By Joe Berk
The good news is when I was recently on the range with my Remington Custom Shop Model 504 the air was dead still and I had the range to myself. The bad news is the 5-shot 50-yard groups were just so-so, and I didn’t have anything to blame that on but myself. Well, maybe. I only tried two kinds of ammo (an old box of Remington Target 22 and a new box of CCI standard velocity ammo). You have to play around trying different makes (just like you would experiment with different reloads) to find ammo that a rimfire rifle really responds to. I’m not there yet. But I’m having fun along the way.
Sue and I were in Rapid City, South Dakota, several years ago exploring Mt. Rushmore and the Black Hills. We took a lot out of that trip…we saw Mt. Rushmore during the day and in the evening, we saw bunch of stuff in the Black Hills area, we went out to a little-known Minuteman Missile National Park, we saw the Badlands, we stopped in Wahl Drug, we went to Devil’s Tower, and of course, I had to check out what I now know to be one of the best gunshops in the country: Rapid City’s First Stop Gun and Coin. I could have spent the entire day there, but we had other things to see and do. After our visit, I started checking out what First Stop had listed on Gunbroker.com, and it wasn’t too long after that that I saw a Remington Custom Shop Model 504.
I didn’t even know what a Model 504 was, I’d never handled or shot one, but I knew what the Remington Custom shop was all about. The rifle had my interest. It was not cheap, but that was maybe a dozen years ago and when you see a Custom Shop Model 504 come up for sale today (which hardly ever happens), the ask is about three times what I paid. I’ve never seen another Custom Shop 504 in person; I’ve only seen them on the rare occasions one appears on Gunbroker and in a couple of Internet reviews.
Remington wanted a high end .22 bolt rifle in the early 2000s to compete with the offerings from Kimber, Browning, Ruger, CZ, and others, and the Model 504 was the result. Remington had three versions: A Sporter model, a heavy barreled Varmint version, and the Custom Shop 504 you see here. Remington built the 504 from 2004 to 2007. The Custom Shop Model 504 was the flagship and it had it all: A machined steel receiver, a highly polished deep blue finish, a free-floated barrel and glass-bedded action, highly figured walnut, a subtle forearm tip, a super smooth action, cut checkering, a recoil pad that might be more at home on a .300 Weatherby, and a barrel from the super-exotic Remington Model 40 target rifle. I didn’t know any of this at the time I hit the “buy now” button, but I knew any Remington Custom Shop rifle is a collectible item.
My rifle came with the rings of unknown origin and Bausch and Lomb mounts. I first mounted Bushnell scope, a scope set up to be parallax free at 100 yards. But I typically shoot a .22 at 50 yards. I next put an old Weaver 4×12 variable scope (adjustable for parallax) on the rifle, and when I adjusted for 50 yards it had no parallax. I don’t know how repeatable that old scope is (and as you’ll notice from the photo above, the groups seem to move around a bit), so one thing I’m going to do in the future is put another scope on the rifle, mostly likely Mueller’s 4×12. I have a Mueller scope on another rimfire rifle and I know it is good. I like the looks of the old Weaver the 504 is wearing now, but when I tried adjusting it, there didn’t seem to be much correlation between the adjustments I was making and where the bullets were going.
Something that had me scratching my head are the plastic inserts on the scope rings between the scope body and the rings. I’ve never seen this on any other rifle, but from what I’ve read on the internet, they work well for other shooters (even on heavily recoiling rifles, which a .22 is not). The scope appears to be secure.
The Model 504 magazine is apparently scarcer than an honest politician. Only one magazine was included with my rifle. Now that I am shooting it more (it’s no longer a safe queen), I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a couple of spare mags until I saw their price. When you can find one on Ebay or Gunbroker, they go for around $200. I think I’ll be careful with my one magazine and keep looking; maybe I’ll get lucky and find one in a gunstore’s discounted junkbox (most old line gunshops have these).
It may be that the Model 504 is just not that accurate. My findings are consistent with what other 504 reviewers have published (in fact, my gun is turning in tighter groups than what others have previously published). Recognizing that the Custom Shop model used the same barrel blanks Remington used for the Model 40 .22 rifle, I would have expected more. Maybe it’s there and I just haven’t found it yet. At least that’s my hope.
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Joe,
That’s an interesting rifle, I’ve never handled a Remington 504 before. Personally, I think you are on the right track with ammo and scope. Sounds like you will switch out that scope before using up much more ammo.
I’ve never been a fan of old Weaver and Bushnell optics, including Bushnell binoculars. Bushnell glass has always been a low-end scope offered by Big 5, and back in the day even K-Mart and Target stores. I purchased them because they were affordable and found that they fogged up easily, didn’t have reticle focus adjustment, were not repeatable when changing from low to high power, and tended to move around a lot when transported. Some of that had to do with the low budget scope mounts, I’m sure.
Weaver scopes were always touted in the gun mags as “the best thing since sliced bread”. My experience has been that the old-style Weaver scopes really weren’t all that much better than Bushnell scopes, but definitely had better mounts. Those old Weavers I had would tend to fog up and also didn’t have reticle adjustments. They were nothing like the quality of modern Leupold scopes, but also not nearly as pricey.
After many years I finally found the nearly perfect scope for my Marlin/Glenfield Model 60 based on a recommendation of a good friend. This budget rifle was the first 22 I ever owned and still use it to this day, some 50 years later. The scope I’m talking about is very affordable turned my previously ho-hum .22 LR rifle into a real tack driver (i.e. my “minute of golf ball” at 100 yards rifle). The scope is the BSA Sweet 22 3-9 X 40 1R. Now I’m sure there are more expensive 22 rifle scopes that might be better, but this Sweet 22 turned my otherwise ho-hum budget rifle into a real tack driver. The transformation is nothing less than incredible. It came with three separate turrets for 36g, 38g, and 40g bullet weights. Mine has held its zero using the scope mounts that came with it for many years over many range sessions. I think that my exact BSA Sweet 22 scope may have been discontinued but appears to have been superseded by an even better model. Check out these specifications, this is truly an impressive affordable scope. I don’t hesitate to recommend it for your Remington Model 504:
https://bsaoptics.com/product/sweet-22-adjustable-objective-scope-4-12×40/
Good inputs, Joe. Thanks very much.