The HK 416 Rimfire Rifle in .22LR: Review

In case you haven’t noticed, ammunition is both hard to get, and expensive right now. Oh, you have? Maybe the solution, or at least one partial solution, is a sub-­caliber trainer. This is something that has been around pretty much from the start of cartridge-­using firearms. A century-­plus ago, it seems as if every military organization had either “gallery” loads, down-­loaded regular service cartridges, or rimfire clones of their service rifle. Even when ammo was cheap, governments were loathing to spend any more on ammunition than they absolutely had to. Well, the age of rimfire service rifle clones is back upon us, in part because ammo is expensive, but also because it isn’t always easy to find a range where you can shoot centerfire rifle cartridges at distance. (And .223 on an indoor range is, shall we say, less than fun a lot of the time.) But a .22LR and a 100-­yard range is a good match for good practice. And so, we have the HK 416 .22LR rimfire. At first glance, it is a complete and utter clone of the centerfire 416. A closer look turns up details that keep the close-­ness not exact, but they are meant as a means of both easing manufacturing, and lowering costs, as near as I can tell. Let’s take a quick walk around and see what there is.

The upper and lower receivers are close copies. The upper is a flat-­top with rail, and the lower appears to be another forged lower from HK. The handguard is the M-LOK RIS free-­float type that is on the 416, but it is not quite as robust, nor need it be. Also, the bolt holding the handguard to the receiver is an allen-­head, not a cross-­slot meant to use the bolt as a wrench. The barrel has an M4/M203 groove in it, and the flash hider on the one sent me is a four-­tine design. Not like the A2 birdcage that is illustrated on the web page, or in the owner’s manual. I’m not particularly worried about muzzle flash from a .22LR, so the difference makes no difference to me. However, if it matters to you, the barrel is threaded ½-­28, so you can swap yours out. On the back end, the tele-­stock has the same configuration as the stock on the centerfire 416 and is quite comfortable. The stock latch is a cleverly concealed tab, flush with the angled edge of the stock. If you are used to just grabbing the stock and pinching the latch, to adjust length, you’ll have to learn a different touch. You have to get a fingertip or fingertips onto the latch, and press it into the front face of the stock, to unlock it.

The pistol grip is the HK shape, which is a bit bulkier than an A1/A2 pistol grip, and also sits at a slightly different angle to the receiver. The lower is marked per HK methodology, so if you have any HK firearms, you’ll be right at home here. On top of all this HK has installed a set of folding sights, front and rear. That cost-­savings thing I mentioned? It is apparent that the sights came in for an inordinate amount of “we can save a buck here” analysis. These are plastic, not very durable, one might even say cheesy. So much so that when they came back from a studio photographer, a small bit of the rear sight was busted off. If you are planning on getting real-­deal practice, using iron sights, with the HK 416 rimfire, you had best invest in a good set of metal sights, the sights of your choice. Because the ones HK ships with the rifle just won’t cut it. I’d say they were acceptable plinker-­level sights, myself.

Now, let’s go over the things that are different on the rimfire, from the centerfire. Let’s confine ourselves with the exterior for the moment. The handguard is not as robust as that on the centerfire. I suspect that is to shave several hundred dollars (or more) off of the MSRP. If you are planning on using the rimfire as hard as a centerfire, then I can only suggest you consider some other approach. Like, converting a centerfire upper to rimfire, using HK centerfire parts. Then you can do your rappelling and bayonet practice to your heart’s content. For marksmanship practice, the handguard that is there will serve you as well as the stouter one. The parts changes bring the 416 rimfire weight down under six pounds. When you consider that the original centerfire 416 can easily start at eight pounds or more, HK has shaved a significant amount of weight off.

The barrel is another matter. Unlike the centerfire 416, where the barrel is cold hammer-­forged steel, the rimfire 416 uses a steel liner in a non-­steel sleeve. This is another cost savings, and a weight savings as well. And, as a marksmanship tool, the sleeved barrel is just fine. In fact, the rimfire 416 shot like a house afire, despite the amazing trigger pull. (More on that in a bit.) The liner is an actual barrel, even though it has thin walls, and is it made in Germany, so of course we would expect it to shoot well. And it does. But it, like the handguard, is not meant to stand up to epic training abuse. The external sleeve is to support and protect the liner, and it also acts to stiffen the assembly, so the end result is really good accuracy. The “gas block” on the barrel is cosmetic. Since the rimfire action is a straight blowback, there is no need for a gas block, but since the end-­users expect the rimfire to look like the centerfire, it has to be there. The pistol grip is just like the centerfire one, in shape and angle, and even has a storage compartment. You remove the bottom cap to access the storage compartment, to remove whatever you’ve kept in there.

Drop the magazine if you have one inserted. The external shape of the magazine is the same as that of the centerfire, with the addition of the rimfire cartridge fed lips sticking up out of the shell of the magazine body. The magazine has a sliding button on the side, and you can use that to lower the follower and make loading the magazine a lot easier. HK offers magazines of ten, twenty and thirty round capacity. Loading is easy, and they insert and lock in place just like the centerfire ones. OK, a slight problem here: the shape of the top end of the HK mags, specifically the location of the feed lip tower, is not the same as on the USA-­standard AR rimfire magazines. The HK and the USA mags are not interchangeable. This would be a big problem, expect that HK offers theirs for $20 each, and apparently has a ready supply of them. Just be sure, if you have one or more of each type rifle, that you must keep the magazine supplies separate, and don’t get to the range with a rifle of one type and mags of the other. A couple of operational details you will have to learn: yes, the bolt locks open after the last round has been fired. But, there is no way to lock it open except with an empty magazine. The bolt catch on the left side of the upper? Cosmetic. It is there for looks only – doesn’t work. The forward assist on the right side does move, but it does not reach the bolt. Look at it this way: you are dealing with rimfire ammo. Do you really want to be hammering on a forward assist, considering how touchy the rim priming of a rimfire cartridge could be? I thought not. I view this as a good thing, something that reduces the reflexive use of the forward assist is a positive, to my mind.

A bigger problem: the takedown pins. The pins are not captured. They come free from the rifle when you take it apart for cleaning, and you could lose them. Now, this is not unheard-­of in the HK universe. The MP5, G3 and all of its clones all have pins that come free. It would have been clever, and a nod to the past, for HK to have made a pair of storage holes on the stock for the takedown pins, as the MP5 and G3 have. Yes, that is a detail not found on the 416, but given that the 416 rimfire is full of “no centerfire” details, what would this one have cost in manufacturing or in verisimilitude? Once apart, you uncover another non-­centerfire detail: the upper and lower are non-­standard. Well, the shells might be, but the rimfire conversion bits and pieces make them non-­standard. The rimfire upper and lower cannot be swapped for centerfire. You cannot park your rimfire upper on a centerfire lower, and the rimfire lower won’t even accept a centerfire upper.

The upper has a central takedown lug on the front of the receiver, but a pair of hoops at the back to accept the takedown pins. The rear lug has been machined away. The lower fire control unit is an assembled block that rides in the lower and fills the space as well as blocking what space the carrier of a centerfire unit would need in order to work. Looking at the lower, the takedown pin holes are in the right locations as are the trigger and hammer pin holes, and I suspect that a clever person with tools and determination could extract the rimfire fire control package and rebuild the lower to centerfire configuration. But then it would not work with the HK rimfire upper. The rimfire bolt and recoil spring assembly rides in the upper inside of its own assembly shell as well, and this is not meant to come out of the upper. That’s right, that’s the really not-­good thing about the upper. You can’t take the bolt out, and as a result you’ll have to do your bore scrubbing from the muzzle. Or use a flexible cable cleaning system, once you weasel it past the locked-­open bolt. On the bright side, the .22LR hardly ever needs a brush or patch down the bore anyway, so good. Keeping the chamber clean will be more difficult. Oh, and if you do go to brush the bore from the muzzle, as mentioned, you’ll have to do it with the upper on the lower, and the bolt locked back. As a final detail, you have to use a bore brush that is not more than one inch long, or it will get wedged between the chamber and the bolt face.

HK 416 Rimfire Specs

• Type: Hammer-fired, semi-automatic
• Caliber: .22LR
• Capacity: 30+1 rds. 
• Barrel: 16.1 in. 
• Overall Length: 38 in. 
• Height: 10.8 in. 
• Width: 2.6 in. 
• Weight: 5 lbs., 9 oz. 
• Finish: Anodized aluminum
• Pistol Grip: HK contour
• Sights: Folding front and rear
• Trigger: 9 lbs. 
• Price: $479
• Manufacturer: HK-USA

The bolt assembly does have one very interesting detail: it is adjustable. If you open the action and look at the rear of the bolt assembly, you’ll see an allen-­head screw. With an allen wrench, you can adjust the bolt speed for standard-­velocity ammunition, or for high speed ammunition. I did not have any functional problems with ammunition of various velocities, but I did have some problems with ammo feeding. It seems that the idea of an accurate rimfire rifle in Germany includes a rather tight chamber. I had occasional failures to close with the CCI Clean 22 Suppressor ammunition. This is a 45-­grain round-­nose with a black synthetic coating, and a listed velocity of 1,000 fps. It cycled properly, ejecting the empties, but the bolt would sometimes not fully close. I would have to wrestle with it to extract the not-­quite-­chambered round. It was accurate, it ejected, but the bullet shape and the leade of the chamber did not always agree on the space available. Considering that when ammunition becomes readily available again, that we’ll be back to the pre-­panic 17,000 different .22LR loadings to choose from, I don’t see this as a problem. And rimfire rifles and handguns are notorious for being picky about what they like and don’t like.

Oh, and the barrel is serialized. There’s a serial number on the lower, the barrel, and the extractor. What looks like the bolt, in the ejection port opening is actually the rear of the barrel. Since the barrel is a liner in a sleeve, the serial number has to be applied back in the ejection port area. German law requires barrels have serial numbers, and it obviously can’t be applied on the sleeve, which isn’t the barrel. But the extractor? That seems dangerously close to OCD territory. One last detail that might be something you want to know before you jump all over this: the trigger pull. The “book” specs that HK has in the owners manual list the trigger pull as 6.6 pounds. If only. The trigger pull on this one was nine pounds. Yes, you read that correctly, nine pounds. Now, in the process of testing this rifle I happened to get to the range before I did all my dimensional checks and such. So, the trigger felt a bit heavy, but it was really clean and crisp, and I figured “OK, a clean and crisp mil-­spec trigger pull.” When I went to measure it with my Lyman digital scale, the first attempt I thought “I left the safety on.” Nope. Nine pounds. Clean and crisp, yes, but nine pounds? I contacted my insider at HK to ask about this.

My question: “Holy cow, nine pounds. Is that normal?” The reply: “Hi Patrick! Yes, you are correct” So, there you have it: the HK 416 rimfire is a neat little carbine, with some non-­standard features, and a really heavy trigger pull. Now, before I put you off of the 416 entirely, we have to consider the rifle as a package. Yes, it takes non-­standard magazines, but the magazines that do work with it are not expensive, readily available, and work like champs. In fact, they actually cost less than the USA-­standard AR-­15 rimfire mags do. The handguard isn’t exactly the one on the centerfire 416, but it is lighter, and it keeps the price down. The sights are fragile, but we were all going to replace whatever came on it with what we really wanted anyway, so that’s not a loss. And a lot of rimfire AR-­15s don’t come with sights at all, so don’t even worry about the sights. The takedown pins come free and could be lost. But then, we’re careful, we keep track of parts, and we all own one or another firearm with small, easily-­lost-­if-­you’re-­careless parts, right? The trigger is heavy, but it is crisp, and it is manageable. I’ve shot clean on targets out to 300 meters with much worse triggers than this.

And on the bright side is the accuracy. Oh, the accuracy. Yes, the barrel is a liner in a sleeve, but it works, and shoots tight groups. As a plinker and getting new shooters hooked on shooting, this is da bomb. It gets bonus points for it being a clone of the HK 416, which has to be quite common in video games, and thus in the minds of young new shooters. The six-­position adjustable stock also makes it easy to fit the rifle to new shooters, which goes a long way to increasing the fun factor. As a low-­recoil, low-­cost training tool, it is even easier on the wallet than a pistol-­caliber training rifle. Even if your regular AR-­15 is not an HK 416, the 416 rimfire would allow you to inexpensively practice, practice indoors, and practice on handgun-­distance steel. I did the basic accuracy check at 50 yards with the iron sights that came with it, but for accuracy work I put a SIG Romeo5XDR on top. I was able to wring more accuracy out of the 416 than with the iron sights. (Yes, I used a red-­dot that costs more than half the price of the rifle it was parked on. Welcome to Gun Writers World.) All of this for a list price of $469, and at your local gun shop a bit less.

Being an HK product, I was expecting there to be another numeral in front of that total, so the price came as a real inducement. However, this one is going back to HK. Not that it isn’t an entirely suitable rifle for what it is meant for, no. If I didn’t already have several AR-­15 rimfires on hand, I’d be all over this one. But I do, and they have their own magazines, magazines that would not work in the HK. Rather than risking the hassle of mixing up mags and rifles, I’ll forego the glamour of owning another something HK. If you do not already have a rimfire AR-­15, then the HK should be on your short list. And if you were thinking of building a rimfire AR-­15, I’m not sure you can even source the parts you need for what a ready-­to-­go HK 416 .22LR would cost you. You might, might, be able to put together a conversion upper, to install on your already-­owned centerfire lower, but even that isn’t a sure thing. One thing I do know: you’ll have fun. The CCI Clean Suppressor cycled the action, and shot accurately, but resisted fully chambering on at least one round per magazine. Proving once again that rimfires can be notoriously selective in the ammunition they prefer. 

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