Thread: BSA Ralock - An interesting old semi auto .22

I picked this up a couple of months ago on a whim, didn't know anything about it but it was different enough to be interesting! Here is a link to a video of me demonstrating it

https://youtu.be/-8quMWR_4Gk

A bit of history - They were made in England from 1948 to 1951 and I think around 5000 were manufactured in both 22lr and 22short. They are a similar looking rifle to the Browning SA22 but they have some very different features, it fires from an open bolt, it has twin strikers, the rifling only has 4 very wide lands, it holds all the spent brass on board until you re cock it and it takes down with the flip of a lever.

While they are probably quite collectible this example had a historic stock repair, holes drilled in the receiver for a rail and was missing a part in the safety mech which is unobtainable. So.... I decided to modernize it a bit and spec it to what I like, short and quiet!

Before


After


The list of mods is quite short really but they have made a huge difference to it. The barrel was cut pretty much in half down to just under 13", re threaded, re crowned and a custom carbon fiber over barrel suppressor built up using the core from a SAK silencer. Then a 20mm rail was mounted to the receiver so I could mount my Falcon M5 scope to it (chosen to keep the length down when taken apart). In testing it is very very quiet with the only noise being the smack of the action, it groups under 1" at 50m and around 1.5" at 100m with CCI standards but I havent tried anything else in it yet. The chop did lose around 80 fps but I don't think the rabbits will notice. It cycles flawlessly and is a real joy to shoot, cant wait to get it out hunting.