Of course whenever you have metal parts moving against each other it is important to consider the lubrication. I’ve been using Interflon Fin Super on all my guns and have been very pleased with it. So I didn’t expect to have any issues using it on any gun.

But recently I purchased a .22 that was known, even by the manufacturer, as being very picky about the type of ammo used in it. Okay, fine, I like my guns to be reliable but this gun had some advantages that I was willing to put up with using only certain types of ammo. I’m not mentioning the gun or the brands of ammo because I, legally, obtained this gun without any paperwork and I would like to keep the details as private as is practical.

I had a two of the recommended types on hand and put several hundred rounds downrange with only a few problems which I attributed to it being a new gun and probably weren’t anything to worry about. I cleaned and lubricated the gun and took it to the range again when Cherie was doing some training. The gun failed to feed on almost every round and we quickly gave up on it.

Later I took it to the range with the specific goal of diagnosing the problem. The slide appeared to not coming all the way back and hence would not properly strip the round off the top of the magazine. This was consistent with the recommendation to only use 40 grain high velocity ammo in the gun. They want to deliver lots of momentum to the slide and low velocity/mass ammo and/or viscous lubrication would result in a slide that didn’t go completely back. I ordered 1000 rounds of another type of recommended ammo to see if that made a difference.

While waiting for the ammo to show up I cleaned the gun again, carefully lubricated it with Interflon Fin Super and put the disassembled gun underneath an incandescent light bulb to dry the liquid so it would just have the semi-dry film rather than the moist layer I had with the previous trip to the range. About the first five to seven rounds failed to strip off the magazine properly. Then it worked great for probably fifty rounds of every type of ammo I had that the manufacture recommended and even did mostly okay with brand the manufacture specifically said would not work.

That’s odd, I thought. It needs to warm up before it functions properly? Maybe it does! The gun had been cold in my car all morning. The range was pretty cool too. So I set the gun aside with the action open and shot some .40 in my STI DVC for a while. When the .22 was cool I tried some of the ammo, in the same magazine, that was working fine a few minutes earlier. Again, the first half magazine was nothing but failure to feeds, then it worked flawlessly for a couple hundred rounds.

Time to try a new lubricant.

I cleaned the gun again, pulled the Eezox Synthetic Gun Oil off the shelf, lubricated the parts, and put them under the light to dry off for 24 hours and went to the range again. The first couple rounds had a problem then it worked great again. Letting it cool didn’t result in misbehavior like with the Interflon Fin Super. I’m making progress!

I again cleaned the gun, this time I lubricated it with Brownell’s Friction Defense, and again put the parts under the light to dry for 24 hours. I went to the range today at lunch time and the gun worked fine with all the recommended ammo, including the new stuff I ordered which just came in, and, again, even some of the stuff the manufacturer specifically did not recommend. The only ammo which basically didn’t work at all was some “standard velocity” ammo.

Okay, so I have an extremely sensitive gun. It needs the right type of lubricant, the right type of ammo, and probably can’t be counted on to function properly in really cold weather either. I still have an application for it. But it’s more of a hassle than what I had originally planned on.

The Ruger .22s I have eat anything I feed them and with whatever I lubricate them with. But they don’t quite deliver on one thing this new gun does. There are trade-offs in almost everything you do. Now that I know what lubricant works best I can probably avoid the problem most of the time and make it work for my intended use.

Update December 27, 2015: New information here.

On November 3rd I had surgery on my left shoulder. Over three and half weeks later I still have large bruises and somewhat limited range of motion.

But I had made it to the range a couple of times for practice and my shooting was okay and only occasionally experienced some pain. So Saturday I went to Whidbey Island for the Holmes Harbor Rod and Gun Club steel match.

I tried to take just a little more time before squeezing off the shot but still make the target transitions as quickly as I could. This seemed to work a lot better than if I tried to make everything go fast.

My rimfire results in particular were very good. I cut my total match time by over 10 seconds (this is about a 15% improvement!). This was a total of 56.64 seconds for five stages. Since there are four strings of five shots in each stage this means my average time for each string was 2.83 seconds. And since every stage requires five shots the average time per shot was 0.5664 seconds. I’m constantly amazed this is even possible let alone that I am capable of shooting this fast on targets likes these:

But it’s possible. Here is the video to prove it:

The scores were:

From Tactical Warrior Wear.

I like this one best:

For many years I’ve been fighting a losing battle (daughter Jaime claims I lost the battle years ago) about people calling a “magazine” a “clip”. I’m not fighting the battle alone though. Guy Sagi posted Top Media-Abused Gun Terms and points out the problem is larger than I usually view it:

Clip—Any ammunition-retention system, including magazines, speed loaders, belts, bandoleers and TSA screeners.

I was expecting the worst when I went to Whidbey Island for the monthly steel match. I have been very busy recently and hadn’t shot a pistol in nearly a month. After I arrived I realized I had left my race holster at home. My centerfire shooting was all from an inside the waistband holster and my draw time showed this.

I was surprised to do as well as I did. I did quite well (I won) with iron sighted rimfire pistol and decent (second place) with iron sighted centerfire pistol:

RF-RI-O: Rimfire Rifle Optics

RF-O: Rimfire Pistol Optics
RF-I: Rimfire Iron sights
PCC-O: Pistol Caliber Carbine Optics
RF-RI-I: Rimfire Rifle Iron sights
CF-I: Centerfire Iron sights

PCC-I: Pistol Caliber Carbine Iron sights

This was a “USPSA like” match I shot in last Sunday. The shooting part was by USPSA rules but the stage designs were NOT! Stages had from 40 to 60 rounds. This was the 60 round stage:

Here is a 59 round stage:

I didn’t do all that well at this match. I made a fair number of mistakes. I overlooked one target. I failed to shoot another target twice, and I had far too many misses on the all steel stage. I also started one stage, stage 5 which I don’t have video of, with a magazine that was only about half full.

It was fun though. There weren’t any no-shoots. There wasn’t any hard cover. There weren’t any disappearing targets. There was just a lot of trigger pulling, reloading and of course fun.

Overall I placed 44th out of 83. In Limited Division I was 25th out 41. Other results things such as individual stage results can be found here.

My shooter point of view video:

Loke was in my squad and has his own video and commentary on the match. His video, and of course his shooting (he came in second overall) is far better than mine:

Ry and I were at the Boomershoot site in Idaho this weekend when Sebastian sent me an email asking about steel penetration by bullets. I was pretty sure I gave him off the cuff correct answers but I was in a good position to do some of the tests. The next morning Ry and I found a piece of 0.5” mild rod and I shot it a few times.

The question was, “Could a pistol bullet severely damage the mild steel rod? Or is severe damage proof that AP rifle rounds were used?” I said, “I don’t think 1000 FPS pistol bullets will do that.” But I also said that a rifle, even relatively low powered lead core rounds, would go right through. Ry said, “The pistol bullets will only polish the metal.”

Here is the photographic evidence:

Entrance of a .223 52 grain JHP from 30 feet.

Side view of the .223 shot.

Left to right are Winchester Ranger 180 grain .40 S&W, hand loaded 180 grain polymer coated lead, .223 exit.

The Winchester Rangers were probably going about 1015 fps and polished the metal a little better than the handloads going about 950 fps. I don’t have any chronograph data of my own for the .223 rounds out of my gun but Black Hills says to expect about 3250 fps.

This shows why those who wish to ban ammo that penetrates police soft body armor are actually proposing to ban all hunting ammo.

Saturday I went to Whidbey Island for the steel match at Holmes Harbor Rod & Gun Club. I had specially practiced for this match last Thursday and had high hopes of doing well.

Here are the results:

I won in both rimfire iron sighted (RF-I) and centerfire iron sighted (CF-I). In a similar match last month I had times of 69.39 seconds and 82.6 seconds compared to this months 67.22 and 82.13 seconds. Those differences are essentially in the noise unless the stages were more difficult this month but comparison of other shooters between the months doesn’t show a clear pattern so I’m going with I didn’t shoot measurably better this month. I had a lot of misses so I think I probably was doing the transitions quickly enough to make up for the misses. If I can combine the speed up in transitions with accuracy then I might see some improvement.

Here are pictures of the stages. You can play a game of “Where’s the tennis ball?” in each of the pictures to discover the starting aiming point for people shooting rimfire guns.

I used my video glasses to record most of the stages. Again I forgot to turn on the glasses for one of the stages.

I was very pleased with one string (starting at 0.00:24). I shot five targets in 1.94 seconds. The first shot took about 0.77 seconds so the remaining four had an average split time of less than 0.30 seconds.

It was hazy from all the smoke but I had a nice ferry ride on my way home: