Final Test Fire

I took the parkerizend and painted rimfire FAL to the range and, with the aid of a FAL-starved Canadian, put nearly 400 rounds through it. The good news: The sights required only normal adjustment after removal and installation. The barrel had been oriented correctly and at no point during the extensive shooting session did it show any tendency to unscrew itself.

Not so great were some occasional failures to feed and extract. I'd expected these might occur because parkerizing dramatically increased the amount of friction between the .22 bolt and receiver interior, but it was still unsettling to see the previously-reliable rifle choking. Fortunately, these issues decreased in frequency over the course of the first hundred rounds or so and eventually went away entirely, even as fouling increased.

Tweaking/polishing feed ramps and break-in periods are two techniques which I typically sneer at as fixes to firearm functioning problems, so the fact that both of these were required for my mostly-custom rifle is slightly embarassing. I'll take the hubris hit, though, for the ability to say that at long last, the project was complete.

Was It Worth It?

Absolutely worth it.

Not only did the extra-heavy dedicated .22 work, but it worked as desired. After a long shooting session with the .22, a scoped, fully-loaded centerfire FAL feels light and nimble in the hands. (Admittedly, .308 recoil is a little surprising after shooting the .22, but you can't have everything.)

I've always loved shooting .22 rifles at 25 yards to practice field positions and iron sight shooting and figured that doing so with a .22 FAL would be fun. However, it's even more fun than originally anticipated. Toward the end of the project I started questining whether the results would justify the time, effort, and money, but I needen't have worried. The same FAL fun factor that always leaves me wishing I brought more .308 to the range now has me scrounging through my range bag in the hopes that there's another box of .22 somewhere in there.

Highfalutin' Conclusion

I have the .22 rimfire FAL I always wanted, and all it took was five years, enormous fiscal outlay for tools and materials, learning how to do precision machining, and hundreds of hours of at times frustrating work. Such investment is utterly unjustified given the output of a single rifle, but that's not the only thing that came out of the .22 FAL project. Now I have the tools and (admittedly limited) talent required to tackle other projects, creating more things that sound really neat but don't yet exist. If there's any takeaway from the story you've just read (beyond lingering doubts around my judgement and priorities), it's that sometimes you have to make the things you want to see--and what you gain from doing so is sometimes far greater than what you set out to create.

And all of this because I really wanted something that most people considered ridiculous. The last stanza from "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost seems applicable here:

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

Now, having concluded in such a pompous and grandiose manner, the next project will probably require closing with "Ozymandias".