Anyone experience a higher than usual failure rate in this stuff? It seemed like every magazine had at least one dud. I even loaded up and tried to shoot a couple of them 2-3 times just to see if it was a light strike or something. But nothing. Out of about 50-75 rounds there was about 5-8 rounds that refused to go bang. The other stuff I had didn’t have any issues.

Winchester M-22 has never been great ammo, but it was at it’s absolute worst when it was being made immediately after the Sandy Hook shooting. That was one of the biggest rimfire droughts ever, and every ammo maker was churning out rimfire as fast as they could.

M-22 was so bad. I would probably still say that Remington Thunderbolt is worse, but the M-22 is definitely in the hall of shame.

The funny thing is one of the other boxes I was pulling from was thunderbolt. And it did not disappoint. I would say it’s pretty well almost empty and I’ve had the thought before when running it through my rifle how I don’t recall having a single round from that box that didn’t fire. And I thought that was crazy.

IMHO ,, M-22 looks better than it shoots....

Wonder if the priming is not distributed well in the rims? Anyone take a dud and turn it 90 degrees and hit it again? Would be worth it to dissect so called dud 22s to see what is actually going on.

I was curious if they weren’t primed or possibly the rim was harder. A couple of them were reloaded multiple times and hit in different spots with no success. Next time I’ll have to save some and deconstruct them to see what I can see.

We were getting SO MANY of them that weren't going bang that we just piled them up after one try and we yanked the slugs from all of them to get a look.

It was absolutely the priming issue. Each round is supposed to have the slurry smeared a full 360 degrees, most of them had it only partially and a number of them had no slurry inside at all.

Every round had it's powder charge.

These were Winchester M-22 from multiple boxes, but all basically from either the same lot or very close lots.

Yes, most "dud" .22LR rounds often work if you try to hit 'em again on a different spot on the rim, but when you have really bad stuff, you'll find that many have no priming compound in them.

I have shot a blue million Winchester Super X and always thought they were the best but the last bunch I bought were junk. Some of the cases were bent and wouldn't chamber in my M17. Some boxes only had 49. There were some hollow points mixed in. There were 1 or 2 misfires out of every 10 boxes and sometimes they would fire if I turned them but sometimes they wouldn't fire. I'm sure that Winchester doesn't care but they lost a good customer. Larry

It is a sorry sight to see a Remington have less misfires than any .22 ammo that you are using !!

Many years ago, Win & Fed ammo was the best you could buy...........
today there are five types of .22 aamo that I don't buy............
even if it is on SALE !!

Times have changed.

I pulled a couple “dud” M-22 rounds. Didn’t see this one coming. Looks as though the priming compound broke apart and was just loose in the cartridge. Well at least that mystery is solved.

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Winchester .22 is the worst of the worst. One step above throwing rocks.