My son uses a M700 so Sunday we load up a truck load of guns and dogs and head to the bush to do some grousing/shooting.
Because I just sold a couple 06s I have a surplus of ammo. I was determined to see if I could make that rifle do something unsafe.......it was no problem.
I couldn't get it to fire with the safety but it was easy to get it not to fire with the safety off.
I simply pushed slightly on the side of the trigger ( to the right on a left handed gun) and pulled. The gun would not fire and the trigger was stiff like in safety on position. You didn't have to hold the trigger to the right, just push it and then pull the trigger-even several minutes later.
You are left holding a gun that will now fire if you do one of three things.
1 Try to move the safety.
2 Tap on the bolt.
3 Push the trigger on the on the right side back to the left.
I believe this is exactly how they got the sniper rifle to fire by touching the bolt in the doc.
Another thing that was every bit as disturbing was after a left push on the trigger. The trigger went to a very light pull-I would guess under a pound.
I do know now why snipers like the light trigger. I fired the best 3 shot group of my life after pushing this thing to the left.
Without wiggling or pushing the trigger the gun worked flawlessly.
The trigger was adjusted to 3.5 lbs ( this was not an option it came factory at like 10 lbs) by a good smith with many years of Remington experience and like I said it breaks perfectly if you don't screw with it before firing.
At home I could not repeat the events and could see nothing out of the ordinary. I took it to my smith and he could see nothing but thought the side to side movement was sloppy.
The gun is a 2007 model and has had only a few boxes fired.
So the questions remains why would you be screwing with your trigger back and forth before firing and what are the chances of my son doing this while handling this gun?
We will have to let someone else answer that as there will be a new Timney trigger installed before this thing does any more shooting. I have a couple already and love them.
For 200 bucks it just didn't seem like something to even think about.
I am not bashing Remington and if I could have seen something that identified a problem I might have considered using it IF it were my rifle.
For a fifteen year old it just is not an option to not have 100% confidence in his equipment being safe.
I think a lot of the trigger problems that get blamed on Remington are very similar to this and have nothing to do with the quality or design - just lousy maintenance or improperly adjusted after the factory...