M1A’s little sister

We test-fired the Mini-14 and a 20″ Colt HBAR earlier. With 55gr ball, the AR15 mounting a 1-4x Trijicon Accupoint yielded 3″ groups at 100. Mini-14 shot 2″ groups with 2.5x Leupold scout scope, shown above on the M1A. So much for the inaccurate Mini! To be fair, the little carbine’s trigger isn’t conducive to accuracy under time pressure. This is a more recent Mini, and we saw no stringing after 20 rounds over two minutes.

The HBAR acquitted itself with 69gr match ammo, shooting 2/3″ groups. Seems that ammunition matters a lot in calibers with widely varying twist rates.

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7 Responses to M1A’s little sister

  1. Ray says:

    The mini-14 is just awful, The mags are iffy from the factory, and the aftermarket mags SUCK. They are a bear to field strip & clean with parts that simply CANNOT be cleaned without tools. They are ammo sensitive to the point of being “single batch/ single bullet only” . If you get them out in the field ,they WILL “pack it up” in short order from dirt or even too much blown powder. Parts in them break with alarming ease and Ruger WILL NOT sell parts to anyone outside government. This is a rifle I have been around since the 70’s and they have always been awful. This is the very last rifle I’d chose for S.D. or SHTF

  2. sean says:

    That is weird. My Mini-14 doesn’t really care what you load in it. In fact, it prefers cheaper ammo. The cheap Tapco mags seem to work just fine. It isn’t a precision rifle, but it works fine. And like above, it plays little brother to my M1A Socom. Which I really can’t afford to shoot that often.

  3. piotr1600 says:

    Weird.
    Totally the opposite experience for me except for the aftermarket steel mags..

    I’ve had mine since 1981, with multiple thousands of rounds thru it and other than cleaning it, and chucking the aforesaid steel aftermarket mags in the trash, have never so much as changed a broken part.

    Mine just runs.

  4. LarryArnold says:

    I have the Ranch Rifle. It’s no harder to clean than my M1A or Garand. Not something I’d use for sniper, but as a carbine the bullets always go, and always go where I want them. I particularly like how easy it is to swap from wood to black stock when I demonstrate the “assault weapon” fallacy.

    I am looking for an adjustable stock. (I have a couple of petite family members who would enjoy it better.)

  5. Lyle says:

    That particular Ruger has only a few thousand rounds through it, so I can’t report on long term reliability. We have had terrible results with after-market steel mags, but the factory mages have always worked very well. I got a rather large pile of Ruger mags for a demonstration once, and they’ve always performed as well as any other box mag. Not that I keep a malf log, but I do recall having FTFs with an all stock Glock and several Kalashnikovs, but at the moment I don’t remember having a FTF with any of our Minis when fed from factory mags. One day I fired over a thousand rounds with one of the earlier Ranch rifles too. One horrific experience with a Kalash had every other round stopping against the barrel without chambering. It turned out to have been a dinged feed lip on one particular magazine. It would feed every other round just fine because a double stack mag feed every other round from the same lip, while the dented caused every other round to jam. They’re tough, but not indestructible. Another time I had a Kalash magazine that looked perfectly good (at first) but must have been stepped on or run over. It had a very gentle, hard-to-see narrowing in the middle of the mag body that was binding on the follower, preventing it from moving freely, resulting in the bolt riding over the rounds without picking them up, so we’d pull the trigger on an empty chamber. But that only happened occasionally and only when there were a certain number of rounds in there, where the follower was riding in the squished spot. At all other times the same mag fed perfectly. Stuff like that can be very aggravating at the range (the rounds went IN alright, so why aren’t they coming OUT??) but it ain’t the maker’s fault. Disassembling the mag, sticking a rod into the body and pushing it out solved the problem. Always suspect the magazine when having feed problems. It could have been made perfectly and then damaged somewhere, in some subtle way, since.

    Take the mags apart and make sure the follower falls through without hindrance, make sure both feed lips are exactly the same, presenting rounds at the same angle and height, and then install the spring and floor, and test the function by pushing the follower all the way down and letting it up several times, looking for hang-ups.

    The bottom of the bolt where it catches the rounds must be in good shape too. I’ve seen cases where some mechanically retarded home “gunsmith” decided for reasons unknown to bevel that critical portion of the bolt, causing it to intermittently fail to strip rounds from the mag. The fix there is to throw it out and get it replaced. I have one Ruger bolt that has the lugs shorn off from over-pressure hand loads. They guy told me he was looking for pressure signs, and didn’t see any, until he did…

  6. Gewehr98 says:

    Point of order: My pre-’94 20″ Colt Competition HBAR absolutely hates ammo over 63 grains. I attribute that to the compromise 1-9″ twist rate. Keep the bullet weight down to 63gr or less, and it’s a tack driver.

    As for the Mini-14, maybe Ruger finally got their heads out of their posteriors with that gun, after listening to those of us who had Mini-14s and Mini-30s that wouldn’t hit the broadside of a barn from inside. I gave up and sold both of mine for a Bulgarian SLR-95, which is a good 2MOA gun right out of the box, even better with my handloads.

    • Sigivald says:

      I recall reading that Ruger did a fairly serious reworking of the Mini-14 a while back (mid-2005?), significantly improving accuracy vs. older models.

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