Your gun, plus a new slide, barrel, and magazine, makes a great .22LR pistol.
Seriously? You’re reviewing a .22LR conversion kit? Are you guys nuts? Don’t you know .22LR ammo hasn’t been seen since 1967?
Yeah, I know, .22LR ammo is harder to find than a Jenny Craig meal at Governor Chris Christie’s house. If you do find some, it costs something like $112.93 per round. Well, not really, but to hear people whine, you might think it did. What used to cost a couple cents per round now commonly runs a minimum of nine cents per.
News Flash! For those of you refusing to buy .22LR ammo until prices get back to normal, you’ll be waiting a long time. Welcome to the new normal. Just like you can no longer buy a new Ford for $350, you probably aren’t going to be able to buy .22LR ammo for 2 cents a round anymore. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just supply and demand. More people than ever are shooting. .22LR ammo production requires a pretty hefty capital investment. Margins aren’t all that great. New companies make more money investing in centerfire ammo. Ergo ipso-facto e Pluribus Unum… .22LR ammo costs more now than it used to.
With all that said, 9 cents a round is still a lot cheaper than $.19 per round, which is about the cheapest price I see for 9mm ammo. So if you want to practice and plink for less money, you still save a dime per shot, which goes a long way towards paying for a .22LR conversion kit for your pistol.
In the box: Slide, barrel, magazine and magazine loading tool.
Side note: .22LR ammo is available at the prices quoted here any day you want to buy it. Check gunbot.net to get up to the minute availability from a whole slew of online retailers for ammo and reloading supplies. Their magic computers constantly scour the internet to see who has what so you can buy it immediately. It’s a really, really handy resource. Don’t get cranky at them about prices – they don’t set them. Gunbot just does all the online looking for you.
While we’re on the cost and math topic, each hundred rounds you shoot of .22LR versus 9mm saves you $10. If you shoot .40 S&W or .45 ACP, the savings are even more as those centerfire cartridges cost about $.24 and $.30 respectively. Carrying some ones, each thousand rounds keeps a hundred bucks in your wallet. After a few thousand rounds, you’ve paid for your conversion kit.
Since the Beretta 92FS is one of my all-time favorite guns, I’ve been itching to try out Beretta’s own conversion kit. So I did. Here’s the rundown.
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