After getting a chance to shoot my friend’s suppressed bolt action Savage .22LR I saw the light. So I picked up a Ruger American Rimfire with threaded barrel. Then I put it up against a 10/22 with Yankee Hill Machine integrally suppressed barrel.

The Ruger American Rimfire is a bolt action rifle that can use the same magazines as the 10/22. The model I got has an 18″bbl and is threaded for suppressors. I mounted a Nikon Prostaff Rimfire 3-9×40. The 10/22 came as is from Silencershop. It has an overmoulded stock and a 4x Centerpoint scope.

I used Winchester’s new M-22 Subsonic ammunition. It is a 45gr black cooper coated round nose bullet that shoots about 1060fps out of a 16-20″ barrel. At least according to the side of the box.

To suppress these subsonic rounds I used my SilencerCo SpectreII suppressor on the American Rimfire and the Yankee Hill Machine integrally suppressed barrel.

The Yankee Hill Machine barrel is 18″ long and has a removable baffle stack. The baffle stack is 9″ long leaving just 9″ of rifling in the barrel.

At first glance, the YHM barrel looks similar in size to my ER Shaw 10/22 heavy barrel.

How does a 9″ barrel compare to an 18″ barrel? Not too bad actually. Without a doubt the Ruger American Rimfire gets tighter groups.

Ignore the yellow spot in the upper right hand corner of the circle. That is from something else. Not a bullet hole. American Rimfire at 25 feet.

10/22 groups at 25 feet.

Below are the groups for the 10/22 on the left and American Rimfire on the right. Shot at 50 yards with the Winchester M-22 Subsonic. The American Rimfire group is less than 2″ and the 10/22 is bigger than 2″.

I was curious about the velocity difference since the YHM has such a short internal barrel and while there were some irregularities with the settings in my Magnetospeed V3 chronograph I was able to get some data. There were a couple odd spikes in speed but I was told by my friend Ryan at Magnetospeed that my sensitivity was too low and that is why I got these false readings. So I took two averages if there were some false readings. With and without the false readings. I shot four different brands of ammo to test. Winchester, CCI, Aguila and Remington Golden Bullet. Only the Golden Bullets are high velocity everything else is std velocity.

As you can see by the data below the American Rimfire 18″ barrel does have an increase in bullet velocity.

How do they shoot? The Ruger American Rimfire shoots the best. This is based on sound and reliability. I am not saying that the 10/22 is not reliable I just had issues getting it to feed reliably with the Ruger BX-25 magazines. Something about the YHM barrel, ammo, and BX25 mag that they just did not like to work together. If I used the standard BX-1 10rd rotary magazine, then the 10/22 runs great. A little annoying when using a semi-auto rifle as it is easy to empty the magazine.

With regards to sound the 10/22 is louder for the shooter. The bolt cycling is very loud and the plastic stock exaggerates it a bit. The American Rimfire has very little noise being a bolt gun. When i try shooting either one in my backyard the 10/22 seems loud enough to be able to attract the attention of my neighbors. However that could just be my paranoia.

The 10/22 integrally suppressed is fun to shoot but the issues of feeding rounds in that barrel with the BX-25 really sours the experience. Whereas the Ruger American Rimfire eats anything from any magazine. Of course a 10/22 with factory threaded barrel would most likely run as reliable as the American Rimfire, it defeats the purpose of an integrally suppressed barrel.

10/22 YHM Provided by Silencershop

M-22 Subsonic ammo provided by Winchester.