Thirty different calibers over twenty variations among five million Remington 700 rifles sold since 1962. If you don’t own a 700, you know someone who does. It’s one of the most dependable, reliable actions ever built, not to mention the basis for more customized rifles than any other bolt gun.

But how much do you know about the 55-year-old Model 700? Here are ten things that might surprise you.

 

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24 COMMENTS

  2. 11. The Remington trigger has a nasty habit of unintentional firing which Remington has known about for decades and ignored.

    • Adjudicated years ago, Remmy lost, is currently on the hook for fixing every one of those crappy triggers.

      ‘Old timers’ warned us as kids in the 70s about those unintentional discharge machines. Search the archives, there have been a few articles about this over the years.

      • Mel Forbes patented a drop in replacement safety to correct that flaw . One of the prototypes lives in my 721 .270 that my Dad bought in Climax , CO in 1955 .
        He tried to show it to Remington execs at a Shot Show after he got it patented .
        They turned up their noses and walked away to lose lawsuits that cost them MEGA BUCKS .
        An unrepaired rifle has the potential to kill you or a friend .
        Take heed .

  3. “If you don’t own a 700, you know someone who does. ”

    Actually not true in my case, and nearly everyone I know owns guns. Winchester M70s and Ruger M77s are at least as good and won’t shoot you with the safety on. 700s make a good action to build a custom rifle on, but that’s the only situation in which I would buy one.

    • The best actions on which to build a custom action are the Rem700 clones. By the time you blueprint a 700 action, you’re into the cost of a custom action. So you might as well buy a custom action – BAT, Sturgeon, Defiance, Stiller, etc.

        • Actually most well heeled people even today still us the Mauser 98 action. For rugged use the Remington 700 is a total piece of shit. See my other post where I detail all the el-cheapo short cuts on this action and its design faults which makes it useless as a rugged hunting rifle.

  4. Here’s a bunch of things people don’t realize about the Rem700:

    1. They knew about the issues with the Walker Fire Control System from decades ago. Decades. Going back to the 1970’s.

    2. Remington loves to brag about their “three rings of steel” surrounding the case head, but they put in such a crappy extractor, that if you buy an aftermarket bolt to solve this, or you have a competent extractor retrofitted to your bolt, that “three rings” idea is gone.

    3. The bolt is actually made from three pieces, silver-soldered together. The bolt head, which is heat treated, is silver-soldered to the main part of the bolt body. The bolt handle is also silver-soldered onto the main bolt body.

    4. The recoil lug is also a washer so that Remington doesn’t need to put in a thread relief on the barrel tenon. This means that you have four, not three, dimensions you need to account for when headspacing a new barrel: the thickness of the lug is added to the length of the tenon, depth of the chamber and the distance from the receiver front ring to the bolt face.

    5. Oh, and you need to make sure the “recoil lug/washer” is ground flat and parallel to make sure that your barrel remains co-axial with the receiver centerline… if you look at the high-end custom actions that fit Rem700 exterior dimensions, you’ll notice that they often have the recoil lug/washer as part of the action.

    6. The round action is easier to manufacture, but in heavy loads with appreciable bullet mass, the only thing keeping the action/barrel combo from rotating is usually the action screws and any pillars. This is one of those areas where a flat-bottom receiver, for all the hassle of machining it, is better.

    I could come up with a bunch of other gripes I have about the Rem700, but I have other things to do.

      • Look at the threads on the action screws. Customer complains of the screws coming loose over time. This happens when the recoil lug’s cut is too wide, and the recoil lug holds the recoil only front/back, but not side-side.

        I’m talking of heavy loads – like .338 WinMag and up, bullets of 250gr and up.

        • DG, they actually knew about issues with this garbage design in the late 1940s, with the gun prior to the 700.

          Validated by Remington internal testing, they knew it could fire on chambering, and could fire switching the safety off. 60 years ago.

          I don’t hang around jugglers of live grenades with pins that are known to just fall out. I cannot imagine hunting with someone who carries a 700. Hell, I’ve got an Erma-Excam RX that I think I won in a poker game. I seldom shoot it, and I certainly don’t hunt with it.

  5. Eh… my Rem700 is so consistently clovering shots at 100 yards I almost never take it to the range any more. I had an aftermarket X-Mark Pro trigger dropped in and it breaks like a politician with a touch over two pounds of pressure. So I don’t slam it around while it is chambered. It shoots great and that’s all I need to know.

  9. Yes Remington 700’s are the worst rifles ever made thats why they only ever sold 5 million of them. I have approximately 12 of those. In truth the worst recoil lug/action screw design is the Ruger 77. Damn near impossible to have a free float bbl in a wooden stock and they routinely shoot loose.

    • By your logic, the Raven .25 semi-auto pistol is a great pistol because they’ve sold over 2 million of them.

  10. I own a Rem 700, Sav 10, and Ruger 77, they all have there own issues that need customising to rectify, which can be done at reasonable cost.

    I also own a Stiller Tac 30 and an AI AW .308.

    You get what you pay for.

  11. The Remington 700 is totally useless as a rugged hunting rifle and here are just a few of its faults.

    1. A stamped sheet metal extractor that breaks like glass under heavy use. It was only recently that Remington quite riveting them in that required a special tool to replace them, making it impossible to change out in the field.

    2. An el-cheapo brazed on bolt handle. Give it a little bump and it comes off in your hand. A disaster for rugged hunting use.

    3. Until recently a defectively designed trigger that killed and maimed hundreds of people.

    4. Until recently it only had a dangerous 2 position trigger. When you flipped it off their was no way to stop an accidental discharged if the trigger was set to light or if the trigger was one of the thousands that Remington made that were defective and there are still thousands of them still out their that have ot had their triggers replaced.

    5. An el-cheapo hammer fudged barrel, the worst type of rifling to use on a firearm.

    6. A firing pin design that is not very easy to change out in the field.

    7. Some of the newer models have junk plastic trigger guards and before that they were aluminum.

    8. Those few guns that still have wood stocks have junk machine cut checkering not hand checkering.

    9. The gas escape system in case of a burst cartridge case will not protect you from getting hurt like the Model 98 Mauser or even the Weatherby Mark 5

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