Well, I managed to take my somewhat problematic Tactical Solutions AR-22 SBX Upper to the range today, and… well, the best I can say is that it does manage to fire and extract now, and that it is fairly accurate. When it wants to fire. Which is not often.
I was shooting Winchester Super-X Copper-Plated Lead Hollow Point .22 Long Rifle ammunition, and the best the upper managed to perform was four misfires out of a magazine of 25, and the worst was about 7. The symptom appeared to be light strikes, judging from the aft ends of the rounds – the successfully fired cases (including those I tried to fire again after they misfired once) had significantly deeper creases than the not-quite-duds.
And just to make sure the ammunition was not misbehaving, I ran a full 50-round box through the Smith & Wesson L-Frame .22 revolver Oleg let me borrow and did not encounter a single misfire of any type.
*sigh* To be fair, I am using a Chip McCormick Tactical Trigger Group, and I guess it is entirely possible it could be light-striking the SBX bolt, but my own tinkering with the lower seemed to indicate that its hammer struck harder than a “mil-spec” part kit, so I have no idea.
At this point, I am going to call the SBX upper a wash until such time as I build out my spare AR-15 with all “standard” components. I honestly do not know what could be causing the problem, so it is just time to start at the beginning and move forward. The good news is that Coal Creek Armory has agreed to order in that Magnum Research Magnum Lite rifle I was talking about recently without any agreement on my part of actually purchasing the thing, so that is pretty cool – it will give me an opportunity to try it on and see how it fits, and, at this point, it may turn out to be my go-to .22 rifle regardless.
I dare say I am slightly disappointed in Tactical Solutions by now; granted, they cannot exactly guarantee full functionality with all potential aftermarket configurations of AR-15s, but I kind of expected better from pretty much one of the leaders in the “conversion kit” industry.
And just to cap off this all-too-enjoyable day at the range, I had to drop $120… on a new battery for the car. Bleh.
I have the same problem with a Chiappa M4-22 upper. The firing pin isn’t long enough to maintain contact with the hammer so it becomes “inertia driven” on its travel to strike the rim of the round. I’m going to dremel the bolt body below the firing pin to remove a bit of metal to allow better contact to see if that fixes the problem.
Any reason for wanting a dedicated 22 upper instead of a drop in conversion kit? My CMMG drop in kit (stainless) has been awesome with (only) ~1500 rounds through it. Biggest headache was getting the mags to seat properly which took all of 5 minutes.
Well, in this particular case, the primary draw was the SBX barrel – it allows you to have a suppressed firearm in the same overall barrel length as a “standard”, non-SBR rifle, without having to register the entire firearm if it was integrally suppressed.
Secondarily, I kind of assumed a dedicated upper would operate better than just a conversion bolt, but, apparently, I was somewhat mistaken.
I just realized something — your barrel length and spring weight may have been meant for suppressed use. We should try it with my can and see if the extra back pressure makes the difference.
Hm. I am not sure how the backpressure of the firing rounds would affect how hard the firing pin is impacting the primer, but it is worth a shot!
If light strikes are the problem, that won’t help. I was thinking about the ejection. Does TS have a suggestion on how to solve this?
Also, try Eley or Aguila ammo, it might go off more reliably.
Have not gotten in touch with them yet; need to.
And I guess it is time to dip into that box-o-ammo, eh?