David E. Petzal - The Gun Nut

At one time every American gun maker with any pretensions to class had a custom shop as part of its factory. These shops offered all sorts of optional engraving, fancy wood, elaborate checkering, barrel lengths—you name it. Remington was no different, but during the middle of the 20th century its Custom Shop in Ilion, NY, was noted not for turning out fancy guns, but for super-accurate rifles. If you showed up at a benchrest shoot with a Remington 40XB-BR, people wet themselves. I owned a 40XB in .222 for a while in the late 1960s, and it made the woodchucks dance for fair.

But over the 70s the trend was to pretty guns, and a typical Remington Custom Shop rifle was likely to be very good looking but otherwise not much different from a production-line gun. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way. The Remington Custom Shop has a new manager, Carlos Martinez, and is getting a major infusion of new CNC machinery with which to build working hunting rifles that are as good as those built by anyone.

The new line of rifles (there are 4) look like run-of-the-mill 700s, but that’s as far as it goes:

• Each model comes in a choice of 56 calibers.
• The barrels (choice of 22 to 26 inches, depending on model) are stainless steel, button rifled (not hammer forged) and lapped right there at Ilion.
• The receivers are stainless steel, and blueprinted. This means that they are trued up so that all the radii are perfect, all the flats are flat, and the barrel screws in perfectly square.
• The trigger is not standard issue*; it’s a Remington 40-X target trigger, which is set at 3 pounds.
• The stock is from Bell & Carlson, and has a full-length bedding girder instead of bedding blocks.
• The aluminum trigger guard and floorplate have been replaced by machined stainless steel.
• In .30 caliber and below, the rifles are guaranteed to shoot sub-MOA.
• Depending on model, you can get black TriNyte finish, satin blue, or satin stainless.

I don’t know if the Custom Shop’s barrels can compete with those made by Lilja, Pac-Nor, Schneider, or others at that lofty level, but aside from that, I don’t see any steps that were skipped here. The rifles I looked at were very carefully put together, and I’ll be getting a loaner soon to see how it shoots.

Prices? The four models hover around the $3,000 mark, which is the low end for work like this. Even if you’re not about to order five, it’s nice to see the Custom Shop going in this direction. It’s what they should be doing.

*Remington’s X-Mark Pro trigger, which debuted last year, was better on the drawing board than in real life. The two that I got to pull extensively were, in a word, ghastly—4 1/2 pounds and creepy. Remington has taken note of this replaced it with the X-Mark Pro Adjustable. It’s set at 3 ½ pounds at the factory, and has a 2-pound range of adjustment that can be set by you, the shooter. Remington recommends that you stay above 3 pounds. So do I.

A number of you have asked if I have a fixation on Ms. Elisha Cuthbert. The answer is yes, but just to show that I’m not weird about it or anything, here is a photo of Ms. Megan Fox, and my thanks to Nate Matthews for finding her, as it were.

But I digress. Marlin has interesting new stuff for 09, including new walnut and laminated stocks for the wonderful, and bargain-priced, XL-7 centerfire rifle. For $300 and change (Cabela’s has sold it for below $300) this gun is beyond belief.

For you lever-gun lovers who yearned for something just a tad more powerful than the .308 Marlin, there is now a .338 Marlin Express, loaded with a 200-grain bullet at 2,565 fps. It is not the ballistic equal of the .338 Win Mag. or the new Ruger short magnum of that caliber, but it is a thumper, and a serious step up in power.

What grabbed me, though was the Marlin Model 1895SBL. The company has taken note of all the hot-rodded Guide Guns out there and decided to build one of their own. It’s .45/70, all stainless steel, laminated stock, heavy 18.5-inch barrel, an enlarged loop lever, a 5-shot half-magazine, and instead of the usual horrible factory sights, it’s been fitted with the XS Ghost Ring sight system. This consists of a big white post up front and a huge, adjustable-aperture rear. You look through it and the aperture seems to vanish. It’s very fast to use. There is a long rail mount that let you use long-eye-relief scopes or standard scopes.

I think Marlin is going to be back-ordered on these for years. It is an altogether nifty little beast, and all the gun writers rushed to grope it. The two samples they had at the range were extremely slick in operation; I don’t know if they had been tuned or not. It’s possible that, in the future, Marlin may establish its own custom shop, where you can get not only special working guns like this, but fancy ones as well. Many years ago, Marlin offered all sorts of grades with fancy wood and checkering, and engraving and inlaying. It would be nice to see that come back.

This past week I was in South Carolina attending a seminar given by Remington, Marlin, H&R, Bushmaster, New England Firearms, and DPMS Panther Arms. These companies are joined at the hip under the name American Heritage Arms. We got so much information in three days that my calcifying brain can scarcely handle it all, but I'll give you what I consider the highlights.

First is the .30 Remington AR, a new cartridge that's mated to a new configuration of the Remington R-15 rifle. The .30 Remington AR fills the gap between the 6.8 SPC and the .450 Bushmaster. It bears an amazing resemblance to the 7.92mm Kurz cartridge, which was developed for the revolutionary  German Sturmgewher rifle in 1941. According to Remington, it is a 350-yard deer-hunting load that is roughly the equal of the .308. It comes in three versions: a 125-grain AccuTip boattail, a 125-grain Core-Lokt PSP, and a 123-grain full-metal-jacket practice version. The muzzle velocity for all three is 2,800 fps.

Remington will sell you a .30 AR rifle ready to go, or you can get an upper that is compatible with the standard AR-15 lower. The new upper accommodates the .30 AR by means of a modified .308 bolt head and barrel extension, and a modified 4-round magazine box.

All this was so new that we were not able to shoot a .30 Remington AR, but it looks perfect for people who like these rifles and have been hoping for a good deer round.

And a word about the Bushmaster: Its paper ballistics are 250 grains at 2,200 fps, but these figures don't do it justice. We were shooting one at an oversized cast-iron groundhog silhouette at 50 yards. A hit from a .223 would cause the target to sway almost imperceptibly, as though a squirrel had farted at it. A hit from the Bushmaster would lift the groundhog up out of its pivots and dump it on the ground. I like the Bushmaster.

Next time: A new .45/70 from Marlin that is cooler than Sarah Palin.