Thursday, November 27, 2014

remington 700


REMINGTON 700

We have a volunteer at the Food Bank who was a Texas farm boy, a sniper in Vietnam, a gun dealer and certified gun safety instructor ( not that I place much importance in the last one, only a moron has trouble getting the basics, but it is another credential ).  He is my go to guy on guns right now until dementia seizes him, his colon explodes in cancer or some other form of death delivers him from me.  And by the way, he has an AR as he loves to go after coyotes.  I do NOT take this as an endorsement of the weapon, even if a former sniper is using it, but merely as underlining my opinion that it makes a darn fine medium range tack driver.  Anyway, I read up on another prepper blog how the Remington 700 was a wonderful bolt gun, having made a gabazillion of them in most calibers and etc.  I asked ol’ Ted what he thought of them.  In a nutshell, it is a five thousand round gun.  It starts out at 2/1,000th inch headspace and at about two thousand rounds that has doubled to 4/1,000th as the two lugs start to wear down.  At four thousand rounds it is at 6/1,000th.  As 7/1,000th is the No-Go number, you can imagine that anything above five thousand rounds is just Baby Jesus smiling down at you ( all Yuppie’s reading this will of course have God’s sole undying love so this gun will obviously fire forever for you ).

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This is not to say you can’t get upwards of six or even eight thousand rounds through a Remington.  The above is a general guideline.  No two rifles will wear down exactly alike.  Yes, I know the Remington 700 is a hunting rifle and its users put five or ten rounds through it a year and hence your great grandson can still use it just fine.  But for post-apocalypse use, not just hunting but also self-defense, you now start to see limitations in this being a multi-generational weapon.  If the rifle you buy is the last one you are going to own, your next one being a black powder and lead pipe lashed to a tree branch, you might want to do a bit of research into another brand.  I have no idea how the 700’s stack up against semi’s or single shot’s ( minions?  Anyone, anyone? I can't get all the answers from Ted as he tends to talk faster than I can't take notes, over complicates and goes overly technical ) in terms of longevity, so I can’t say if it is just Remington being tight ass bastards and screwing us or if this is typical.  I can’t even say if it matters all that much, if you can still keep throwing lead down range without it being a huge issue.  Mechanics are NOT my strong suite.  Hell, if you can get three times the rounds from an AR compared to a bolt, that $700 starter AR would actually be a better deal financially ( and since you are using it merely as a sniper, you wouldn’t need but a few 20 round mags, so that additional cost would be negligible ).  I await your expertise in this matter.

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25 comments:

  1. “In a nutshell, it is a five thousand round gun”

    Probably another good argument in favour of handloading James.

    My late father, among many things, dallied in gunsmithing for a time. One thing that he mentioned was that rounds typically used in medium to big game hunting, were often loaded to the excess. Yes, you need the extra velocity, but they were very often loaded to “overkill” velocities.

    As a result, he only put handloads through his .44 magnum. He had tried the factory loads early on, and found that the gun would “loosen up” considerably upon firing the hot factory rounds.

    The old .220 Swift varmint rifle (Super hot .22 cal centrefire; 4000+ FPS) was considered to have a 2000 or so round barrel life. But I'll bet that handloaders downloading their rounds got more for barrel life? And that 500 yards away prairie dog only died 2/10ths of a second later.

    Other certain rounds, such as the .45 Long Colt, and the .38 Special are quite the opposite, and are loaded to be anemic from the factory, since there are many older guns still floating around that are chambered for these rounds. But these two rounds have a lot of potential with handloads, if the gun is of modern manufacture, and built strong.

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    1. Good idea. Handloads increase the life of the gun, AND save powder. In my 45, handloads sucked. Always a jam. But now that I'm semi free...

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  2. When young both my boys wore neck chain with whistle and ID tag with name and home phone number. If lost in the crowd stand with back to wall., fingers in ears, blow whistle, remove fingers and listen for my reply.
    Unless you plug ears a few blasts of whistle will temporarily deafen you.

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    1. Did they feel like dorks? Now that you mention it, the decades ago whistle blowing I did was a bit painful on the ears. Good point.

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    2. Do I correctly understand that a dork is slow, dull-witted and inept?
      I did not ask how they felt.
      I told them to wear the whistles and ID tags and they did.
      I do what I think is best to protect my family.

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  3. My take on the Rem 700, I have used two of them to compete in HP rifle matches. One is a dedicated prone LR rifle and the other built for across the course matches (2,3 and 6 hundred yards). They both have had two barrel replacements at 3500 rds each. Both are chambered in .260 Rem. I handloaded every rd and have tools to measure head space. Neither of these guns gained head space over the life of both barrels. And the ATC gun is used for rapid fire (only 10 rds in 60 seconds) using a clip slot and mauser five rd clips.
    Long story short the 700 has other short comings that will break it before you have any head space troubles. The top of the list is the very small extractor that is hell to replace although I never had one break I have seen other competitors break them. Nothing is fool proof.

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    1. Okay, that is valuable info. Invalidates my concerns over headspace. I wonder if Ted has already delved into dementia. Course, a busted extractor is nothing to sneeze at.

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  4. Remington has changed hands a few times. I bought a 30.06 woodsman semi-auto tack driver but found it had plastic parts that fail eventually in researching it. It was a gunshow buy. I had Cabelas appraise it and they didn't want to buy it said it was poorly made no spare parts and refunds were paid out from previous owners of Remington. I like Savage action, adjustable triggers and $ but their magazines suck. Lake Erie Pirate

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    1. Anyone putting plastic in a gun, other than the stock or handguard, should be shot with that gun until the part breaks. I had wife #3 buy a 22 for me, Remington, with a plastic innard. Returned that bastard pronto. I had forgotten all about that. Remington, the brand NOT to trust.

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  5. A Remmie 700 is a prettified and refined Mauser 98. Yeah, the 700 is more accurate out of the box, and truth be told, you can expend a lot of effort and cash on a K98k and it will never be as accurate as a 700. However, you hit it in your post, My Lord Bison: a hunting rifle will fire a maximum of 20 rounds a year. A military rifle (Mauser, Enfield, Mosin, etc.) are made to fire 20 rounds per minute, hour after hour, day after day. You'll shoot the rifling out long before you mess up the action/headspace. That's assuming jacketed bullets; if you handload and use lead bullets instead (and accept 1800-2000fps instead of the higher muzzle velocity that you can get with jacketed bullets) the rifling (and rifle) will last pretty much forever.

    Not to mention that the wooden stock gets a certain patina with age, a plastic one just gets dirtier.

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    1. I think my patina is from Cosmoline. And thanks for the pep talk, I was almost thinking bad thoughts on the surplus rifles ( a bit conflicted as to whether I should be replacing the arsenal- I really have WAY too much free cash in my budget nowadays )

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  6. One could assume (if they could pull themselves away from looking at your hair for one moment) that if the collapse has happened, and you put 5,000 rounds through a Remington ... that at least one or two of the bullets would earn you another gun or 3.

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    1. Tru dat, yo. But why invest in the rifle if it ain't a multi-generational? Unless, you just need to be armed and aren't too picky.

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  7. I'm a bit skeptical about the round count in the prepper community.
    Do you really expect to survive multiple firefights with 5000 rounds fired total ?

    Especially a bolt action, I would think 20 rounds fired in a firefight is a big number. Someone should be dead at this point ! With 5000 rounds you could have 250 firefights ... I wouldn't bet on me to survive this many deadly encounters, I would consider 5 or 6 to be already a miracle (unless you're playing assassin / sniper and ambush from afar unsuspecting survivors).

    Unless you train a lot with your weapons (which I can't afford to), storing thousand and thousand ammo is a bit of waste of prep money imo.
    You will run sooner out of food than out of ammo.
    I have 500 rounds for my Mauser. It's a bit under my comfort limit, but I don't feel under-supplied.

    What really bothers me with the R700, if this 5000 rounds limit is true, is that it's not a quality gun and it may not withstand the abuses it will receive in a collapse scenario.

    French Lesbian Male Minion

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    1. I don't expect to live long enough to eat all my stored wheat, but I plan on being alive after it runs out as a worse case. I don't plan on firing many rounds, but others will far in the future, cumulatively.

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  8. My humble opinion on the 700 is that it makes a fine sniper/long range weapon. The fact it might wear out at 5k is meaningless because that many rounds cost wise is probably at least $5,000 . So buy two of em if you're worried about wearing one out.
    I've owned a 700BDL in 7mm mag, for about thirty years now and consider it a fine gun. The go to weapon for over 100 yds.
    Screw those POS ARs, I prefer my mini-14 in 5.56 for other up close encounters, ammo is cheap for it. So a guy might actually be able to afford stashing 5k rounds.
    As you well know, ammo will be the thing in short supply...not guns, be plenty of those laying around without anything to feed them.

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    1. I don't think a new Remington would stack up to your old one. If I'm not mistaken, Sportsman's has currently 48 cent steel case 308. Yes, reloads are better. But in case you need as much as possible it is an option.

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    2. “I don't think a new Remington would stack up to your old one.“

      The quality reduction in firearms has been long in the process James.

      My old Stevens model 9478 12GA shotgun (Circa 1978) has a plastic trigger guard and barrel break release. Though to be fair, it is a high strength plastic, and it has never failed in the 36 years that I have owned the gun. What did fail was the hammer that was made of cast metal. The spur snapped off one day in ordinary use. I was lucky and found the replacements and ordered two, along with a rear stock that someone broke, and never confessed to (Yes, I liked the gun that much).

      My Browning double barrel 12GA is from around 1980, and has stamped on the receiver “assembled in Japan with Japanese components”, and this was a $500.00 shotgun at that time.

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  9. Howa 1500 boltie rifles are sold under the Weatherby Vanguard name at discount sporting good stores like Bi-Mart. I got one in .308Win for ~$300 (no tax Oregon). There are aftermarket upgrades to /detachable box mag, or fixed 10-round box mag that can be zipped in from a stripper. Yes, it's a Japanese Mauser. I wish that it was a 7.62NATO rifle rather than .308Win, but the main job is to re-fire brass once-shot by a yuppie semi-auto.

    .30 because NATO medium MG's shoot it and Uncle stocks it deep. If it was the only rifle in the world, probly tend toward .243.

    pdxr13

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  10. No bayonet lugs? No clipper strips? No dried up Nazi blood in the woodgrain?

    Sounds like a gun for metrosexuals. :)

    The SMLE on the other hand...

    Personally I only think of bolt action rifles as emplacement defence guns, all but fixed to their position of overwatch. Buy 'em cheap and powerful. Be inclined to have multiple loaded guns on hand rather than one really expensive one. After all, you can't split the expensive gun with the new recruits.

    On the trail I prefer a lever gun for a bunch of reasons.

    As for sub MOA accuracy, who is seriously going to able to make good use of it? In what circumstance? The barbarians aren't going to be standing still and they're not going to come at you across hundreds of yards of open terrain on a bright, windless day.

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    1. Unfortunately, no longer cheap. Just found a no.9 bayonet on Amazon for $33 after shipping. If it works, I'll order more and report. That is what passes for cheap nowadays. Course, in the end it won't matter what it cost, only if you have it.

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    2. NOT that that is an excuse to buy a $2500 AR in 308.

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  11. Some folks have mentioned the Japanese.

    The folks at Gun Test have looked at some old Saigas, in some case rebranded under American names, and they have held up very well.

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    1. I focused on modern manufacture just because of ease of availability.

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