FYI: Problems with Recent CCI Ammunition

[Gwhite]

The college team I help coach has been having all sorts of mysterious jams & problems lately, mostly with CCI ammunition. We've shot it for decades, and generally had pretty good luck with it until now. The team has won several national championships over the years, outshooting even the military academies. Courtesy of a special program for schools, we've been able to buy it at a very good price even when ammo was nearly unobtainable elsewhere. It also has enough recoil to cycle most of our semiauto .22's well.

The older CCI we used always came in dark blue boxes. We got three cases through the school program last year, and they have re-designed the packaging to use a lighter blue box. This has been helpful in keeping track of which batch is which.

Over the past several weeks, we've had multiple problems where rounds are jamming in the magazines while loading, or aren't feeding up out of the magazine fast enough, causing feed jams. This has happened with both Benelli MP90/95's & Pardini SP's. Most of the issues went away when we switched students to the older dark blue box CCI, although we started having other problems.

CCI has always tended to run longer than other brands, and the suspicion was that the new lots were overly long. I embarked on a measurement campaign and checked the length of 50 rounds each of all the lots of CCI we have at the college, and various lots I had at home. I also measured eight other brands, although Fiocchi of America is apparently made on CCI production lines, but to different specs.

The results are here:

The two new lots of CCI (D14CA04 & D14CA03) we got last year are longer than ANY other .22 ammunition, although an old lot of CCI I have came close. The average dark blue box CCI is significantly shorter. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers' Institute​ spec for the length of .22 long rifle ammo is 25.40 mm - 1.27 mm ( 1.000" - 0.050"), which is a huge range. All the ammo I measured is "in spec", but quite a few of the new CCI rounds are within 0.005" of the maximum. One thing that is odd is that the standard deviations of the length of the two lots of long CCI are actually better than ANY other ammo, including Eley Tenex & RWS Target Rifle. ​If they'd just make the stuff shorter, it could shoot really well. The Fiocchi of America ammo is shorter than all the lots of CCI I measured, but not by much.

I had a student test fire 20 rounds of CCI in his Benelli that was all 24.20 mm or longer. He had several feed jams. When he switched to ammo that was between 24.00 mm & 24.10 mm, the feed jams went away.

We have most of a case of dark blue box Lot #C30W85 left, and we've used that for recent matches. That lot turns out to be the shortest CCI I've measured. My plan was to send the students off to the National Championship next week with that. HOWEVER, at practice on Friday, we had several problems with bolts not closing all the way, causing light hits. It turns out a lot of the rounds in this lot are caked with excess wax. I took the remains of one box home, and this is what I found:

I have contacted CCI to see if the two super long lots we received are unusual, or represent an intentional design/manufacturing change. I've seen the wax problem in the past, but it's usually pretty rare, and the two long lots are fine in that regard. Now that ammo availability & prices are improving, I will be investigating other options. We used to have RWS Target Rifle for fussy pistols, but that has been discontinued by the US importer. We have quite a few pistols that will shoot Aguila well, and we have plenty on hand. I just need to work on getting all the other pistols to work with it. I know I can get the Pardinis to work if I cut the recoils springs down.

If anyone has some of the light blue box CCI & a caliper and gets bored, I'd be interested to hear how long it tends to run. This year's school program opens up on Monday, and without any indication the long lots we got last year are an exception, we won't be buying any.

Thanks!

[-TT-]

I've seen that glue booger on a box of recent CCI as well, and have taken to checking the rounds pretty carefully. It's sticky, but seems to pop right off if you get a fingernail under it. I'd hate to shoot it into my barrel! I've only seen it on one box, other boxes in the same brick have been clean (so far).

A friend and I were suspicious that the ammo was grouping differently in his Pardini (6" barrel), and we did some bench testing. At first, the group was a bit wide, but after shooting some other ammo brands, we retested the same box of CCI and got the best group of all. We surmise the gun was cold, since it was!

Several of our shooters have recently picked up new CCI, since it's become available. There haven't been a lot of alibis, but these are mainly Ruger and S&W Victory shooters. I've been using a couple of boxes so far in my Hammerli X-Esse, with good results (and no misfeeds). I've not tried them in my Benelli, which gets a diet of all-SK. I'll try to get some comparisons to your data.

[edit]
One other thing, there have been some shooters in the past who used mandrels to whack a flatnose on the rounds to improve feeding and accuracy (or so the legend goes). Seems to me these rounds would be ideal candidates for a repeat of that experiment!

[Gwhite]

I've been trying to think of a way to trim the long rounds efficiently so we're not stuck with two cases that we can't shoot. The Federal/CCI school program prohibits selling the ammo on the open market, but if I can find a summer camp or school rifle program, it should be OK. Several years go they ran out of CCI, and decided to be "nice" to us by substituting much more expensive Federal match rifle ammo. It wouldn't cycle any of our pistols, and it took me a couple months to find a local junior rifle program to take it. They had CCI, so we swapped.

[-TT-]

Seems to me you could drill 24.XXmm-deep holes in a block of plastic, drop the rounds in with the tips sticking out, and use a razor blade or plane to take off the excess. 10 at a time would be relatively easy, in a row.

The mandrels I remember seeing were split and they pressed together to hold the rounds tightly, all around the edge of the lead boss at the base of the bullet itself. Then a little cap went on top which you'd whack with a small hammer. Same idea, just swaged the bullet lengthwise instead of removing material.

The flat nose would make nice scorable holes, as a side benefit!

[MikeMargolis]

I have read about this on bullseye-L forum as well.

Thank God I shoot Eley and Lapua/SK.

[Gwhite]

Seems to me you could drill 24.XXmm-deep holes in a block of plastic, drop the rounds in with the tips sticking out, and use a razor blade or plane to take off the excess. 10 at a time would be relatively easy, in a row.

The mandrels I remember seeing were split and they pressed together to hold the rounds tightly, all around the edge of the lead boss at the base of the bullet itself. Then a little cap went on top which you'd whack with a small hammer. Same idea, just swaged the bullet lengthwise instead of removing material.

The flat nose would make nice scorable holes, as a side benefit!

I'm thinking about a fixture that would take an entire frame of 50 rounds, and allow you to file the tips all at once. I've got 10,000 rounds to salvage, so anything that works one-at-a-time is a non-starter. I only need to knock off about 0.005".

[spektr]

I have a theory. CCI builds their standard velocity ammunition om the extreme end of the Saami spec intentionally. I believe that the engraving of the bullet in the rifling at bullet obduration is guaranteed at the high end of OAL. This works great for Saami nominal chambers. It seems that Eurospec guns are usually chambered at the short end of Saami spec so that the engraving of the bullet into the rifling happens at Saami nominal. Trying to fight that philosophy isn't something easily done. I cannot comfortably close the actions on my earlier free pistols since CCI went to this thinking. its unfortunate, but the solution to the problem is to stop shooting CCI in Eurospec chambers. I measured the craap out of things, and dropping a reamer in the guns is the fix, but Id never do it on purpose..... CCI SV also gives my supermatch and Mk1FVT high bolt closure forces that Im not liking.....

Lastly, the rulebook actually prohibits modification of the ammunition, I chambered a block to the nominal oal and ran ammo thru an arbor press until it dawned on me that it was stupidly unsafe......... but it shot sooooo good

[Ray Dash]

Well CCI was my go to ammo and with the new price increase it may just be time to switch brands. I will say that the new Light Blue box stuff seemed to shoot tighter groups in my Walthers then the older dark blue box ammo. I have a couple of the older more reliable cases left and then I will be switching.

[Gwhite]

For a good economical ammo, I really like Aguila. They use Eley priming technology, and I've never had a misfire after many 10's of thousands of rounds. They use a light lube coating, so you don't get the waxy build up in your pistol the way you do with CCI. It's plenty accurate for Sport & Standard Pistol competition. The only downside(?) is that it has slightly milder recoil than CCI, and you may have to tweak your pistol to get it to work reliably. Once you've got it working well, the softer recoil helps quick recovery in Standard Pistol sustained fire. My Benelli MP90S and my Pardini both work fine with it, but the Pardini recoil spring needs to be shortened slightly. The typical failure is the bolt won't come back far enough to pick up the 2nd round, and closes on an empty chamber. If that happens, cut off another turn, rinse & repeat...

Before the recent ammo shortage, I used to be able to get Aguila for less than $200 a case on sale. It's currently selling for about the same as CCI, ~ $50 a "brick".

[m1963]

We got to the point that, due to misfeeds and misfires, we were measuring all of the Aguilla and CCI SV rounds to make sure they were in spec before using them in our pistols. That would have been around 2012, or so. We sold everything (there may be a stray 500 round box of each still around) and switched to SK for practice and Lapua Pistol King for match ammo; in our pistols. We have had no issues since, and have not looked back.

[Gwhite]

I've never had a problem with Aguila except for the mild recoil, which I consider an advantage if the pistol can be made to cycle it reliably. I used to shoot CCI almost exclusively, and had many duds over the years.

The one issue I've had with Aguila is they sometimes get their crimping dies out of adjustment, and that can create brass burrs that end up in the action. Before anyone points to that as a sign that Aguila is junk, I had some Eley Target that was much worse.

I now shoot a MatchGun MG2, and apparently the factory tests them with SK Standard Plus. I bought a brick to try out, but it's still pretty pricey these days.

This afternoon, I spent about an hour hand selecting boxes of older dark blue box CCI to send with the students to the National Championships. I'd say about 1/4 of the boxes in this lot had more wax on the bullets than I felt was reasonable. I didn't find any that were nearly as bad as the box I photographed earlier for my first post on this topic.

[Rover]

I bought some Aguila when the store was out of CCI SV. I only use it for slow fire due to the frequent alibis.

[Gwhite]

I bought some Aguila when the store was out of CCI SV. I only use it for slow fire due to the frequent alibis.

Were the alibis because it didn't go bang, or because it wouldn't cycle a semiauto? That can be as much the pistol's fault as the ammo.

Lots of people with S&W Model 41's find that almost all standard velocity ammo is "bad". Wolff sells recoil spring kits so you can find one that works well with standard velocity stuff. The Model 41 was specifically designed to work well with Remington Standard Velocity .22, but that was 1950's vintage Remington. The ammo has changed multiple times over the years, and it's a toss up as to whether it will cycle a 41 OK anymore (often not...).

On the other hand, I won't shoot Federal #711B in any semi-auto because it is so feeble it can cause doubling from hammer follow. Federal 711 (no "B") used to work great in my Benelli & High Standards. They dropped the published velocity by 10 FPS when they came out with the "B" version, and that killed it for semi-autos.

The velocity numbers on most .22 ammo boxes is meaningless for pistols. Because the market for rifle shooting is much much larger, it's typically tested in a 16" or longer barrel. The results can be wildly different in a 6" or shorter pistol barrel. Back in the mid-2000's, Greg Derr recommended Aguila sub-sonic ammo for Pardinis, and it worked great. My wife shot a couple cases without any problems. It had a nice soft recoil, but cycled just fine. Around 2010, they changed the powder formula slightly, and it wouldn't cycle the pistol any more.

You can achieve a given muzzle velocity in a rifle in a variety of ways. You can use a slower burning powder that pushes the bullet all the way down the barrel, accelerating as it goes. Or you can kick it in the butt with faster burning powder and let it coast most of the way. There a broad range of variations between the two approaches. The exit velocity from a rifle can be identical, but the performance in a short barrel will be markedly different.

[Rover]

Almost none of the AGUILA problems were due to failure to fire. My S&W 41 has a light spring.

I had given AGUILA a pretty good testing about three years ago and rejected it. At the time there was a .22 shortage, so I was using whatever I could find. I was surprised at how well some tired old stuff performed.

[Gwhite]

I suspected it was a Model 41... They tend to be fussier than most pistols. I'm not sure why.

[Rover]

I just picked up a brick of the new CCI SV. I'll shoot some of it tomorrow and see what happens.

[Gwhite]

I heard back from CCI. Their response was pretty much what I expected:

A) The ammo is in spec, because it's shorter than the SAAMI maximum.

B) They have not changed their manufacturing process intentionally to produce this overly long ammo. Whether future lots exhibit the same issue is at the mercy of manufacturing variations.

The tech support guy I communicated with was going to send the manufacturing folks my full table of measurement results. It clearly shows how out of line CCI's ammo is compared to everyone else's ammo. At some point, I think I will examine a few rounds of the longest & shortest CCI stuff, and see if the issue is the bullets or the cases. Changing the casting for the bullets would be expensive, but I suspect the cases are all trimmed, and it could just a matter of adjusting the trim length a small amount.

[spektr]

The CCI stuff has been longish for years. Its no secret that the longer rounds perform better as the bullet is controlled better between ignition and during obduration and engagement in the bore. It does cause problems with autoloaders designed for nominal Saami length ammo and even more issues with Eurospec guns running shorter chambers. CCI appears to be loading the SV ammo to mimic the chamber fits that Lilja and Anschutz get with their chambering reamers which are short and dialed for Eley and Lapua Eurospec lengths...... Its all on the chart, CCI is long to make American nominal saami chambered guns perform well. Its NOT got the numbers to fit Eurospec guns

Here's an article from Pac Tool and Gauge
https://4drentals.com/22-long-rifle-man ... imensions/
https://4drentals.com/products/reamer-rentals/rimfire/

pay particular attention to the Lilja entry, its tight for Eurospec ammo And very short so you
get rifling engagement and centering prior to ignition. The Anschutz numbers are near identical to it, no surprises there.

[Gwhite]

Is it long bullets or long ammo that perform better? If it's that simple, why is Eley Tenex shorter than almost anyone else's ammo? They may have long bullets, but they must compensate with shorter cases.

[spektr]

Its long cartridges OAL wise. And its a long OAL with respect to the specific chamber you're trying to get performance out of. This sort of explains why rim thickness matters a lot, sometimes...... Its about selecting a round with the OAL long enough to fit your chamber deep enough and engrave. Too long is also bad. There's a lot of Aero going on with respect to spinning conelike shapes that are really close to voodoo, and Im not even going to guess at that.... I can measure a chamber, go to this chart eliminate a lot of testing by knowing what is obviously the wrong choices, or if I even want to mess with the gun at all......