There’s a rodent problem at the family farm and I offered up a .410 Saiga to my dad to help get rid of them. He said he’d rather have something quieter, like a .22LR rifle.
Hey, I know a guy that’s got a few of those!
So, the next day I used my lunch hour to hit Grand Valley Sporting Goods to see if they had any subsonic .22 ammo. They had some CCI CB Longs so I snagged 200 rounds and hit the range.
They advertise a velocity of 710fps and the bullet is a 29 grain Lead Round Nose. I got my Savage Mark-II FSS sighted in with them. Well, mostly. The elevation is still horribly off, but I’ll get to that later.
These rounds are exceptionally quiet. It sounds like a good pellet gun, really. The bullet impact on the chip-board target backing made more noise than the actual shot. There’s certainly no need to wear any hearing protection with these!
Of course, that shouldn’t come as any surprise. There’s no powder in the rounds. They rely entirely on the primer to get the job done if I’m not mistaken.
The problem I had with adjusting elevation is that with the rear sight as low as it’ll go rounds were impacting about 4.5″ high at 15 yards and around 5.5″ high at 25 yards. I ran those numbers through a ballistic chart calculator and that indicates that the rifle is zeroed for 100 yards. That seems rather odd… a 100 yard zero using subsonic ammunition out of a .22? Somebody, please, tell me that this is not normal. That means I’ll have a zero around 190 yards with standard velocity (around 1050fps) .22 ammo. That really doesn’t sound right, and yes, I verified that I’m still around 5.5″ high at 25 yards using some standard velocity Federal ammo while I was there.
In related news, I wouldn’t recommend a Savage Mark-II FSS. The trigger is horrible with a lot of play in it. It’s the only gun I’ve ever seen that has significant side-to-side wobble in the trigger. Oh, and it breaks around 12lbs. Yuck.
