Can’t speak to modern stuff.
Fucking rough. It truly got inexcusably shitty by the 2010s, but already in the 1990s people complained about the 870 Action Express having hangups and rust issues, or the 700 having its bolt handle poorly brazed on, hence the trend of having those staked, as rough enough handling really could make them come off on many examples. 90s Remington stuff could be decent still, barring you looked out for problems like those or kept in mind to fix/prevent it.
In more modern times, I've once seen an 870 Action Express where the fitment of the pump-slide was
so shit that you couldn't open the action all the way, because it was crooked and the handguard ran into the taper of the barrel, and I have a memory of an anon on /k/ describing a Wingmaster him or his dad won in a raffle which had the same problem, requiring that you mortar the action to get it all the way back. He ground away material on the handguard to let it clear the barrel so he could disassemble it, then emptying the receiver of loose steel shavings which had made the already rough action grittier than Deer Hunter, after picking a particularly sharp one out of his fingertip, he proceeded to put a lot of polish into the gun to get it properly working.
Then there's the lawsuit about the Remington 700s safety, if you're gonna pay attention to any part of this post, make it this. As it turns out, the trigger mechanism can, if set up or manufactured incorrectly, be made to sometimes trip the sear when the safety is manipulated. This would first manifest in the early 2000s where a woman was unloading her rifle after coming home from hunting, where her young son was on the other side of the wall by pure coincidence as the safety made the rifle fire, killing him. Remington settles this in the resulting court case.
Later, as quality control gets more awful, more triggers are built wrong, and more incidents happen, like a man putting his rifle in the backseat of his car, where a phone charging cable then brushes up against the safety and fires it, killing his young daughter. There's a lot more, like a man who shot off his foot because of the defective trigger, but you get the point.
As it turns out, this is something Remington was aware of could happen
as far back as 1948, but they never told anyone, and when the company got shitty and put less money into skilled labor and quality control to the point that it actually became a problem, they were apparently fine with not telling anyone by then either, or issuing any kind of recall.
The 700 situation obviously leads to lawsuits of cyclopean proportions, beyond the death and personal injury suits you then get the settlements, where thousands upon thousands of people file claims because they can demonstrate that their rifles are indeed deathtraps. In spite of Remington actually taking in god knows how many rifles, people get them back and they still have the same problem, meaning they either didn't actually do anything, or they did but fucked it up anyway, and I really don't know which of those two possibilities are worse.
I would assume that any 700s from the early 90s or before are safe, as there wasn't this rash of surprise amputations, or surprise post-term abortions, but I'd make sure to check any rifle just to be sure, and to assume it's distinctly possible with any rifle made in the past 20ish years.
Seeking out an aftermarket trigger seems about as vital to me as addressing the weak bolt handle on 21st century Remington 700s, remember, this is a problem that is common enough that numerous people have been killed and injured, and many people detect that their rifle still had this problem in spite of warranty work enforced by court order.
I would say that this was probably the primary reason they went out of business the last time.
And here I thought all my old ammo from big green had gotten moist or something, so I stopped using it; that stuff made smokepole-tier clouds, especially the .22, but my hoarding autism never let me get rid of it.
Their centerfire stuff I think is passable in spite of not exactly being deluxe, smoky, but it'll certainly do for practice and recreation, and the brass is perfectly reusable for better results if you reload. Their rimfire ammo is subpar, but it's workable for manual actions like revolvers and repeaters, so you might as well plink the stuff up to make space for other things anyway. Maybe look at something like a Ruger Wrangler or that Diamondback Sidekick if you want an inexpensive wheelgun you won't feel bad for putting lots of bleh ammo through, their cowboy styling might make the smoke clouds feel less shitty.
the old name of it was "nyclad" and originated as a nylon replacement for soft lead alloy bullets that was cheaper and easier to make than copper jacketed rounds while also not being as dirty as unalloyed lead. S&W i think advertised it to LEO still carrying .357 back then and i might have a box somewhere of the stuff. it's was mediocre in performance but was admittedly a fairly clean ammo.
Oh, so they rebranded that stuff under that name? The exact details are fuzzy to me, but I think it was mostly intended as a better target ammo under Smith & Wesson (they did hollowpoints, but most of what I've seen was roundnose ball, wadcutters, and then primarily semi-wadcutters), after retiring it they sold it to Federal, who wanted to develop it into defensive ammo. Federal's approach was to make it a lot softer, softer than most soft lead bullets around, the goal being to let you get good expansion even out of a short 2" barrel in a gun not rated for +P loads.
This actually 'worked,' but not in the way people liked, because in exchange for good expansion, you lost a LOT of penetration, hence they made the alloy a little harder to try to offset this, but Federal discontinued it anyway after finding it wasn't profitable enough.
Through hearsay this got twisted into them being super bullets, which deformed and fragmented so much that it made forensic ballistics much more difficult, and that political pressure was then put on Federal to change the round (or that it was supposedly banned), which is the kind of mythical quality that boomer fudds tend to ascribe to weird and collectible ammo which in reality wasn't actually that good.
I've seen Syntech, but I'll have to assume that it's not loaded super soft in an attempt to try to get that effect.
Anyone have experience with Windham weaponry?
A bit, was very nice and I want one.
He was the guy that famously told Bill Ruger off for his "only 10 round" thing and purposely built weird blind magazine receivers and marked "10 round .50 Beowolf" on AR mag baseplates and stuff to get around anti gun laws.
I knew the background of Windham, but I didn't know that story, makes me think of Ronnie Barrett.
