You may recall the Volquartsen .22 rifle from Top Shot. In Season Three, Episode Seven the guys competed for marksmanship bragging rights with a Volquartsen Custom .22 semi-automatic I-Fluted Rimfire Rifle. Volquartsen equipped the psychedelic long gun with a Trijicon Accupoint 3X9 scope, a forward blow comp[ensator] and a lightweight thumb hole stock upgrade ($1554 for the rifle and $900 for the scope). Clearly, it wasn’t your grandpa’s squirrel rifle (no offense, grandpa). Ditto the rifle the company’s sending your scribe for review. Scott Volquartsen generously agreed to work with me to create a rifle suitable for extreme accuracy (i.e. trick shots). When I first visited their site . . .
I practically short-circuited at all the options available. No other company that I’ve encountered puts as much thought into rimfire or gives you as many choices to trick out your .22lr. (Oh, and its not just .22lr. Amidst their pistol and rifle options, they offer .17 HMR, various .22 caliber options, and yes, even a .223 rifle). All kinds of fluting options, compensators, stocks — even multi-colored trigger choices –are just a bit of what awaits to tantalize your adventurous side. Many of their pieces look straight out of some slick sci-fi movie, which I consider a plus.
So what’s coming? A .22lr rifle with a “snake fluted” barrel, slight twist for a forward blow comp, set in a laminated wood thumbhole stock, with the receiver featuring an integrally machined Picatinny scope mount that will have a Zeiss 4.5 x 14 mounted in their…DEEP BREATH…Nova stainless steel rings.
Check out their site here for yourself, but beware, especially if you have a thing for rimfire rifles. Not that I’m pointing any fingers or anything.
Their trigger kits for Ruger MKII’s and III’s are amazing. My dad has 2 and they are better than any trigger I have ever pulled. Doesn’t hurt that they’re based in my home state. IOWA WOOT!
not an “Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!”??? Sounds awesome… I need to get myself a .22LR rifle…
and a compass in the stock
Boy, am I glad I’m such a lousy shot. A $179 Ruger 10/22 with a $105 Nikon 2-7x scope still exceeds my marksmanship skills.
My Savage bolt action is superlatively accurate with a basic 4x scope. But no one makes such cool stocks for it as these.
I’m not sure what model you own, Mark, but Savage does offer some stock options on their current rimfire bolt-gun lineup that are VERY similar to the Volquartsen stock pictured above. Not sure if these stocks are sold separately, but you could drop them a line and ask.
Beautiful stuff, but do they shoot as well as (or better than) the Anschutz? I was under the impression that pretty much all of the Olympic shooters buy from Germany.
Anschutz is probably the most prevalent rifle in Olympic competition but what does that have to do with anything? You can’t shoot a semi-auto rifle in any Olympic shooting event and the Volquartsens aren’t meant for that kind of shooting.
Looks interesting. What all does it do?
I bought a Magnum Research MagnumLite 10/22 clone with the graphite thumbhole stock $500 out the door. 4×32 Simmons scope that I don’t even remember how little I spent on it except that the ratings were good. When I do my job, that gun will make a large ragged hole at 50 yards with CCI Blazer. Now I need to drop the money on some Eley or Wolf Super Match just to see what that gun can really do.
$2400? I’ve got a list of things I’ll spend that money on first. I am looking to buy three cans, for instance (.22, 9mm, .308). $2400 would come in very handy for those…
Then there is CZ-USA. Very fine .22s.
Reminds me that I should have bought that old .222 that my friend was selling…
I own three 10/22s and the most accurate is the first one I purchased, a carbine with th barrel band and everything. Of course, I free floated the barrel, hollowed out the barrel band to prevent contact and bedded the action and the first inch of the barrel. The gun shoots lasers with Mini Mags, the best ammo I have ever run through it.
I know that beauty is the eye of the beholder, but damn… that is one ugly .22lr.
This beholder disagrees.
I like the fluting, but I’ve never really been a fan of the multicolored laminated stocks. But hey, I get to use this phrase twice in one day!
De gustibus non est disputandum.
From Volquartsen’s web site:
There’s more to Snake Fluting than its exotic looks. The Snake Flute is not a spiral or helical flute, nor is it a conventional straight flute, but a unique method of cutting flutes. Snake Fluting is a set of flutes that are positioned around the barrel to provide unsurpassed rigidity and longitudinal stiffness.
“Unsurpassed?”
So let me understand this: By removing material, we’re going to have a stiffer barrel than if we didn’t remove any material? Are they saying that they changed the Young’s Modulus of steel by the shape of their fluting? Hmmm. I need to see some evidence in the way of measurement here.
Sir, you continue to impress me with every comment.
Keep in mind though that Young’s modulus is not consistent with metals.
Yes, removing material from the barrel and creating additional angled surfaces along the longitudinal axis lightens the barrel and strengthens it. Think of how an I-beam works. It has less material than a solid beam, but is stronger and resists warping better. This is what fluting does for a barrel. But while straight fluting does resist warping in the up/down/left/right axis, it doesn’t resist twisting and vibration very well. Putting an S curve in the fluting helps solve that problem making a very accurate barrel that will resist change of impact point as the barrel heats up, resists twisting, and helps dampen vibration.
It doesn’t quite work like that. An I-beam of the same outside dimensions as a box or solid beam has effectively the same strength as a box or solid beam, but it’s a whole lot lighter. The value of the I-beam is in the weight savings. Removing the fluting material from a barrel such as this does not magically turn it into a significantly stronger structure. What it will do is allow you to use a heavier overall barrel profile and mitigate that somewhat by removing some weight.
Another way to look at it is if you have a 1″ diameter barrel, and you want to make it stronger, you can increase the whole barrel to 2″ in diameter, but it will be significantly heavier. Alternately, you could add 8-10 ribs to the outside of that 1″ barrel, with the outer diameter of those ribs being 2″. The ribs would increase the structural rigidity of that 1″ barrel to approximately the same as the 2″ barrel, and would be the same size, but with a fraction of the attendant weight gain. The only difference here is they’re machining out material to “leave” the ribs, rather than adding them on.
That barrel is lighter than the same barrel without the fluting, but the strength difference is negligible.
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