Hey Clubby, in your experience, who is making excellent .22 LR rounds these days? For plinking or for hunting small game.
i've had the best luck with CCI Mini Mags (and for small game Velocitor) are great for sheer reliability and versatility with Eley Tenax for actual repeatable accuracy (in a competition setting). Aguila Super Extra plated 40gr and Federal Champion or Automatch (or M-22) works for blasting ammo in a lot of .22LR guns i've tried them with, both my own and with other people. a close third place with Aguila/Federal might be Remington Golden Bullet - now it's generally not all that great but for people that use a conversion kit from Advantage Arms, Marvell, CMMG, Colt, Beretta, CZ, et c for a .22LR pistol they work surprisingly well. Thunderbolt and a lot of other stuff i keep for manual actions only (revolvers, repeaters, et c). shout out to SK ammo which works really good in a lot of .22 handguns, but i haven't tried it in a lot of different firearms to really say they're was "wide ranging" as CCI mini mags.
I never got the point of the M4 with only a 3 round burst with no full auto. Like its barely better than a civvie AR-15 in my perspective. It sounds like it was adopted from a very bureaucratic perspective.
it was a hold over from the M16A2 carbine project. the M4A1 returned back to offering full auto, but since 90% of the time we were shooting semi anyway it wasn't a big deal unless you really needed to achieve fire superiority - and that wasn't even the job of someone with a carbine anyway. since the carbine was so versatile and hit the right size, weight, compatibility, and price it became a bit of a defacto cool guy gun instead of bespoke spooky stuff that was in some cases
too specialized. maybe the M4 wasn't the best at everything, but short of walking around with a couple fire teams with a longer logistical train to have a bunch of specialized tools for different situations it was an awful lot nicer to carry a carbine and kind of do most things well and have only one or two specialists with you. you can also rather easily bolt stuff onto an M4 in many ways (gangster grips, clamps for lights or optics, et c) for mission specific situations.
i used the gangster grip with a slightly cut down A2 grip for a long time since it pre-dated the RIS, and when some cool guys showed us the ARMS swan sleeve and SIR system, i made sure to snag that. i still have mine even after my service since i bought that with my own money
does anyone know if the old G.I. trick of cutting a X into ball ammo actually works? if so, then that is something you could do if down bad.
iirc that only ever worked for flat meplats (where the bullet has a flat nose rather than round) and you used a knife edge to cut out a wedges so the soft lead would obturate ("flower open" basically) when hitting leather or flesh or bone and encouraged the lead to break up a bit making the wound much worse. it has little effect on jacketed or hard cast ammo unless you load your ammo backwards (so the base is now exposed) and you purposely do it to induce tumbling.
Any FAL/L1A1 experienced kiwis? I have a L1A1 that's marked for 7.62x51 but I get weak ejection and it only cycles ok at the 2 setting. The previous owner has. 308 cases in a bag with a box of stuff for it, I was going to buy some and see if that fixes my issues but I find it odd
use a sharpie on the piston to see if it's dragging anywhere, make sure there isn't weird crud that might be blocking the gas port. if there is a leak, check if gas is leaving streaks of carbon around the gas block. if it's a kit gun, where did the barrel come from? you can use a little pin vise and drill bit to drill out the gas port slightly so the rifle cycles reliably at setting 5 (6 and 7 should be weak or not cycle at all). you shouldn't mix and match inch and metric parts ever with the FAL as there are many sutble dimensional changes where you get inconsistent performance.
