Cartridges That Killed the 222 Remington

[Music] hi everyone ron spomer back with more cartridges and today i'm launching with this one everyone knows the 30 odd sex and one of the things most of us know about the 30 op 6 is that it was used as a parent cartridge to make a lot of others most famously the 270 but also the 338.6 the 35 wayland 25 odd 6 the 280. there's lots of them and that is a factor in a lot of our cartridges we just use one like this to make a bunch more by modifying the shape of the case you can neck it down you can shorten it you can lengthen it you can change the slope of the shoulder a lot of options so the 30 odd six was a good platform for making other cartridges but there of course were others and one that will probably surprise you is this that little guy is the two to two remittance also known affectionately as the triple deuce and it was ah just a real popular cartridge in its day it came out in 1950 remington turned it out there was a guy working at remington the name of mike walker and he was pretty innovative guy i think he wore a lot of hats for remington so he was kind of a pr guy a marketing manager but he also designed things and one of them was that 2-2-2 cartridge and after he cranked that out he started something called bench rest competition shooting this whole idea of trying to print tiny tiny little groups was started by him and some friends and that 222 remington was a big part of it because it was extremely accurate little cartridge it would drive a 50 grain bullet around 3 200 feet per second and yet of course just swept through that bench rest field everyone was shooting it and went on to make all kinds of accuracy records including a world record that stood for 40 years and that was in 1973 getting pretty far into its lifespan but someone i think was mac macmillan shot a five shot group at 100 yards into one hole and i mean literally one hole not a ragged hole and the official score of it was 0.009 i believe and it stood for 40 years before it was finally broken wow so that says a lot about that 222 but it was also extremely popular with varmint shooters it was real popular with the fox hunters because it didn't damage the pelts very much shot pretty flat you could figure on about a 250 to maybe 300 yard dead on hold if you use the right bullet good high ballistics coefficient and whatnot and almost no recoil 25 grains of powder in that would drive that bullet and just with that tiny of a bullet and that much powder didn't amount to much so the recoil was almost nothing i'm real delight to shoot and it was extremely popular when it came out because it sort of fed in the middle of these two this is the 22 hornet came out i think in 1930 and then in 35 they came out with this 220 swift so those are all 22 calibers but man what a difference in velocity of those bullets if you're pushing roughly the same bullet you've got maybe three to 400 feet per second slower out of the hornet and about the same faster with the 220 swift so that 222 fell right in the middle made it pretty convenient for folks who couldn't make up their mind and off it went so it was a great cartridge but what most of us don't realize is that 222 like the 30 at 6 became a parent cartridge for quite a few others some of which might really surprise you they certainly did me a couple of eye openers for me when i started examining this so let's see if i can get the chronology right on this so the 222 comes out in 1950 and it rolls along and the military starts looking for a new replacement cartridge for the what they were using at the time was the 30 odd six and they were working on the 308 that wouldn't really be adopted until the mid 50s so they took a look at that 2-2-2 and of course they had some standards that had to be met one of which was the bullet had to penetrate the typical soldier's helmet at 500 yards i believe it was the remington threw that 222 into the mix and didn't quite make the grade so they thought what are we going to do let's lengthen it get a little more powder in it still be able to function in those short actions and they made the 222 remington magnum of course at the time it wasn't called that it was an experimental cartridge but the military rejected it for some reason so remington thought we did all that research and development let's recoup some of our expenses here and turn it into a commercial cartridge so they called it the 222 rem mag why not it added about 100 feet per second to the two two two and it was just a little bit longer now i apologize because i don't actually have one on the table i could not find one in my supply of little demonstration cartridges so just think of a cartridge that's a little bit longer than that 2 2 2 and that's your red mag but then that is probably going to remind you of something else that's real common and real popular right there this is the son or daughter of this 222 that really sent it to an early grave it's the 223 remington now wait a minute this guy is actually just a smidgen smaller or shorter than the 222 rem mag and yet the military chose this one they developed it so i don't know if it was a d it was like the military was saying remington we don't like your 222 remain idea so we're going to make one on the same platform a little bit shorter and that's going to make the grade i don't know how that happened but the the pressures from sami on both of those are the same i think they're 55 000 psi so why the 223 comes up with a little more velocity and wins that contract i don't know but at any rate that came out in 1963 officially and once the military adopted that one remington saw the writing on the board and that we had better turn that into a commercial cartridge too because at that time they were taking over from winchester in the 22 market used to be all winchester stuff the 220 swift the 22 hornet they had a lot of different 22s and here comes remington storming in with that two two and the whole family that's about to erupt so they come out with the two two three and it's kind of funny why would you name it two two three it's also a two two two it's shooting a two two four bullet size that's your diameter why don't you call it a 2 2 4 or a 2 2 2 because it's a 22 caliber i suspect it was pretty obvious you've got too many 2 2 2s flying around out there how are we going to distinguish this one from the other two let's throw a three on the end of it even though it didn't have anything to do with anything there's no three in there anywhere anyhow they called it the two two three remington and now they had that family a little bit shorter two two two a little bit longer two two 2-2 remag which we don't have here and then the 2-2-3 well guess who survived and thrived of course the military cartridge because the brass just rained down there was all sorts of brass free for the picking up at the range and you could make anything you want out of that thing so off to the races they went so that was 1963. now the real surprise no that was 64 actually when they came out they were playing around with it yet but remington didn't adopt it till 64. what they adopted in 63 was a real surprise this little guy this is the 2 2 1 fireball now we've got the number game going on again so there's your 222 remington shorten it down and call it the 2-2-1 fireball once again you don't want to have too many twos in there now what's that little guy good for i mean if the 2-2-2 wasn't fast enough and they had to go to a longer one a couple of them actually why do they suddenly go short well at the time they were developing that bolt action pistol the xp-100 and the 2-2-2 was burning too much powder on the outside of that 14-inch barrel i think they used 10 and a half to fourteen and a half inch barrels in those and they were just wasting powder so they thought let's go a little bit shorter cut like the powder by about five grains and they get a complete burn in that shorter barrel bingo there's your two two one fireball really popular with a handgun folks what's really amazing about that though is it went on to foster a lot of cartridges of its own and that's what we're going to get into for the rest of this video but before i do that i want to show you something you rarely see jewelry on me i am not a jewelry kind of guy but my wife got me these delightful bracelets which are really pretty coarse there's no gold there's no platinum there are no diamonds it's just some old wire so why am i wearing some goofy wire bracelets because this supports an organization called shepherds of wildlife they are in africa helping the africans to help themselves and wildlife at the same time shepherds of wildlife raises money by using the anti-poaching patrols who capture the snares that are used over there for snaring everything it's a big big problem so they clean up these snares and i mean they had piles and piles of wire snares and someone came up with a brilliant idea i'm guessing it was the wife of one of the ph's or one of the button guys over there why don't we make bracelets out of it it will employ the locals they make the bracelets we sell those and use the money to fund the villagers and improve their life and and make it so they don't have to go out and poach and snare and trap these animals so for about fifty dollars you can buy one of these i mean it's a piece of wire it's probably worth 50 cents but boy does it ever support a good cause so if you would like to help with this cause just go to shepherds shepherdsofwildlife.org and look for those bracelets and if you can pick one or two of them up you will help support conservation in africa now back to our 222 remington family so they've got the little fireball for their handguns now what are you going to do to grow that family even more well one of the ideas was to make a 17 caliber you know they're always looking for new ideas and one of the new things was 17 because even though the wildcatters were playing around with it and there was a 17222 it wasn't commercialized so they took a hard look at that and thought you know rather than go with the 2 2 2 and that get down to 17 like the wildcatters do let's jump over to that two two three version and then they shorten it just a little bit so that you see the shoulder sits down a little bit lower on that one that prevents you from shoving it two two three into there and trying to run that 22 caliber bullet down to 17 caliber barrel okay makes a lot of sense the upshot though was by putting a 25 grain 17 caliber bullet on top of that little guy they were able to drive that 4 300 feet per second that's as fast as the 220 swift can push a 40 grain bullet so you've got a contender here for the fastest commercial cartridge in the world 17 remington came out 1971. and it's fairly popular with the usual varmint shooter class good for all the ground rodents that are bothering the alfalfa fields and whatnot but fairly good on on coyotes too and in red fox once again you use a small bullet like that and you don't damage the fur as much as with a heavier one so it was never really took off and real popular but boy if you're looking to do a lot of long range shooting and flat and i'm not talking 500 yards stuff but out to 300 but shoot really flat with no recoil and very little powder this is an inexpensive round shoot and don't get freaked out about what most people do which is the fear of plugging up that bore getting it fouled and then you won't shoot i have heard from several guys who have tested that 17 shot something like 200 rounds in a row without cleaning it and it was just as accurate as before and it cleaned up rather quickly too i have not tried that but you always hear that you can't shoot 10 rounds to it and it's plugged up you got to clean it apparently that's not true so you might want to look into that because in this day and age with the prices of ammo you can cut that down a lot you can get a lot more loads out of a pound of powder putting them into one of those little guys at around 20 grains then something bigger something to consider okay so what happened next in 2004 ruger came up with an idea in conjunction with hornady they came out with a cartridge based on these called the 204 ruger the only to this day it is still the only 20 caliber commercial cartridge out there now again there were several wildcats and what they decided to do instead of using the 2 2 3 neck down to 20 they went up to that 2 2 2 rem mag which boy by 2004 i don't even know where they found the brass for it it's just not a very popular cartridge anymore so the 204 ruger is a little bit longer than a 2-2-3 and it's a screamer i mean this will push the 30 grain 25 about a 30 grain bullet 4 000 feet per second or so you shoot that and it has almost the same ballistics curve as a 20 a 22 250 shooting i think a 55 grain bullet so once again you've got a lot less powder a lot smaller bullet a lot less expense involved in that 204 and for folks who are a little bit leery of stepping down to that skinny little 17 and yet they want something a little smaller than the 22s good option is that 204 ruger and what happened after that boy here's a kind of a surprise that little 2-2-1 fireball came alive in some other formats and one of them was the 17 fireball now remington came out with that 17 fireball in 2007 pretty late in the game because the wildcatters are playing around with it for a long time they already had the 17 remington and some folks were thinking that's too much powder for that little of a bullet blah blah blah why don't we just shorten that down there won't be as much powder to push it you won't follow us quickly satisfy some of those folks who worried about the fouling we'll go with the 17 on the fireball so the mach 4 was the popular name for the wildcat the 17 mach 4 because it would just break 4 000 feet per second with a 20 grain bullet so they thought bam let's not go with the same thing the wild catters are using let's change it up a little bit so they changed the shape of the case just a little bit i think it's a little bit shorter than the mach 4. called it the fireball which i think is a great name i mean the cartridge called the fireball how can you miss so there it is the two two one fireball became the 17 fireball and now you had a couple of them but the real surprise is what they did next that was the 300 blackout now this is a strange one imagine if you would this little two two one this short stumpy little thing that only holds about 15 grains of powder and you're gonna open that up to a 30 caliber and what are you going to shoot in that thing 150 grain bullets yeah how about 220 yeah they shoot 220 grain bullets out of that little powder supply how does that work well the idea was silence or as close to it as you can get the experimenting was by jd jones who started a cartridge he called the whisper in fact the whole family based on that 221 fireball the whisper clan six millimeter whisper six point five seven millimeter up to thirty at which point you don't have enough diameter there to neck it down anymore your neck clear out you're almost a straight there's a little bit of a shoulder on that 30 blackout well jd called it the whisper and it was pretty successful but it was always a proprietary cartridge so when aac a company called aac i believe uh started designing one they thought well we can't step on his toes so we're gonna change it up a little bit enough that we can call it something else we'll call it the blackout because a lot of the military were looking at this as a useful tool for i don't know 100 yards shooting maybe a little farther but quiet because you could load that with a big heavy bullet and drive it about 1100 maybe a thousand feet per second and that is under the sound barrier so speed of sound you're not going to have that ballistic crack of the bullet so it goes crack kaboom right there at the gun but downrange you don't hear the ch wacko that you can hear on a ballistic bullet so that was the basic idea and the military would use it for special ops undercover in the dark and they'd put suppressors on the front of the gun and all and boy pretty successful well of course somebody started fooling around with it and figured out that not only is it fun to shoot targets and not make a lot of noise while you're doing it but it proved to be pretty effective on feral hogs and if you know anything about feral hogs in the south they cause billions of dollars of damage to agricultural crops down there and they're spreading all over and it's just difficult to control them so if you go out at night with a suppressor on a blackout rifle you can shoot that round and before the pigs figure out what's going on you can take out quite a few of them so there's one of the places where that blackout is really shiny again i wish i had the cartridge here to show you but i looked through my supply and i could not find one i have never worked with that but a friend of mine tom claycomb did a hog hunt in texas last year and he was really impressed he told me he was shooting at 300 blackout and i said he'll probably bounce off he said it worked beautifully and no recoil as you can imagine hardly any recoil with that tiny little bit of powder wow what a development and who would have thought all those years of trying to come up with faster and more powerful cartridges now we're going the other direction but it makes sense because there are special purposes and special uses so why not take advantage of the cartridges we have reshape them rebrand them come up with something new that does something that really no other cartridge had done before and that's essentially what they do with the blackout so there's your family with that little two two two unfortunately the poor little guy is pretty much dead you know he went on to father father a whole extended clan in the meanwhile they left him in the dust i always say it's kind of like the old uh the princes of the king the sons of the king back in the old days in the middle ages and whatnot would often bump off the poor old guy so they could become the king it's kind of what these guys did to the 2-2-2 so today the king of the whole heap is of course the 2-2-3 that's really what did in that 2-2-2 remington and really i can't complain and i can't blame people for using it once again you've got the abundance of the military brass everybody in his dog who loads ammunition loads two two three you can find some really inexpensive stuff or you can get some high grade high quality stuff extremely accurate i don't suspect it's any less accurate than the 222 remington so why not and the 222 is going away and i don't think anyone chambers rifles for it anymore maybe a few folks in europe but boy not over here it's just a 222 rem that's definitely gone because that's so close to the two two three why bother so the 204 ruger i think is going to hang around and i don't know about that 17 i think it should the 17 remington i think it's a good option um especially for foxes and coyotes and fur getting um but the little fireball family not only is it hanging in there it's actually increasing it's growing pretty strong so of all the 22's my favorite is still the 22-250 remington but that's not part of this family at all it's much bigger and you can see this right here look at the size difference on that this is actually the same room size as the 30 odd six let's drag that guy out here and show you see look at the difference there so this guy is closer to the 220 swift those two are still at the top of the heap for vermin cartridges for long range but boy if you're looking for efficiency you don't want to burn a lot of powder save a little bit of money that 222 remington family is who you want to look to so hey let's all give a big round cheer for the 222 remington 1950 mike walker thank you for cranking that guy out because that was a brand new cartridge there was no parent cartridge for the 222. they started from scratch made it out of whole cloth and man did it go on to change the cartridge world hey thanks for watching i'm ron spomer inviting you to subscribe to the channel and if you can check us out on patreon become a patron and you will help us to fund the production of these videos which we really enjoy doing so thanks to all our current patrons and i hope a few more of you folks could join us to help us out we really appreciate it thanks for watching this episode of whatever this stuff is i do and don't forget buy those bracelets to help [Music] africa [Music] you

Channel: Ron Spomer Outdoors

Views: 111,297

Rating: 4.9553905 out of 5

Keywords: outdoors, ron spomer outdoors, ron spomer, hunting, firearms, guns, shooting sports, rifles, big game hunting, hunting gear, hunting gear review, rifle review, gun review, 222 remington, 222 rem, 30-06, 222 remington cartridge, reloading 222 remington cartridge

Id: H3gLn-KOu68

Length: 22min 37sec (1357 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021