Rimfire rifles have been made as copies of full-size guns for years. In fact, you can find a .22-caliber variant of just about any cool-looking piece, from MP5s to STG 44s. Because rim-fire rifles don’t have to bear the same type of pressure or rigidity as the guns they’re copying, they can be made to mimic almost anything at no cost to function.
Dedicated rimfire rifles have always been somewhat smaller—more weight equals more pain in the field, and most people don’t want to be walking around with a 10-pound rifle while going after squirrels.
Recently, however, there has been an increasing trend toward rimfire rifles that don’t try to save space in their footprint or their weight. Today, this interesting subcategory continues to grow, and we have a wide number of options if you decide to build a precision rimfire rifle.
THE MODULAR MARKET
We can’t start the discussion on these full-size rimfire actions without looking at the situation that allowed them to exist in the first place. As the years have gone on, the general shooting public has settled on a number of common base platforms. It’s never easy to tell what’s going to be popular, and some types of guns never caught on.
A good example of one that stuck is the Remington 700. When it was introduced, its design
