A new .22 rimfire round with a fatter BN case that lends itself better to those of us with arthritic fingers. The .17's & strait walled RF's currently available are nothing less than a P.I.T.A. to handle. There is no reason the ballistics of a smaller .22 CF can't be duplicated in a rimfire at a fraction of the CF ammo costs and in guns not much, if at all, bigger than those used for the .17HMR or current .22 rimfire ammo. 40-45gr bullet with more energy and penetration than the .17HMR. I know a lot of other people like who have gone to CF cartidges simply because they have a hard time dealing with the micro sized RF rounds.

Have you thought about going to something like the 22 hornet in the new savage model 40 or one of the lightweight CZ 527's in a 221 Remington fireball?

No one is going to ever retool the rimfire industry so your choices are limited. If you want to shoot cheaply and need a case easier to handle you can reload the ones mentioned above at a reasonable cost.

Parade raining time.

Don't think it would be cheap. The only rim fire base cases are the .22LR and the .22mag....the current 17's are based on those cases. A whole new case for such a limited market would be an expensive undertaking...and as rem. found out with their 5mm RM (which was a differnt case size all together), new rounds may not fall on fertile ground.

Duplicate a center fire...maybe...but no RF runs at the pressure of even the ancient .22Hornet so better RF rifle designs would be needed...someting along the desings of centerfires (and the same expense). Consider that the whole rim has to be hollow and soft enough to be dented by the pring pin...and it has to be fully suported if you intend running pressures higher than current RF max...consider the area available for powder gas to push back into the whole hollow rim vs. the small flash hole of centerfire primers.

Even with the high cost of centefire cases, the .22hornet can be loaded pretty cheaply...considering the nearly free .223 cases to be had, even with the larger powder charges, the mil.surp. bullets are cheaper, so it may be even cheaper to load run-of-the-mill ammo for.

Part of me is with Elmer Kieth on this one...the .25stevens modernized into a higher vel. round would be nice...not a long range reach out and zap them kind of round, just something like an .258" 70-75 gr. bullet at about 1500fps would do the trick for me. Didn't happen wehn he proposed in in the 1950's, don't belive it is going to happen today.

Can it be done? Yes, no doubt about it, it is possible to build a rim fire case, bottle necked, running at about 20- 25K without any real change in case metal alloy or action designs (other than being scaled up to be larger). IT would always be more expensive than reloaded centefire and would be more expensive than factory centerfire loads unless it started selling in the multiple millions.

I was thinking along the lines of a guilded metal case, strong enough to hold higher pressures than the normal brass RF cases but still soft enough to be RF primed. "Duplicating" was probly the wrong choice of wording, should have said "approaching" instead.

Yes, a .25 would be great but most states have their game laws written for ".22 and smaller RF" which would mean a whole new set of hurdles to jump with a .25 cal. Current advances in hydro-forming soft steel alloys means re-tooling would be a minimal cost factor, way below that of the old multi-set system of punching then rolling, which reduces forming of the cases to a single step operation where hundreds can be done at one time.

I've got my .222 I reload at minimal cost but it's still higher than what a major mfg should be able to do with a RF case, especially one made from cheaper materials and with a more efficient process than is presently being used.

Last I priced .22 RF mag ammo it was running about $5.00/50 in bulk. Even if the hotter ammo was running say $8.00/50 in bulk, it's still cheaper than reloading .222 CF's and a whole lot more convenient.

If it came down to it, I's go with the 7.62x25 and be done with it. 85-90 gr bullet zipping out at 2000-2100 fps would definitely be the ticket but then again we're back to game law problems.