In the last installment (Part IV) I described the installation of a modified trigger assembly, my final mod to what began as a stock slightly used 10/22 purchased at Gander for $207. With warm weather having finally arrived, I took the gun and a selection of .22 ammunition to my club for some long awaited testing. Is my $478 project gun as good as, or (hopefully) better than the $550 Ruger target version? The first thing I discovered was why everyone was selling the BSA Sweet .22 scope so cheaply- it's just not very good. I was not able to dial out all of the parallax in this scope, which meant my results were not reflective of shat this rifle is actually capable of. I also discovered that while a 3-9x scope is perfectly adequate for hunting with a .22, it's not not really adequate for critical accuracy testing.
First group (Federal Auto Match) was almost 2". That's around 4MOA:
Not what I expected after all that work, but the new barrel had only had a dozen shots through it, and I was still struggling with the parallax error. I changed my grip, and tried to view the scope the same way every time to reduce the parallax:
Once I got settled in with a consistent position, to minimize parallax, most of my groups looked like this one (above), which was 3/4" in size. That works out to 1.5 MOA, which isn't too bad, but I'm betting I can so much better with a better scope.
I tested Federal Auto Match, Aguila Rifle Match, CCI Standard Velocity, and Wolf Match; the Wolf gave the best groups, like this one, which measured 5/8", or 1.25 MOA. Getting there, but still short of what I think it can do:
Vertical dispersion on that 5 shot group is only 3/8", or 0.750 MOA. That gives you an idea of what this rifle might be capable of. Weather permitting, I'm going to try again this coming week with a BSA 6-24x44 scope I picked up at a swap last year, but I should probably buy a new scope. The obvious choice is a T36 Weaver, but I'm going to see what the BSA can do first.
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