A friend bought a Glock 44 yesterday and put 300 rounds through it with pretty good results, especially since most of it was Thunderbolt.
Today we took it to the range again to test with an assortment of ammo and against a few other common 22s, an M&P22 Compact and a Ruger 22/45. The ammo selection:
The contenders:
The Ruger and the M&P are both suppressor hosts owned by myself and the non-G44 owner, but we didn't bother with that since the Glock doesn't play that way. We did test a bunch of standard velocity and subsonic rounds since we both run that 95% of the time.
We didn't write a bunch of stuff down or test for accuracy, we just wanted to see if the G44's claim to reliability was true.
The unanimous decision at the end of the day was that the M&P22 is more reliable across ALL the ammo used, but the G44 is way more Glock like. Since the 3 of us are all Glock shooters we all appreciated how it felt like a Glock. It's also got more recoil than the M&P or the Ruger but that's actually a good thing for us. It 'feels' more like a G19 with that extra recoil. It's obviously no where near the same as a 9mm, but it's better than we expected.
There were a lot of light strikes with the G44. A lot. Sometimes 50% or more of a mag would not fire on the first hit. I was adding insult to injury there by loading those once struck rounds into a mag and firing them out of my pistol. We did run into a half dozen that were legitimately duds; they wouldn't go off after 3 hits in different guns in different spots on the rim. We pulled one open and it seemed to be filled with more brass shavings than powder.
This particular G44 really, really liked the thunderbolts. Ran very well with them, and did OK with the CCI Standard Velocity stuff. As long as supply is good and you can get what you want in terms of ammo it should be possible to keep the G44 running well and potentially running with a can with the CCI std vel. If the .22lr supply starts to dry up and you find yourself having to run whatever random crap you can find, the M&P is the clear winner.
Today we took it to the range again to test with an assortment of ammo and against a few other common 22s, an M&P22 Compact and a Ruger 22/45. The ammo selection:
The contenders:
The Ruger and the M&P are both suppressor hosts owned by myself and the non-G44 owner, but we didn't bother with that since the Glock doesn't play that way. We did test a bunch of standard velocity and subsonic rounds since we both run that 95% of the time.
We didn't write a bunch of stuff down or test for accuracy, we just wanted to see if the G44's claim to reliability was true.
The unanimous decision at the end of the day was that the M&P22 is more reliable across ALL the ammo used, but the G44 is way more Glock like. Since the 3 of us are all Glock shooters we all appreciated how it felt like a Glock. It's also got more recoil than the M&P or the Ruger but that's actually a good thing for us. It 'feels' more like a G19 with that extra recoil. It's obviously no where near the same as a 9mm, but it's better than we expected.
There were a lot of light strikes with the G44. A lot. Sometimes 50% or more of a mag would not fire on the first hit. I was adding insult to injury there by loading those once struck rounds into a mag and firing them out of my pistol. We did run into a half dozen that were legitimately duds; they wouldn't go off after 3 hits in different guns in different spots on the rim. We pulled one open and it seemed to be filled with more brass shavings than powder.
This particular G44 really, really liked the thunderbolts. Ran very well with them, and did OK with the CCI Standard Velocity stuff. As long as supply is good and you can get what you want in terms of ammo it should be possible to keep the G44 running well and potentially running with a can with the CCI std vel. If the .22lr supply starts to dry up and you find yourself having to run whatever random crap you can find, the M&P is the clear winner.