The Chiappa Little Badger, part 1

I am a great fan of .22s, miniatures, curious and unusual arms, and guns that cry out for customization, so it was only a matter of time before I found my way to buying a Chiappa Little Badger. My local FFL (Paragon Arms in Berkley, MI) quoted me a better price than any of the stores or on-line discounters, and a few days later I had the little box seen above in my hands. 

Inside, as you can see, there's a backpack case (with a large printed logo-not very low key!) and the gun itself in folded configuration. I loaded up an fired a few Aguila Colibris (a primer-only round with a muzzle energy of 3 foot-pounds) and discovered that the gun has an excellent, trigger, and that the sights are almost unusable for me- either my head is too big, or they're too low. No matter. The gun does come with enough Picatinny rails to please the most ardent fan of the Tacticool style.

However... these rails are made of HDPE, not metal. That's fine for attaching flashlights and hand grips but suboptimal for optics. Luckily you can get an anodized aluminum replacement from Long Shot Manufacturing (longshotmfg.com), which is what I did.

Here's the new rail seen next to the stock rails:

And here it is installed. You can see it looks identical to the HDPE side plates, but it's a lot more rigid. I used LocTite on the screws to make sure they stayed in place. 

Another interesting feature of the gun is the threaded muzzle- another increasingly popular feature on firearms these days:

I have no plans to buy a moderator for it, but I did think the supplied plastic thread protector was a bit tacky, so I bought this sharp looking steel muzzle brake on eBay for about $15:

The sights were too low for me to comfortably use, as well as being made of plastic, so off they came:

I tried a few different optics on the Badger and decided that the best choice was either a Millet dot sight:

or possibly this compact Burris 4x20:

...which is a bit too close to the hammer. I could use higher mounts, but a better solution would probably be a hammer side extension. Chiappa offers one for $15, and there are several others available from Uncle Mike's and other vendors.

 I also decided that the stock and the rest of the plastic Picatinny rails needed some improvement. The cartridge holder is cheap looking and has sharp edges, and should be removed. Maybe I could make  a walnut forearm and butt- but that will have to wait until my next post.