A Model 700 Varmint Rifle

There’s gun stores, and then there’s gun stores.  I can’t pass a gun store without stopping in.  The issue is that most gun shops today are soulless retail outlets with black plastic.  Glocks, ARs, you get the idea.  Guns with no soul and gun shop owners with even less.  But there are exceptions.  One that comes to mind is the Gunrunner in Duarte.  It’s a favorite, partly because the team working there consists of older guys a lot like myself (crusty, maybe carrying a few pounds more than they should be, and a sense of humor).   But it’s mostly because they get it.  “It” being, of course, blue steel and walnut.  And military surplus rifles.  I can’t drive by Gunrunner’s without stopping in.  You never know what they might have in stock, and even if I don’t buy anything, it’s always fun looking.

One day a few years ago on just such a stop, I noticed an older Remington Model 700. It was the varmint model and it had a price that was just too good to walk away from. And the photos don’t do it justice. It had a real contrasty bit of walnut with horizontal dark stripes that were unusually nice on a production gun. As the saying goes, I pulled the trigger. I bought the rifle for a scant $400, which I thought was a hell of a deal (I think new ones are about a thousand bucks now).

The Remington was pretty well gummed up with old oil (so much so the firing pin and trigger were stuck), and the standard M-700 BDL high gloss urethane finish was going south in a big way.  I took the barreled action out of the stock and gave it a thorough cleaning.  Then I spent hours on the stock with 0000 steel wool.

When I was finished, I was pleased with the results. The rifle looked way better than it did with the original high gloss finish (which never really appealed to me…it was too Hollywood for my tastes). The stock had a few nicks and scratches before; after the refinish, those completely disappeared. It became a thing of great beauty with a nice, subdued, European look.  I grabbed a few shots, and then I played with them a bit in Photoshop to subdue the background and highlight the rifle. I like how the rifle and this photo in particular turned out…

I mounted an inexpensive Tasco 6×24 scope on the Model 700. I wasn’t wild about the scope, as it didn’t seem to be able to focus the reticle and the target simultaneously (or maybe it was just my old eyes). A new Weaver or a Leupold might have been in order, but the results with this resurrected old warhorse were still outstanding.  The rifle shot into an inch at 100 yards before I did any load development (which wasn’t too shabby) with what I regarded as junk .223 ammo.

I went to work on developing a load to get the rifle to shoot into a half-inch, and I succeeded: I broke the half-minute-of-angle barrier with a 0.498-inch three-shot group almost immediately!

That was with IMR 4320 propellant, and it prompted me to try several different propellants and charge weights:

You might think that with the above results the rifle was a keeper.  It was, but not for me.  A couple of my shooting buddies wanted it, and I transferred it to a good friend for what I had into it.

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