I just want to say one word to you, just one word. You listening?
Plastics.
There was a great future in plastics, and the
Remington Arms Company was going to be all over it.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today courtesy of the
Dutch Hillenburg collection, we are taking a look
at a Remington Nylon 66.
This is not a rare gun, it's not an exotic gun,
but I think it's a gun with a really cool backstory.
It represents a gamble taken by the Remington Arms Company.
Actually a really big gamble, and a gamble that paid off tremendously well for them.
So the backstory here is going into the 1950s Remington didn't really have a good,
inexpensive .22 calibre semi-auto rifle in its catalogue. It needed something.
And it wanted this new rifle to be cheap to manufacture, it wanted to have a good profit margin.
Something that it could use to really effectively compete
against the other .22s that were out there in the market. This is a huge market for a rifle.
This is a plinking rifle. It's a recreational rifle. It's a rifle you throw in the back of your truck
when you are going out fishing. It's a kid's rifle in many cases. ...
There's a huge potential market for this, and Remington wanted to fill that need.
But they wanted it cheap, so they looked at the stereotypical .22 calibre rifle
to try and figure out where they can cut costs.
The barrel? Not much you can really do with the barrel,
or not much that they saw they could do with the barrel.
The bolt is another expensive part, but they didn't really see any way
to simplify or cheapen the bolt beyond what was already being used for
plain blowback rimfire .22.
And that led them to the stock, the wood handguard and the wood buttstock.
The furniture of a .22 calibre rifle was a place where there was a real potential for savings.
You wouldn't think that the wood stock on the gun is particularly expensive.
But when you've whittled everything else down to a lot of
very simple machined parts and very simple stampings,
the wood actually remains as one of the higher cost items.
And Remington took a look at this and thought "plastics".
Now since the 1930s the Remington Company was actually owned by DuPont.
DuPont ... is and was a massive chemical conglomerate.
And they had done a lot of research into polymers,
they'd in fact come up with this thing called "Nylon".
In particular Nylon 6/6 was one of nearly a hundred different polymers
that was tested by DuPont in the 1930s.
And fibre 6/6 turned out to be really good, and DuPont would make a tremendous amount of money
making these things for women's stockings.
They were so common that they ... are one of those products
that acquired its own brand name as a generic: "nylons".
Well Nylon is actually the polymer material that was used to make those stockings.
And Remington engineers decided that they could use that same Nylon
to make furniture for their new rifle.
In fact not only would they use it to make the furniture,
they [used] it to [make] the entire darn thing.
This looks like it's got a metal receiver, but it actually doesn't.
It has a little sheet metal cover that is screwed onto the middle of the gun
so that it looks like it has a metal receiver so that people don't freak out quite so much
as if they thought the whole gun was just one big lump of plastic, which it pretty much is.
Remington designed their new rifle (which they would call the Nylon 66 after its material)
to use essentially a single monolithic polymer everything.
The handguard, the receiver, the buttstock are all one continuous piece of polymer.
It was going to be moulded in two halves, left and right, and then put together,
welded or fixed together into one piece.
And when this was being done in the mid-1950s,
allegedly the mould used to create the Nylon 66 was
the most complex and most expensive polymer mould in the world at the time.
And ... when we get into this, if you look at all the levels of detail and reinforcements
and everything in this receiver, you can certainly understand how that could easily be the case.
And Remington knew that this would be potentially a hard sell to their customers.
Even today we see people in some cases, looking at a monolithic polymer receiver and thinking,
"Well that's going to be really fragile, it'll never work right."
Remington wanted to make sure that their gun was substantially durable.
That it could withstand things that say,
other companies' wooden stock, wooden furniture rifles couldn't.
And so they put an immense amount of testing into this rifle.
Between 1955 and 1958, when the first production batch was actually manufactured,
they tested many of these rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds.
They sent them out to ... sales reps to use and abuse and report back.
And the reports were glowing. A lot of the sales reps wanted these things right away.
They did all sorts of nasty things to them, they threw them in lakes, they drove over them with trucks.
And the Nylon 66 turned out to be a remarkably durable and reliable, effective little rifle.
So the first batch ... became available for sale to the public
in January of 1959 for the price of $49.95.
And it would go on to be produced for decades in massive numbers.
But first, before we talk about the end game of the Nylon 66,
let's take a look at how it actually works, because this is pretty cool inside.
Let's go ahead and dig into this. First off, we have a weird receiver marking on this one,
because this is actually a special commemorative edition
celebrating Remington's [150th] anniversary.
Note that that's the anniversary of the name - they went through
at least a couple of bankruptcies during that time, but.
There would be a series of occasional special editions of Nylon 66 sold.
But the only thing different about this is the fact that they stamped this marking into the side.
Otherwise mechanically it's the same as all the rest of them.
We have a Remington mark and calibre, these are .22 Long Rifle, on the top of the barrel.
There is no serial number on this rifle, because well it was made in 1966,
and federal law didn't actually require serialising rifles
until the passage of the Gun Control Act in 1968.
Apparently Remington saw what was coming, because they started serialising Nylon 66s in 1967,
but that still leaves about 8 years of the initial production
where just the act of stamping a sequential serial number
on the gun would be enough additional cost that they opted not to do it.
The controls are very simple, we have a safety here on the back tang of the receiver.
Red is fire, no red is safe.
We have a plastic charging handle here that pulls the bolt back.
The magazine is actually located in the buttstock.
So you take this, turn it about 90 degrees, and pull it out.
There we go. Got a little spring-loaded follower there.
To load the magazine, you just drop .22 calibre cases nose first down into that magazine tube,
and then put the follower back in after it.
The exact same system as the Spencer and a number of other guns,
especially ones before World War Two, .22s used this style of magazine.
The rear sight is a very simple little spring sheet-metal sort of rear notch.
You can adjust this screw to move it up or down, but there are no specific settings.
And we've got a big ol' blade front sight there.
Oh, and the cap on the grip is marked Remington Nylon 66.
Notice how they did go ahead and add some black streaking into the polymer
of the receivers to kind of make it look like wood grain.
And they did a decent job on that, it's more natural looking just at a glance
from afar than a just a plain solid ... colour polymer.
They also added this fake checkering,
I suppose it is real checkering but it's moulded in, it's not actually cut.
And that just duplicates what you would normally expect to see on a wood-stocked rifle.
However, we have a very obvious seam that runs the entire length of the receiver, top and bottom.
Now let's get this apart, we're going to start with these two screws.
By the way, you would normally look at that screw on a gun like this and go,
"Aha, that's what's holding the stock onto the action."
In this case, you're wrong, that's actually what's controlling
the headspace of the rifle, which is ... yeah, we'll get to that in a moment.
Anyway, these two screws just go through the receiver.
There we go, pull those out.
I now also need to remove the charging handle, which is done by
just pulling it out of the side of the gun. This is really simple, cheap plastic.
And then I can lift the "receiver" off the gun.
So now you can see that this is one solid piece of polymer.
This guy is just a little sheet metal shell that sits over the top
to look like metal, and has the rear sight riveted on.
You may have seen this guy fall out of the side of the gun, that is the ejector.
It sits right here, and it is in fact held in place by the faux receiver.
So that little tip right there
is what catches the rim of the cartridge and ejects it out the side of the rifle.
This guy right here is basically a feed ramp.
It's going to ride up the top of the barrel here and ensure that a cartridge,
(which is going to come up through this tube, you can see the tip of the follower there)
a cartridge is going to run smoothly into the chamber.
This guy prevents that cartridge from lifting up and coming too high.
Now the barrel is locked into the receiver assembly by this stirrup.
And that stirrup is held in place by this big screw on the bottom.
So if I unscrew this, you can see that stirrup lifting up right here.
And take the screw out.
This stirrup is sort of locked in place a little bit by the barrel,
I can't actually remove it until I take the barrel out.
And ... this really is a polymer receiver,
we're used to a barrel being fixed to a metal receiver that the bolt then rides in.
In this case that's a nope.
I can just slide the barrel forward ...
and right out of the gun.
There you go, barrel's removed.
And now I can pull out that locking stirrup, it's got a little metal plate on it as well.
Now the way this bolt actually works is interestingly actually rather like
a lot of open bolt to closed bolt submachine gun conversions.
So we have a bolt here and we have a striker here.
When I cycle the bolt, the striker is going to come to the rear
and get caught by the sear and held back.
There we go, like that.
Now I'm not going to dry fire this, but when you pull the trigger this striker snaps forward.
You can see its spring compressed right there.
And it's going to hit the firing pin right here.
That firing pin can move back and forth just enough to fire a cartridge.
It's prevented from going too far forward by that pin,
which blocks it from going forward there.
You can see the firing pin right there at the top of the bolt face, and that's how it fires.
Like those semi-auto SMG conversions, this has two basically nested recoil springs.
You can see the striker recoil spring there, and then inside this tube
is a smaller diameter recoil spring that pushes the bolt forward independently.
Now let's pull the bolt out and I can show you all those parts.
So I'm going to pull this back a little bit, take tension off the charging handle.
There we go, so the charging handle comes out.
And then with the barrel removed, the bolt and the striker are just going to come right out ...
the front of the receiver.
Here is the bolt, there's its guide rod, there's the striker.
There is our striker spring, the guide rod in between, and the bolt spring right there.
So the bolt spring is going to sit over this guide rod inside that tube.
And this also sits outside that tube.
So there's the whole assembly put together.
You can see that ... there's one rail on each side of the bolt
and the striker that they ride in.
And this is just a .22, it's intended to be a really cheap gun.
And so there's no metal reinforcing there,
there's just rails in the polymer that those two parts ride in.
We've got our trigger assembly down in here.
So essentially what happens is this bar is preventing this sear from dropping down.
When I pull it forward, that sear will drop.
That sear is holding onto this angled surface of the striker,
so as soon as it can drop the striker is pushed forward under spring pressure.
That top little lug right here, where you can see the imprint of the firing pin,
that's what hits the firing pin.
And then we have our extractor right there.
There is a semi-auto disconnector in here that resets it so that it won't fire full-auto.
And that's pretty much it. There is the magazine tube coming up from the buttstock.
Now we talked about this being a very complex mould to put together.
And you can see from all of the recesses, the holes for the charging handle,
the ejection port, the rails inside, this indeed is a very complex piece to mould.
Especially given just how long it is, ensuring that you don't have warpage
that's going to render ... the part unusable.
This was a serious engineering challenge for Remington,
and it's really impressive that they pulled it off as well as they did.
One of the things that was done with the Nylon 66 right after they came into production,
almost certainly as part of an advertising or promotional push for Remington,
was a guy named Tom Frye used three of these rifles
to beat Ad Toepperwein's record for shooting thrown blocks out of the air.
So the idea here is you take I believe it was a 2 inch square wooden cube,
and throw it at a specific velocity and elevation and direction away from a shooter
and the shooter ... fires and tries to hit the block in mid-air.
This was done with .22 calibre rifles.
Ad Toepperwein made ... tens of thousands of hits.
Well Tom Frye used three Nylon 66s to beat that record in 1959
over the course of 13 days, shooting 8 hours a day.
He hit 100,004 wooden blocks in a row.
I think he missed 4 of them or 8 of them over the course of that entire two week period.
So just another element that Remington put out there in the public media
to show the durability, and the accuracy as well, the shootability of the Nylon 66.
Ultimately the Nylon 66 would remain in production until 1987, so a run of nearly 30 years.
And during that time 1,050,052 of them (or thereabouts) were manufactured in total.
The vast majority are rifles just like this one, the Mohawk Brown colour,
and really they didn't change anything, they just kept cranking them out.
And with the Nylon polymer mould, this was a really cheap, high profit margin gun for Remington.
It was a huge success for the company.
They would have a variety of special editions over the years, they had an Apache Black version.
They actually initially offered the gun in Mohawk Brown like this, or Seneca Green,
which was really a pretty dark greenish colour.
Seneca Green turned out to be not all that popular, it was discontinued in 1962.
The black was available for a short time.
There would actually be a Nylon 76 lever action version of this rifle that was also made.
And they also made a series of bolt action versions,
one single shot, one with an under the ... barrel tube magazine,
one with a detachable box magazine.
Those actually are constructed differently, they had metal receivers
in them to work with the turn bolt action.
Those were sold as well, based on the marketing of the Nylon 66
because they looked the same on the outside.
But ultimately these things would become an iconic, very common, .22 calibre
general purpose plinking and recreational outdoors rifle for an entire generation of people.
So, I think this is a really cool example of non-traditional materials
and how a company tried to, and did in fact, adapt the gun to fit their market
and develop something cool using a new method.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this as well. Thanks for watching.