Miss Bernadelli flunks the course; more fun with P229 .22 slide kit

Another sunny day here in the South and I made it back to Dewitt's range for round two of .22LR fun, sorta.

Plan A was to try out a V. Bernadelli .22 target pistol that I put on layaway at the gun shop where I work. It's probably purt near old as God with serial number 517, but it shows evidence of having been gunsmithed with jeweled parts and a red-fiber-optic front sight. Feels good in the hand and looks cool, so I fell in love with it. Until I shot it.

Miss Bernadelli flunked the course big-time. Maybe out of a dozen magazines I got two or three shots without a misfeed. I tried six or eight different loads, Remington, Winchester, Federal and CCI, and she wouldn't eat any of them without a hiccup.

Back to the shop she goes and I hope to God no customer asks me if she will shoot good. I don't wanta lie so I'd rather not be asked. Plan B is an Austrian-made Glock-wannabe .22 pistol I've had my eye on, the ISSC M22. I'll just transfer the cash I put down on the Bernadelli to start paying off an ISSC .22 pistol.

So then I proceeded on with day two at the range with my new Sig P229 .22LR slide conversion kit. Last Saturday I tried just Federals and the results were not good. So today I used two CCI loads, two Remington loads, two Federal loads and one Winchester Super X. It absolutely hates Winchester so that one is out.

The others were sorta so-so. It would shoot a while, then hit a dud, shoot some more, hit another dud. I was on a roll with CCI standard velocity when I got three duds in a row. And all the duds would fire on the second try.

End result is the best was from CCI Mini-Mags, which is the most expensive .22 ammo I had with me. So it appears she's got expensive tastes.

I did establish that Sig knows what they're saying when they said this slide kit is for the Sig P229R, the rail model. She works pretty good with my P229R and she works pretty terrible with my Sig P229 SAS Gen2 with no rail. All the problems with the P229R were duds. But the P229 had a lot of feed problems, as well as a few duds. So the slide stays on the P229R.

I thought I was going to use my new Caldwell Pistolero pistol rest (first photo) to zero in the sights, but instead spent all my time trying to find a .22 load the slide likes. All told I shot more than 500 rounds of .22 today. At least I didn't go broke doing it, which is the whole point of .22 shooting.

I finally used the Caldwell rest on my Sig P220 with the .45 ACP slide on it to see if I could do as good or better than I did last week standing up. First set of targets, 10 yards on the rest, has 16 holes in target at right and eight in target at left. Last week my best of three mags loads was all eight in the black. Today my best was at left, all eight in the 10 ring and at right with only one out of 16 in the 9 ring ain't too bad. This P220 is so easy to shoot well it makes me look real good. It's definitely a carry gun, even fits my Galco P229 paddle holster.

And since I had my P229R with a mag full of .357 Sig Ranger hollow-points, just in case some yahoo thought it would be smart to rob somebody at the range, I decided to try it from the rest also. The bottom set of targets on the left is 13 rds., one magazine full and one in the pipe. Not as good as the P220, but not too bad either. The post-dot contrast sights on the P229R aren't as exact for me as the three dots of the P220's night sights. Bottom target at right is a scattering of .22 shots with the 229 slide kit.

Teddy Roosevelt said there's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of man. TR probably said the same thing about guns and he'd be right. I left the range as usual with a big smile on my face. See you there next Saturday if I ain't working.