I took my new Ruger Mark II to the range on Saturday and put about 250-300 rounds through it. Don't have an exact round count because I wasn't keeping track, and I had a bulk pack of 550 rounds which is packed loose in the box, instead of a plastic tray with spots for each individual round.
It felt great to just shoot magazine after magazine after magazine and not worry about how much money I was spending on the ammunition. I bought the box of 550 rounds for $16.99, about 3 cents per round. Compare that with 100 rounds of 9mm ammunition which I paid $29.98, about 30 cents per round. So 9mm costs 10 times what .22 LR costs. I just shot magazine after magazine without really keeping track, because I knew that even if I emptied the whole box, it would have only cost me 17 dollars. The box is around half full now, so I went through 250-300 rounds or so.
It was an absolute blast. The gun shot great. It's accuracy is incredible -- I did some informal testing from a rest and got 5-shot groups of less than 2" at 25 yards. And this is from cheap bulk ammo. Doing actual (off-hand / unsupported) shooting at 10-15 yards I was consistently getting 5-shot groups of less than 3 inches. Not too bad for someone who only started shooting a couple of months ago, and I'm glad to know that the gun is capable of much more than my current skill level.
After a couple hundred rounds through the Ruger Mark II, I shot a 50-round box of 9mm ammunition through my Sig Sauer P6, and did the best that I've ever done. The heavy practice with the .22 LR Ruger helped me immensely in shooting my 9mm Sig. The Sig P6 is a home-defense gun, so I concentrated mostly on double-taps at 10 yards. 90% of the initial shots were in the 10-ring, and about 90% of the follow-up shots were in the 8-ring or better (with about 50% in the 10-ring). Again, nothing exceptional, but I left the range very pleased.
Function-wise the new Ruger Mark II did very well. The trigger is great even straight from the factory with no modifications -- extremely light and smooth, and it just feels plain awesome.
One of the 2 magazines had a FTF (failure to feed) on the last round of its first 2 uses, but that did not happen again after that. Other than that, I had only 2 stovepipes (failure to extract -- the spent casing from the round fired was not ejected fully), both of which happened in the first 100 rounds through the gun. After that, the gun functioned flawlessly for another 150-200 rounds.
So only 4 malfunctions in 250-300 rounds from a brand-new gun, and half of those were caused by the magazine, not the gun itself. This was with el-cheapo bulk ammunition and should only get better because the gun should be fully broken in at this point.
So I have a great gun that has exceptional accuracy and reliability. And I have a gun that is just plain beautiful because of the engravings and the ivory-colored grips. It caught the eyes of a few people at the range and they all complimented me on how good the gun looked. And I picked it up for around the same price that I would have paid for a brand-new standard model.
I'm more than happy with it, and am looking forward to shooting it again soon.
