Well, the nephews left grinning, one with a BB gun and the other with the Rossi.

The 22 barrel is accurate - as accurate as I am with open sights. I suspect it will be wearing a 'scope by, oh, December 26th, and when I have the opportunity after that I'll see what I can do with it. We put 200 rounds of Rem Std Velocity and perhaps 40-50 rounds of new production Super-X HP through it. The ejector is vigorous... There were no malfunctions/misfires, but this is not an exhaustive test.

The 20 gauge barrel was delightful with Rem 7/8oz 2 1/2 dram equiv - the "club load". Vigorous ejector also. I was extremely pleased with the patterning. I didn't test it on a pattern board, but I did check it on a 24" x 24" scrap of drywall brought along for that purpose. Probably a true modified choke - which means more like a modern improved cylinder these days (everything seems to shoot too tight for its markings in the last, er, many years). Extremely uniform and practical. This will be quite an adaptable litte fellow.

But I'm not a good judge of recoil. Heavy recoil doesn't bother me in the least (sharp recoil, OTOH, does - simply measuring the energy of the recoil is not the whole story as far as I am concerned). The proof was that my nephew fired the 20 gauge 5 times in succession - sloppily shouldered on the last one, and it nipped him a little - just enough to drive home my point about not getting sloppy with mounting the gun. He likes it and is not afraid of the recoil now that he's fired it. I expect that I'll be adding a recoil pad by late spring to accomodate a growing boy, but it's not bad just as it is.

I think one would have to be crazy to fire a heavy 3" field load in it, however. It's rather lightweight.

The wood on the buttstock stands proud of the metal about 1 mm - very uniformly so. The buttplate is not trimmed off nice and flush - in fact, that's about the only thing I would call "sloppy" on the weapon. An evening's work would fit all that together neatly. At the cost of the weapon, I don't regard these to be important at all - the silly thing fuctions and fires rather well.

Once it has a scope on it, I'll do a shoot-out against another youth rifle. We have a Marlin 15YM that has proven to be extremely accurate (embarrasingly so, although I've come to expect that from inexpensive Marlin bolt action 22 rifles). Actually, I set out to purchase nephew a 15YM - so far, I'm happy with the Rossi. The Rossi trigger is quite good - properly not too light, but crisp with very little movement; it breaks well. Much better than the previous factory Marlin triggers (I have smoothed but not lightened the Marlin - and I don't like the safety design on the 1930s-till-now Marlins; too good of a trigger job and one can disengage the safety with a firm pull on the trigger) New Marlins have a grown-up trigger system that has been amply written about by the pundits, but I have not used one yet.

The 9yr old nephew fell in love with the Marlin - he was center-punching water-filled pop cans everytime he pulled the trigger. Told me "I want a bolt action just like this one when I'm old enough..." Both boys easily outshot most of the so-called adults at the range that day. (...not to put too fine a point on it...) The happiest one was the one with his very own Rossi, of course <grin>.

I also looked at a Savage Cub Youth Model (I would have *sworn* it was on a black synthetic stock, though). I liked the peep sight and over-all feel of that one quite a bit and am wondering if anyone here has fired one of those?

Based on this sample of one, I would purchase another Rossi. These are inexpensive, so not too much damage to the wallet if things go awry. Having a misfire whilst on a hunt is another story, as was reported previously.

That's all I can report on for now.

Tom