I went out to pick up my M22 from the FFL this afternoon over lunch and took it with me to the range this evening.
The range I go to has round nose CCI mini mags in stock, so I picked up two boxes of 100 so that I could perform the break-in on this pistol. I also happened to have a little more than half of a box of Remington Golden Bullets bulk 22LR to test out as well.
First and foremost, the gun arrived with only one mag
. I had already planned on buying more mags, but I also plan on asking ASA to provide an additional mag for this bugger. The finish seems a little cheap on the gun, but it's in line with what I was expecting. Nothing that will blow you away, but it will suffice for a training pistol.
I installed the front sight and loaded up a magazine full of mini mags and proceeded to chamber the first round. Dropping the slide, it did not go fully into battery. I tapped the slide forward and it snicked into place, but the trigger would not fire. Turns out it was operator error, as I still had the safety partially engaged. Once I got all of the controls in the proper position, the first mag cycled correctly. I proceeded to go through the first box of 100 mini mags without incident.
I wanted to see how things were going before ISSC's suggested "break in" was complete, so I loaded up 3 of the remington bulk rounds and had at it. The first round fired and brough the second round up perfectly. The second round fired but did not have enough ooomph to correctly feed the 3rd round in. I went ahead and fired several more magazines of the bulk ammo. I had several failures to fire, but all of them had solid primer strikes on them, so I'm marking that down as cheap bulk ammo failures. I had a few feeding issues as well, but maybe 3 or 4 out of 10 magazines of the bulk ammo.
I then opened up the second box of mini mags and alternated that with the bulk ammo. After 30 more rounds of mini mags, almost all of the feeding issues had disappeared. At that point, my buddy showed up and took the lane next to me. I handed him the pistol and a full magazine of mini mags and he shot a pretty nice grouping with it at 7 yds. He then fired off some mini mags he had left in his stash, as well as some winchester high velocity ammo as well. He did not report any feeding issues, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention, as I was firing my XD.
I then proceeded to go through the rest of the mini mags that I had left (all fired flawlessly) as well as some remington vipers that my friend left for me when he took off (how can anyone have that short of a range session? I just don't get it...) The whole time, I was mixing in remington bulk ammo as well. At this point, ASA recommends cleaning and polishing up the feed ramp and considers the gun "broken in".
I dumped a bunch more bulk ammo into the empty plastic tub from the mini mags and tried to get the pistol to malfucntion. I shot through at least 200 more rounds of bulk ammo and had one Failure to Eject and two Failure to Return to Battery. With cheap horrible dirty walmart bulk ammo.
Overall, I am very pleased with the ISSC M22. It's great little gun. It feels like a defensive pistol in the hand. It shoots well and I don't think I'll have much trouble finding ammo it likes. ISSC recommends Federal Game Shok as well as mini mags, and I have a LOT of it on the way from cheaperthandirt.
The first thing I will want to do is smooth down the face of the trigger. A little bit of sandpaper should take care of that nicely, though. Another issue I'm having is with the rear sight. It seems to be very loose and not keeping windage adjustments. I think a dab of loctite on the adjustment screw should take care of that, though. All in all, a great cheap little plinker to give me more trigger time for not a lot of money.
-rick
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