, and the barrel is not threaded.

When I looked into shortening and threading a barrel, it turned out to be a complex job, of course.

Any idiot can shorten a barrel. You clamp it in a vise, cut it with a hacksaw, and use an inexpensive set of hand tools to repair the muzzle.

To thread a barrel, you have to find the center of the bore. If your threads are not concentric with the bore, your silencer will also be out of alignment, and when you shoot, you will shoot the silencer.

You would think gun makers would make their bores and barrels concentric, but most don’t. It’s hard to make a long, completely straight hole down the middle of a round rod, concentric with the rod’s surface. Manufacturers try to get close, and that’s about it.

When you thread a barrel, you have to stick something inside the bore in order to find out where the center is. There is a complicated procedure involving a thing called a range rod. I won’t go into that, because it appears to be outdated.

These days, people put barrels in their lathes and use test indicators with long probes to indicate the bores. If you don’t understand that sentence, it just means you’re not a machinist or gunsmith. A test indicator will tell you when something moves a ten-thousandth or two ten-thousandths of an inch, depending on its level of precision. You stick your probe in your bore and rotate the barrel, and you move things around until the indicator dial’s hand stops moving.

Some people use indicators that can go 2.75″ into barrels. That seems silly to me, although I may be wrong. A bullet’s path is entirely determined by the last bit of the barrel. Bores usually are not straight, but bullets aren’t influenced by whatever crooked paths they may traverse on the way to muzzles. Stretches of barrel farther down the line move them wherever they want. A bullet has no memory of what it was doing a few inches earlier.

If this is true, then indicating the last inch should be more than adequate. Whatever direction the last inch is pointing in will be the direction in which the bullet will fly.

This is my theory.

I plan to take the barrel out of the gun and cut it down to 16.5″. Then I’ll hold it in a 4-jaw chuck with about 2″ hanging out. I may have to find a way to stabilize the rear of the barrel, which will be unsupported in the lathe’s hollow spindle, but if I keep the speed low, I don’t think I’ll need to. It shouldn’t whip around.

I’ll put a nice face on the new muzzle. I’ll make an 11° crown. I’ll turn down the last half-inch for threading. I’ll put a small chamfer at the end to make it easier to get the barrel into the silencer. I’ll put a radiused recess in where the shoulder meets the turned-down part, so the threads will end before reaching the shoulder. Then I’ll thread the barrel and polish everything. Finally, I’ll blue the exposed metal.

I can also drill new holes near the muzzle so I can put the front sight back on the barrel.

This should work, and if it doesn’t, a new A22 barrel can be had cheaply.

When it’s over, I should have a handy, short gun that shoots a little better than it did originally. The velocity should be nearly the same. I won’t have to use hearing protection.

Unless I chicken out and get a new gun. Since starting to write this, I have learned new things, and I am wavering.

As bolt guns go, the Tikka is just about perfect. Fantastic trigger and barrel. Light. Super accurate. If I went this route, I wouldn’t have to do any work, and I’d have my first bolt-action .22.

A Savage Mark II would work, but gun nerds say they have ejection issues.

If I want to stick with semiauto, I can buy a shorter Savage barrel with a threaded muzzle and stick it in my A22.

Finally, I could buy a Savage A22 with a short barrel. They are not expensive at all. They’re so cheap, I could buy one and sell my old one and not lose more than maybe $150.

Of course, I wouldn’t sell the old one, because guns increase in value. I’d hang onto it as long as I had room for it. No reason to hurry.

I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this, with the squirrels avoiding every area where I can get a safe shot and forming conga lines and cheerleader-style pyramids between me and my neighbor’s house.

Whatever I end up doing, it looks like real squirrel-grade accuracy is possible, even with a semiauto.