Good morning, everyone, this is John with gun.deals, today we're going to be takinga look at the Ruger Precision 22.
Full disclosure on the Ruger Precision 22 is that I paid my own money for this, I actually bought it used at my local shields for $3.99 and you can usually find them somewhere between $400 and $500 new, which for a precision rifle trainer setup, even in 22, is a pretty good price, especially for the features that we'll get into in just a minute.
Starting out with the most important component for a Precision build, this is an 18-inch cold hammer forged 22 long rifle barrel with, I believe a 1:16 right hand twist, made out of 1137, I'm not familiar with 1137, it is definitely a cheaper steel and it'sprobably fairly easy to machine, which is why they're using it in a 22 long rifle, but I've never seen another barrel made out of 1137. Keep in mind this is just chambered in 22 Long Rifle, so barrel life, barrel longevity is probably not that much of a concern so you don't need something harder, tougher, like a 416R or 4150 chrome moly vanadium steel, and it is kind of finished in what appears to be a phosphate finish.
The profile on the barrel is certainly what I would consider to be a heavy profile, it is basically a straight .85 from the front, all the way to the back, there doesn't appear to be any taper to it whatsoever, and that is very heavy. However, there are even heavier profiles available on other builds, for instance on like a custom 22 Long Rifle Precision build, I've seen barrels as thick as 1 to 1.1 inches, which is absolutely ridiculous. This one here is cut up front half by 28 for your suppressors or whatever other sort of muzzle devices you want. In this case we have a rear flash hider/suppressor host and then the YHM turbo K.
Moving back to the action and the bolt, we do have some fairly interesting features here. I should say that the action, the bolt, the handguard, and the barrel, those are all steel or aluminum, everything else on the gun is polymer, so the uh chassis and everything behind the handguard, all of that is polymer and fairly cheap feeling, but getting back to the action we actually have a very smooth throw for a inexpensive 22 Long Rifle.
The throw itself is adjustable on the bolt, so you can have the very short inch and a half throw for your 22 Long Rifle or if you want this to be set up as more of a training rifle you can actually have it set up to do the full 3-inch throw for something in a more reasonable caliber, so if you're training a lot with this and then you transition to your 308, your 65 Creedmoor, 5.56, whatever your other Precision bolt gun might be, you're not accidentally short stroking it by having that bad training hitch in there. The throw itself on the bolt is just under 90°, it's probably like 75 or something like that, but it does feel quite smooth, it is quite quick as well, especially with it being so short.
Moving up to the rail that they install, it is bolted to the top of the action via four bolts. It is a 30 MOA rail which means that it already has 30 MOA of can built into the rail itself, which is quite nice when we're talking about 22 Long Rifle because as we'll get into a little bit later on when I took it out to basically its max-effective range, I ran out of adjustment in my scope and I had an extra 30 MOA already built into the rail itself.
Straight underneath!
That's it for elevation, that's topped out elevation within the scope itself!
And for the money I don't really have any complaints about, the action, the bolt or the rail. If you do want to take out the bolt it is a simple singular button on the left hand side to pull the bolt out, very easy to remove if you wanted to for storage, cleaning, so on and so forth. Nothing too special other than the 30 MOA rail, which I do really like, I think that is awesome for a 22 Long Rifle, Precision rifle, I think that's basically needed if you want to be able to get the most out of it. Other than that very simple, and for the money, very hard to complain about, and if I haven't mentioned it already, the trigger is fairly decent, it is adjustable anywhere from about 2.5 pounds all the way up to 5 pounds where I have it sitting currently, it's right at about 4 pounds. I don't really have any complaints about the weight of the trigger, but I will say that the pull itself is a little bit creepy and a little bit spongy. So, not necessarily my favorite trigger, but for 500 bucks it's certainly not bad and can definitely be adjusted light enough for me.
Talking about the rail for just a minute, this is an 18-inch barrel 15-inch M-LOK handguard, so we have M-LOK all the way on top and the 3, 6, and 9 as well, it is a very slim lightweight rail as well. For precision shooting you don't really care that much about weight. I should mention the weight of the rifle, just by itself, not including the optic, bipod, suppress or anything else that you're going to add to it, is about 7 pounds, which for a 22 Long Rifle is perfectly fine. Keep in mind this isn't a hunting gun, this isn't a hiking gun, this is designed as a Precision 22 or a training substitute for your real gun basically. Currently the only thing that I have attached to the rail is my bipod via this aluminum Picatinny section.
This is the UTG 360 Recon I want to say, so it actually has an adjustable tension bolt in it, so you get forward, back, left, right, pan, everything that you could want, and then the legs also have I believe 6 inches of adjustment in them, so a very usable bipod. The downside of it is that it's cheap and it does feel a little bit cheap, also this is all aluminum on it other than the rubber feet, and it comes in a over a pound by itself. So, if you're looking for a lightweight bipod this doesn't do it, if you're looking for something that's very functional and easy to use, you even have three positions on your feet as well for different angles, shooting high angles, shooting stuff like that, it's very usable, it's also just very heavy and it feels a little bit cheap.
Talking about the chassis that it comes in, it is almost entirely plastic so it feels cheap, it's probably very cheap to manufacture, but it does still have some nice features in it. We might as well talk about the magazines first, this does fortunately use any Ruger 10/22magazines, which is a good and bad thing. The only two malfunctions I had in this gun were due to the 15-round magazine that it ships with, however, there are better aftermarket magazines that you can buy, unfortunately, they are plentiful as well.
The issue with the magazine is that it is very, very wobbly and you can adjust it a little bit, but it is very, very wobbly, so there were two times when it did not pick up the first round, and there's just a lot of extra room in the plastic chassis that allows the magazine to move around quitea bit and cause a little bit of issues when it comes to feeding.
Moving back from there, very interesting, the grip panel is a standard AR-15 grip so you can swap this grip for whatever you want. Fortunately, it's a fine grip, especially for what it is, I don't need anything super special, but it does work just fine.
The safety selector is also AR-15. What it comes with is a 45 degree selector, which is not my favorite on an AR-15, however, for a bolt gun I really don't mind it whatsoever, but you can swap out the grip and the safety selector, so you can swap it out to an ambidextrous safety selector, if you want to have your switch on the right side as well, or you can flip it, but it is nice just to have that option.
Moving back from here, it is not a folding stock, however, we do have adjustable length of pull, I believe it is anywhere from 12 inches 15.5 inches, so we have almost 4 inches of variation, so it's going to fit basically everyone, I'm a little bit on the short side so I have to stock a little bit shorter, if you're a big and tall guy you might want it a little bit further back. You also have an adjustable cheek riser that does get very tall, they are very easy to adjust and you can go basically in line with the rail itself or you can have it very low, depending on your personal preference, and forward and back is also quite a bit, and you can do them individually of each other, they don't have to go with each other, but that is just a little bit more finicky than I can do with one hand easily.
A few other things that I should mention about the stock is that you do have a very nice rubber butt pad, which you don't need because it's 22 Long Rifle. You do also have two QD inserts on either side, which is nice for your QD slings or attachments. You also have a little bit of Picatinny on the bottom for a monopod or if you did want to attach something else there, and it is this nice long flat section here in the back for a bag rider or something else like that, for those ultimate Precision shots. Other than that almost everything on the stock, the chassis itself, is plastic, which is a cheap feeling and it's not necessarily the most confidence inspiring, but considering you should be spending less than $500 on the entire system, probably not that big of a deal.
When we talk about a precision rifle the most important thing to most people is probably going to be accuracy. I should mention that I only had the loads that I had to test, I tried four different loads of wildly varying ammunition and got some wildly varying results. Starting off with some CCI Quiet, which is incredibly weak ammunition at about 50 yards, I produced about a 4.5 to 5-inch group, which is not great. Then moving on to some CCI Clean ammunition, which is also subsonic, but supposed to be a little bit cleaner, so on and so forth, that grouped also very poorly coming in at about 4.5 to 5 inches.
Moving on to the nice ammo that I used for most of my distance shooting, that was going to be SK Match. The SK Match ammunition is sorted by a lot and it's supposed to be very accurate, on the first range trip of the Ruger Precision 22 I produced a very, very tight group, then when I went to film the actual accuracy testing portion with seven shots it came in at right at about an inch, keep in mind this is only at 50 yards, so not the greatest group out there, and I have produced better results with that ammunition through this gun, but maybe I didn't clean it or the 22 Long Rifle is just a little bit more sensitive than I would like.
The last ammo that I tested was just bulk crappy Remington Thunderbolt ammunition, which is a high velocity load, certainly supersonic, out of an 18-inch barrel, and that produced actually a very similar group to what I got with the SK Match right at about an inch at 50 yards. Neither of those were particularly good, however, when it comes to functional accuracy at distance I was able to take the Remington Thunderbolt ammo out to about 300 yards consistently, and right about 300 yards is where it started to have really bad inconsistency at distance, you would have shots way to the left, way to the right, up, and down, just because at distance that supersonic ammo is actually a liability because as soon as it starts to go subsonic there can be some instability in the projectile, and then you can get wildly varying impacts.
With the SK Match ammunition that was able to maintain its consistency to a much further range than the Remington Thunder Thunderbolt, not because it was necessarily much more accurate out of this specific barrel on this specific day, but because it doesn't have to go through that transonic barrier because it's always subsonic, it's much more stable, and so with that ammunition I was able to take it out to just under 400 yards. On that day I was using the Maven RS4, which is a 5-30 first focal plane scope, 56mm objective, also comes in at a retail price of about $1,800, which is very expensive, with I believe 35.5 mils of internal rotation plus 30 MOA on the base mount itself, I ran out of elevation in the turrets and had to resort to using the max on the turrets and also about 2 mils within the reticle at that almost 400-yard distance.
And even at those extended distances for 22 Long Rifle anyways, it was able to be fairly consistent, even though the base accuracy that I got wasn't quite what I wanted. With that SK Match ammunition I have gotten much better groups, but the groups that I actually got to film just not particularly great. However, it was still very easy to take it out to 300 yards, and 400 yards was doable once I got myself dialed in which did take a little bit to figure out where I was actually hitting because spotting hits with 22 Long Rifle, not necessarily the easiest thing to do in the world. However, the Ruger Precision 22, if you're looking at shooting inside of 400 yards and certainly inside of 300 yards, very, very doable.
I should also mention that there are a lot of other Precision loads for 22 Long Rifle, Eley makes another load, and I'm sure there's a few other companies in there as well that I have not gotten to test yet that may work better in this specific barrel. It is kind of an odd barrel choice, it is 1137 cold hammer forged instead of something maybe a little bit more common like 416R, which is usually noted for having a little bit better accuracy characteristics, but it is cheap system, it is a sub $500 rifle, usually MSRP is about $600, but street price should be around $500 or less if you get it on a really good deal. For that money I think it can make an excellent trainer rifle for your full power cartridge rifle that you maybe don't have the money or the ammo to shoot all the time like you would like, but you can get a lot of good training, good reps, dialing, holdovers, wind, just cycling the action as well if you use the full three action on the bolt that can help correspond or relate to your full size rifle, or this can get your foot in the door for Precision 22 like NRL 22 or anything else like that.
This probably is never going to be winning, well I shouldn't say never, in the right hands I'm sure it could, but probably is not going to compete in terms of accuracy or features with true high-end 22 Long Rifle Precision builds, but can probably get your foot in the door to some of those competitions if that was something that you looking to do, and it's fairly economical, and it's very economical to shoot, even ‘Match ammo’ is usually under or around $10 a box, which is cheaper than 9 mm at this point, and can be stretched out to 3 or 400 yards in the right set of hands.
So, for what I paid for it, which was $400 flat used, I think that it is definitely a good value if you're looking for a Precision 22, not necessarily going to compete with the high-end options, might make good trainer rifle if you like that sort of thing, but for me I'm definitely going to be keeping it around, doing some more shooting with it, hopefully trying out some different Match loads, and hopefully finding something that I will shoot right about 1 MOA consistently with.
