If you are going to shoot 40gr or bigger, and in a hot rod pushing 100 fpe and well into the transonic range, my experience with PB 22lr says 1-14 is an improvement over 1-16. I would have gone to 1-12 if I could have found a quality blank at a price I was willing to pay just for the heck of it. 1-9 twist in a minimum 22 inch barrel is gaining some traction in the long range 22 world.
I have two 22lr rebarelled with 1-14 twist, I don't shoot any competition, just playing around. Only reason I tried it is I shoot only subsonic in 22lr, and some of it in 45 grain and found a large discount on a douglas xx air guaged match barrel blank in 1-14 twist and at the price decided it couldn't hurt. That one blank made two barrels, one on my savage bolt gun at 16.25 inches, and one dedicated 22 upper at 11 inches. Pulling bullets and measuring them, running them in twist rate calcs for the high transonic speeds they ran it seemed like 1-16 was marginal at best and nothing was shooting well enough for me, so at the price I decided what the heck. I tried everything out there short of expensive match ammo when I ran out of my supply of CCI standard velocity purchased in the late 80's that was always good for 1/3 inch groups at 50, the new CCI, and I've tried several different lot numbers, can't hold a candle to the old CCI standard velocity, 10 times the fliers and they are much worse fliers than the old stuff, and twice the group size discounting fliers on the new stuff. Took me nearly 30 years to go through the 40K I bought back then. Out of around 8 different subsonic loads, all but one showed improvement with 1-14. The one that didn't was american eagle subsonic did not get any better, but that ammo is pure sh)t, don't think it is possible for it to shoot even remotely ok out of anything, at least the lot number I have. Improvements in the 40 gr bullets were all mostly fliers were less pronounced. Typical 1-16 twist ten shot groups may have had 2 fliers opening up group at 50 yards up to 1/2 inch or close to it beyond the other 8 in the group, same ammo with 1-14 still had clear fliers, but they were less than 1/4 inch after and maybe the others in the group were barely tighter. The 45 gr subsonics were all significantly better, sucks that the best one was a winchester round made in Australia. It improved from 9/10 at 50 yards to just over 3/10 at 50 yards. Reason that sucks is they either stopped importing those or discontinued them, don't know which. If I knew when I bought 2 bricks of them at a big discount before covid/election mess, they would no longer be available, I would have bought cases of them.
The barrel blank only cost me 125, it was like 70% off on old stock from a custom maker of beautiful single shots, had the machine work done at paladin machine for just a hair more than the blank cost, given the price it really seemed a no brainer to try it and Paladin is barely over an hour drive from me. Paladin machine service did all the barrel work for the SOCOM calibers developed for AR's by teppo jutsu and Tony Rumore of Tromix. If you are into AR's at all and don't recognize those two there is something wrong with you.
