First of all, why didn't anyone tell me how much fun a .22lr upper can be?
Picked up a Tacsol .22lr upper a couple months ago in a trade, with the intent to be able to shoot more often and practice with a setup similar to my HD carbine. Also got 4 25rd magazines. Probably need to pick up a few more.
I decided that while my primary AR has an Aimpoint ML3, that my .22lr training rig would be used mainly with irons, since I really don't practice that skill nearly enough and I can't afford another aimpoint at this point. I replaced the MBUS on my primary AR with the DD A1.5 fixed BUIS and moved the MBUS over to the tacsol upper.
When I received the upper, I had a small issue with the bolt cycling with the charging handle, as the action spring was catching on the bolt. Tacsol sent me the proper washer to fix the issue and I was back in business.
I headed out to the range today to sight in and test out the upper. My initial impressions are good. A friend and I shot about 500 rounds of Federal and CCI bulk .22lr. The only malfunctions I had were when I accidently rode the charging handle home on the first 2 mags I ran. My friend did the same thing, but also had a failure to feed in the middle of his first magazine.
The interesting thing I found was that when I would clear a failure to feed, the round that hadn't fed wouldn't eject, so I would end up inducing a double feed malfunction. I found that if a malfunction was encountered than the best course of action was to treat it as a double feed and remove the magazine and than clear the malfunction. This worked for all but 1 of the 5 malfunctions we experienced. The other malfunction, the round partially fed, but wouldn't extract when I tried to clear the malfunction. Instead, as I was racking the charging handle, the round finally made it into the chamber and fired normally.
All 5 malfunctions were experienced in the first 100 rounds and 4 out of 5 were shooter induced. The rifle functioned perfectly from there on out.
Sighting in was pretty straight forward. I started to sight in at 50 yards and got on target pretty quick. I'm still deciding what distance I should be zeroed at with a .22lr. At some point I decided to take my Aimpoint off my BCM 16" upper and throw it on the .22lr to see how far off the Aimpoint would be on the .22lr. I was surprised to find that I was hitting POA without any adjustment.
I didn't test accuracy, as all shooting was done off hand and most was fairly close at clays set about 10-15 yards out. I also shot some clays off hand at 50 yards at another berm and had no issues hitting those so accuracy seems to be fine for my purpose.
On the downside I don't really like the way the bolt hold open works. For those that don't know, the bolt is held open after the last round, but when you drop the magazine the bolt drops as well. Not really a good setup for practicing reloads.
Right now the upper isn't setup to accept the VTAC sling I am running, so that combined with the issue with the bolt hold open mechanism means that it's not a perfect analogue to my primary AR.
However, I think I can use it effectively to practice things like target transitions and transitions to secondary as well as practicing sight alignment and trigger control, so it's going to have some value.
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Originally Posted by ASH556
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