World's Smallest & Biggest Rimfires — 17 and 22 Calibers

hi ron spomer with a question what is the world's smallest rifle cartridge and what's the world's most powerful rimfire cartridge well the answers to that and a lot more on this episode of ron spomer outdoors [Music] before we uncover the world's smallest cartridge i want to thank our patrons on patreon for suggesting this topic and of course we want to thank them for their support they as we always say help keep the lights on if you're interested in joining us at ron swimmer outdoors just go to patreon.com and ron's bowmer outdoors we'd sure appreciate the help now we did a little survey of our patrons and asked them what they would like to see us covered and i think number two or three on the list was the 17s now most of us know the 22 calibers and it's pretty small the 22 long rifle would be one of the world's smallest cartridges but the 22 short is even smaller so if you guessed 22 short close but no cigar there's an even shorter one and it's a 17. now actual length is the same but the power is different it actually has a little more power than the 22 or at least a little more reach so we are going to cover rim fires today there are 17 caliber center fires as well but we're going to get pretty busy just covering the rim fire so we'll do the center fires another time today is rim fire time so the first rimfire cartridge was really the first self-contained cartridge a brass cartridge that had the primer in it the powder in it and the bullet on top the way we know cartridges today prior to that of course they had to have muzzle loaders where you loaded from the top and then they got some paper cartridges where the powder was wrapped in paper they had all sorts of variations of that before they finally came up with this internal priming compound in the rim of the cartridge and that's why it's called a rim fire we'll hold up an example here for you the rim actually has a primer put in it wet and then it's spun so that all the primer gets to the edges and then when the firing pin hits on that edge that's what squeezes it and ignites it and then of course ignites the main powder charge launches your bullet that's the difference between a rim fire and a center fire the center fire of course has a replaceable primer stuck in the center of the back of the case so the rim fires have one small problem well maybe it's a big problem and that is in order to squeeze that case and ignite that the case itself has to be fairly soft and then if you hit it too hard it blows open and you get the gases coming the wrong direction you want them following the bullet out the bore pushing it out the bore not bagging your face so it's kind of tricky to get the pressures just right and the thicknesses of the brass and everything just right on that case so typically your 22s whether it's the short long or long rifle your pressures are going to be under 20 000 psi and then when you step up to some of the bigger ones that pressure will go up a bit but that again makes it a little more challenging to get uh the thing built just right and consistent firing with different firing pin tensions and that sort of thing so it's a little bit tricky building those 22s so the first 22 came along in about 18 45 or a little earlier than that and they started with the caps back in the day where they were getting away from flint locks and they put a cap on the cap locks that cap had the priming compound in it well somebody thought why don't we just put a little bb on top of that to fit it and shoot the whole thing out in one bang and that became sort of a parlor fun gun it really wasn't considered to be a self-protection device or a hunting rifle or anything like that it was just shooting tiny little bbs out of those cb caps where you can still get cb caps i might even have some here um rifles you know they're made at any rate and it's not exactly the same but it's a really short little thing with hardly any powder in it and shoots a tiny little bullet well then they went up to shorts and then smith and wesson got involved and i think they built the first actual 22 short in a smith and wesson revolver and then they extended it from there they went to longs and then long rifles and then in the late 20th century we got things like the cci stinger which increased the length of the case just a little bit on that 22 and lightened up the bullet a smidgen and got more velocity out of it but you know that's about all you can do with that 22 and winchester came up with an idea of lengthening it a lot and they did that in 1959 with the 22 winchester magnum it's a winchester rimfire magnum and that one got to be fairly popular because it increased the velocity now a typical 22 long rifle called high velocity will have around 1 250 feet per second pushing a 40 grain bullet the 22 magnum increased that velocity to around 1800 to 1900 feet per second so that was significant but as you can see neither of them is particularly long and sleek they do not have what we call a high ballistics coefficient so they run out of gas fairly quickly because they're pushing so much air out of their way but still they're great little rounds for fairly close shooting and we're going to do some numbers and see what their maximum point blank ranges are and how much energy they carry downrange but we're going to move on to what have become well in the 21st century the new hot 17 rimfires and i think everyone knows the first one up and that is hornady's 17 hmr hornady magnum rimfire that thing really took off came out in 2002 and all it is is the 22 case the 22 mag case neck down to 17 and it throws a 17 grain bullet not much there but it throws it so fast about 2 500 to 2 550 feet per second and man that makes for a long reach with pretty flat trajectory even though it doesn't have quite the energy that the 22 carries in that 40 grain bullet it just reaches out there so far and it proved to be pretty successful on small rodents a lot of vermin squirrels rabbits uh i shot up to say red fox and uh raccoons and quite a few people we use them on coyotes so it really became a popular round just because it's what we've always been looking for when we were kids shooting 22s we wanted to move up in speed and velocity so we could reach out further for those jackrabbits we were hunting and the 22 mag was all the only option we had and back in those days they were a lot more expensive you know when you're scrounging up a dollar to buy a box of cartridges you don't want to have to spend two dollars for the same number um and then the other thing was that you weren't that many rifles made for it and they were not all that accurate and i don't know exactly why but uh they sort of got pooh-poohed because the accuracy was not quite up there with the standard 22s but the 17s really changed that so the 17 hmr came along and that was so successful that they decided to come up with a smaller one the world's smallest cartridge is the 22 can you see this little guy it's the 17 it was a 22 until they changed it to the 17 mach 2 and what they did was they took that cci stinger case which was a little bit longer than the standard long rifle on the 22 and they necked it down to 17 and they drive the same 17 grain bullet as the hmr but they can only push it about 2 100 feet per second and that's right about twice the speed of sound depending on the the altitude you are down at sea level is around a thousand thousand one hundred feet per second is the speed of sound so 2100 close enough they're going to call it mach 2. that did not exactly set the world on fire when it came out and fairly soon they stopped building rifles ford and then they stopped making ammunition for it and we thought it was dead in the water but savage to its credit continued to make rifles they chambered rifles for that guy and for some reason it caught on again and they started making ammo and now you can get ammunition for that from several different brands so i think that mach 2 is making it come back and it may be around to stay and i'm glad it is because i have found this to be what i consider probably the optimum squirrel hunting cartridge and i say that because the 17 hmr is great for the same job but it's got so much explosive energy that you even hit a squirrel in the head with it and you're probably going to lose the front quarters so it's just a little more oomph than you need for a squirrel and even this short little mock too i've used on squirrel hunts and i've have to be pretty careful to take a broadside headshot if i take a straight on head shot that squirrel is going to lose some meat and back in that the front quarters even with this little guy but the reason i think it's the ultimate for tree squirrels is you're shooting up in the air and if you hit a limb you're just going to knock that tiny little 17 grain bullet to pieces so there's very little ricochet with a solid 40 grain slug like you get in a 22 there's a lot of ricocheting if you've shot 22's a lot and plinked with them you've probably heard it and off it goes you know there's not a lot of energy in that bullet but you still you don't want a bullet flying around in the air in unspecified directions because of a ricochet and then shooting up into the trees like you do for squirrels that potentially that bullet could go a long way so just makes it i think a lot safer to break up the bullet if you miss your squirrel in the branches beyond um and also yeah i think even if that bullet did get somewhere downrange and maybe strike a cow inadvertently or something it's so tiny and it should have such a little bit of remaining energy i'm not sure it would do any significant damage or maybe even any damage at all of course you still want to be safe with them all the time but i just think it adds a little safety factor to shooting with a small rim fire for small game so there is your world's smallest cartridge and we're going to look at some numbers on that compare all the ballistics the maximum point-blank ranges of all of these but before we do that i want to now introduce the world's most powerful rimfire we're going to the opposite end of the spectrum and that takes us to the winchester wsm winchester super magnum it's not the short magnum i said to a friend yesterday a young fella hadn't heard of the 17 wsm and he said oh my gosh i must be screaming and they net that wsm down to 17 and then it struck me but he was thinking i said no no this isn't the 300 winchester short magnum neck down to 17. it's a whole different program just happens to have the same initials 17 wsm super magnum not short magnum well you look at that and think well what's the difference between that and the hornady 17. i don't know if you can see it right here we'll probably put some photographs up to have to get pretty close to make these really show but it's a bigger cartridge all the way around let me see if i can stand those guys up you got that so what they did with this hornady hmr of course was take that 22 necked it down what did they do with the winchester as you can see it's a lot bigger than the 22 win mag too they went with a 27 caliber nail cartridge a blank for driving nails in carpentry they necked that down to 17 and that's how they came up with this one now this guy really screams 20 grain bullets so you've got three grains more than the 17 and that doesn't sound like much but when you put the velocity that that extra powder capacity has in there you're driving at 3000 feet per second that's almost 500 feet per second faster than the hornady and that makes a huge difference we're going to look at that on our infamous ballistic charts this chart i think is really fascinating as you look down that list and we'll put it on the screen here for you you see first of all look for those mpbr those are maximum point blank range for a two inch diameter circle i figure that's about a squirrel's head or a cottontail head if you can hit that by a dead center aim out to 100 yards or so that makes for a pretty long reach for small game hunting right that would be your maximum point blank range so the way i set these up when i zeroed them we are not going to go more than an inch above our point of aim and when we drop an ish below our point of aim that's the end of our two inch target reach so the maximum point blank range on the 22 long rifle is 83 yards stepped down to the 22 wind mag where we thought we were going to really improve it and it only goes to 115 yards the mach 2 actually goes a little bit farther that tiny little guy will reach it out to 120 yards pretty remarkable for small game shooting and another reason that i like it for a tree squirrel round the 17 hmr is pushing it out to 145 yards and i have taken it out to 150 yards on uh ground squirrels quite handily um and it i just love it for any kind of an infestation of a ground squirrel in somebody's alfalfa field because you can really reach out there when those squirrels start to go under you're still able to stretch it out another 40 50 yards and then the 17 wsm takes it all the way to 182 yards that is getting out there on a flat flat trajectory with a two inch target pretty impressive so then you can look at the 50 yard 100 yard 150 yard and 200 yard drops and drifts and get an idea how once again you just go down the line and it's improvement after improvement with these rimfires except for the difference between a 22 wind mag and that 17 mach 2. that mach 2 because of that lighter sleeker bullet with a higher bc well it's not higher it's actually five points or 0.5 how would i explain that let's just say the 22 win mag is at 1 3 0 bc and the mach 2's bullet is a one two five but because it has faster launch speed at the muzzle that's where you get your improvement so you look out there on your drops and they're pretty close to the same you're looking at maybe an inch half inch difference between them but you've got a lot more energy in the 22 mag but do you need that energy on a squirrel i don't think so so that's the only two that don't just match up with a steady improvement down the line you certainly see it though with the hmr and the wsm you just extend your range you reduce your drift you reduce your drop and you end up with that wsm as the top of the heap i mean that's that's the one if you want to maximize your rim fire and right now that is the world's most powerful rimfire for reaching out there you know there's plenty of power when you start off with that 22 wind mag but not as much as that 17 ws amp even though it's got a lighter bullet at 3000 feet per second really helps so all of these are going to be quite explosive you're not going to expect a lot of penetration on anything that's not what they were designed for although there are different bullet options and i know for a while they had some full metal jacket bullets and i tried those on prairie dogs i couldn't even tell i was hitting the prairie dog it was just like a miss i missed they wouldn't react then they trot off after a few seconds and fall over so i wasn't real real keen on those i want to hit something i want it to be gone right now or as quickly as i can but you may find an application for those now there are some issues with rifles with some of these obviously 22s they've got that figured out for easily 150 years so you can find all sorts of 22s and all sorts of actions when you get into the 17s though things get a little tricky and one thing you will find hard to find are autoloaders you know ruger with their 1022 tried to make it a 17 hmr 22 didn't work out so well that extra pressure in those bigger cartridges are messing it up so you're slamming that bolt back so hard that you're doing damage so they had to slow it down or make it heavier and try to try to tweak it just so and they just weren't having luck with it volkhartsen tried it in their rifle and i had when it was shooting beautifully but it was at first it cracked the stock from it slamming back they made some adjustments put some titanium in tried to get it fixed up i guess they just never really could get it perfected so they gave up on it but the um the smaller one that mach 2 i think there's an auto loader out i think savage might have one there are a couple other other brands that aren't real well known and real popular that are successful with those in an autoloader so you might want to look for those otherwise you're looking at bold actions and break actions except for some ar-15 styles there are at least two out there that i have heard carry it and do quite well with it a lot of folks reported back that they were enamored of the function it was just always doing what it was supposed to do and quite accurate so if you're an ar fan you might be able to swap out the uppers and get one in the 17. at one time i got a barrel and a switch out system from someone who was trying to perfect it and we could never get it to be consistent sometimes it wouldn't go off sometimes it wouldn't eject properly and i sent it back and the general was going to fix it and get it back to me and i never saw it again so i don't know if it's impossible or if you just gave up on the project but there are at least two ars out there that are doing the 17 hmr successfully and a couple of them i think are doing the wsm as well so you want to look for those i have here on the table some examples of some easy to find rifles in 17s as well as the 22s this is the contender and most of us know this single shot from thompson center i got this one in the mach 2. i just need to put a scope back on it and i'm squirrel hunting so pretty simple you just break action load it up [ __ ] the hammer take your shot people love these because you can swap barrels back and forth a lot of folks have them in a 22 already so there's a fairly inexpensive way to move up one of my favorites for the um honeydew magnum fire is this ruger it's the 77-17 what puzzled me is why they didn't make the same system successfully with the wsm they had one and i had it and was shooting it and always having a little bit of problem getting consistent groups with it it's more like an inch and a half when i thought i should be getting under an inch but i have since heard from folks who said that they've made a couple of changes and their rifles are shooting half inch or better with the wsm and they were really excited about it i'm not sure ruger is still making and offering that one but worth looking into even if you find an older one i think they have some aftermarket triggers and things that might be fixing that up and then the one that i currently have for the wsm is uh one of the first ones that was chambered in it and that is browning's version of the winchester 85 and this is a single shot that was invented by browning in 1878 and i did a video on this one you can check it out i got this guy shooting down under an inch and a few times at half inch so it took a bit of work sanding on the end and then really perfecting my technique had to be really easy because it's got such a slim forend it wants to rock in the cradle when i'm shooting off the bench but it certainly has the accuracy there for a thin barrel and a fairly light rifle i'm i'm pressed and it's doing a great job i have taken those out in the ground squirrel fields and just had a great time because they reach out so far i was reaching out to 200 yards and while doing some testing i went out to 300 yards and i got a two and i think it was two and three quarter inch five shot group at 300 yards one time with the wind deflections and sort that's pretty impressive with a little bullet like that so uh you've got the chart there we maybe put it up again for you to study for a little bit but go to my website um and look also on youtube i've got some older videos on these cartridges back in oh gosh a good s probably even getting onto eight nine years ago some fairly popular ones on the wsm there's one that shows some of the impact when i was shooting jugs of water with a 22 17 hmr and i think the 17 wsm i don't remember if i had a 22 win mag in there but that's kind of fun because you can see the differences in the impact the 22 just puts a hole in it and with the mach 2 or the uh hornaday hmr they make a pretty significant splash and jump that bottle up in the air but with the wsm there's a significant explosion you can really tell the pressure differences on those so once again you look at the numbers and that on the energy and that's what's impressive about that wsm in addition to being the flattest it carries more energy than the 22 wind mag with a 40 grain bullet so 20 grain to 40 grain you'd think it would be less but it's considerably more energy that doesn't mean it's going to penetrate as well but again as i said these explosive bullets weren't designed to penetrate all that much anyway you're shooting them into fairly small animals so they're going to come to pieces in the thoracic cavity and you're going to get a pretty dramatic and instantaneous demise and that's what you want with the little 17 calibers so those are the 17s with some 22s thrown in to put things in perspective that is the rimfire family now now one little caveat not really a caveat but just an extra plug here at the end someone is surely going to bring up the five millimeter remington this was a 1969 project i'm pretty sure remington came out with and it's similar to a 22 mag but it's neck down to 20 caliber 5 millimeter and that one was fairly cons well it was it was not widely accepted but i thought it was pretty darn effective it does not match the wsm 17 here but it went away in just a few years i don't know if people weren't ready for it yet or what but that was at the time the fastest and hardest hitting to um rimfire cartridge i borrowed a rifle i believe it or not from my english teacher in high school what a great guy he let me borrow his remington rifle and take it out fox hunting and as luck would have it i snuck up on a fox and took him with that that five millimeter so i was pretty excited about that but at the time i didn't have enough money to buy a rifle i wish i'd had but then it went away they quit making the ammo for it now i think aguia is making ammunition for it again so look around and you can find that five millimeter remington rimfire ammunition so that's the story on the rimfires here in the 21st century they're still going strong i would invite you to take a careful look at one or more of these 17s it's kind of fun to have the world's smallest 17 and the world's most powerful rimfire in the same arsenal so there's something for you to look forward to until next time this is ron spumber thanking you for watching invite you to subscribe to our channel join us on patreon until next week on honest to shoot straight [Music] you

Channel: Ron Spomer Outdoors

Views: 308,504

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, 17 hmr, 22 magnum, 22 mag, rimfire vs centerfire, 22 caliber rimfire, 17 caliber rimfire cartridges

Id: RycZohILKfA

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 30 2021