The $200 Rifle That Quietly Bankrupted America’s Oldest Gunmakers

In 1962, the cheaper of the two rifles on that rack was the one that shot tighter groups. Nobody standing at the gun counter was ready for that. About $24 separated them. One came from New Haven, where a receiver began as 120 oz of bar stock and was machined away, operation after operation, until almost nothing remained.

The other came from Ilion, drawn up by the man who created the .22 Remington and became benchrest shooting’s first national president. He turned his steel on a lathe because he had measured what actually made a group small. Picture a clerk lifting both rifles down and running a thumb across two kinds of checkering.

He could feel the difference. He could not feel which one was going to close both factories. [music] The number that ended this argument was never $24. It was smaller than a nickel. June 1962. Remington bought a page in American Rifleman and put a new bolt action rifle in front of the American hunter, the Model 700.

The plain version listed at $114.95, the dressed-up version, $139.95. Down the same racks at the Winchester Model 70, standard calibers, $139. New Haven had been building rifles since 1866. Ilion had been building them since 1816. Both towns knew exactly what they were. At the counter, the arithmetic was simple and everybody believed it.

Cheap meant worse. It always had. Then you looked at the Remington’s receiver and found a plain steel cylinder. Nothing to admire. Nothing to hold your eye at all. The Model 70 earned its reputation the expensive way. Its receiver started life as bar stock weighing 120 oz and somewhere around 75 machining operations later, 19 and 3/10 of an oz of it was still a rifle.

The rest was on the floor. Steel shavings swept into a pile at the end of a shift by a man who had run the same operation for 20 years and could not have told you what it cost. By the early ’60s, according to accounts of the period, Winchester was losing money on everyone it built. What does a company do when the finest thing it makes is the thing killing it? 14 years earlier, a Remington engineer named Merle Walker, everyone called him Mike, had already answered that question without meaning to. In 1948, Remington

released the Model 721 and the short-action 722, >> [music] >> $79.95. Around 118,000 of them eventually. The receiver was a cylinder turned from bar stock on a lathe instead of milled out of a block. Walker was not chasing cheap. He shot benchrest on weekends, where the entire sport comes down to one question answered with calipers, and he built what the calipers rewarded.

Cheap [music] fell out of it. That was only the surface argument. The real one hadn’t started. Two towns. Two ideas about what a factory is for. New Haven had spent a century proving that if you put enough skilled hands on a piece of steel, you got something no machine could fake. Winchester’s whole identity sat on that, >> [music] >> the fit of a bolt, the line of a stock, the way a rifle came up.

Ilion came out of the war with a different education. Remington [music] had spent four years building arms in volume under deadline for a customer [music] that counted units and did not care how the checkering felt. When the war ended, [music] the company folded that knowledge into what it called a reconversion and modernization program and [music] pointed it straight at sporting rifles.

What came out was not corner-cutting. It was a different theory about where quality actually lives. Put it in the design and the tooling, [music] and you don’t have to buy it back later in labor. Accounts of the period put Remington’s finished rifles at roughly 30% under the competition. 30% is not a gap you close by [music] trimming.

It is not a gap you close by working harder or by finding a cheaper grade of walnut or by asking the men on the floor to move faster. 30% is a number that tells you your entire method is wrong. Picture a foreman on the New Haven floor who could hear a bad cut from across the room, who knew by sound alone when a machine had started to drift.

That man was the most valuable thing in the building. He was also the most expensive thing in it. If the old way makes the better rifle, why can’t the better rifle pay for itself? Before forums, [music] before comment sections, before anybody could argue back in real time, this fight had a referee and it arrived in the mail once a month. Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, >> [music] >> American Rifleman.

A byline in those pages wasn’t an opinion. It was the closest thing American hunting had to a Supreme Court. Jack O’Connor started writing the gun column at Outdoor Life in 1939, took the arms and ammunition editor’s job in 1941, and held the shooting editor’s chair for 31 years, which meant that for three decades, when a man in Ohio wanted to know whether his rifle was any good, the answer came folded next to his coffee.

He read it. >> [music] >> He read the good part out loud to his son. Weeks later he repeated it at a gun counter in a town O’Connor had never seen, and by then it wasn’t a magazine anymore. It was just something everybody knew. Winchester understood precisely what it was dealing with. In the fall of 1958, the company brought the shooting press to Nilo Farms in southwestern Illinois for the first of its gun writers seminars.

Good shooting, long nights, and a great deal of talk among men who would each go home and file a column. A tableful of writers in tweed jackets, half of them going deaf from the work, drinking on Winchester’s tab. Six years before Winchester was going to need every one of them. At a bench somewhere in New England, another shooting editor was doing the thing O’Connor mostly didn’t.

He was measuring. Warren Page held the shooting editor’s job at Field and Stream from 1947 to 1971. A Harvard man and a serious competitor on the benchrest line, back when benchrest was a small, obsessive, deeply unglamorous corner of the sport, where nobody cared what your rifle looked like, and everybody cared what the group measured.

Two men, two national magazines, both trusted completely, and they were not testing the same thing. O’Connor’s evidence was a lifetime of remembered shots, thousands of miles, dozens of seasons, an eye trained in country where you either called it right the first time or went home empty. Page’s evidence was a strip of paper with holes in it, measured to the thousandth of an inch.

Neither man was faking. That’s exactly what made it a real argument, and it’s why it never resolved. Because the split was never Winchester against Remington. It was memory against measurement, two incompatible ideas about what counts as proof, and the gun press itself was cut straight down that line. If this one’s holding you, a like helps it reach the people who still argue about it at gun counters.

And stay with me because the document that actually decided this fight is coming. >> [music] >> It isn’t a rifle test or a sales chart. It’s a company memo with a number on it, and the number is smaller than anyone would guess. The measurement men were about to win. It cost them more than they expected. In 1964, Winchester rebuilt the Model 70 in order to survive it.

The claw extractor that had gripped a cartridge from the moment it left the magazine, the Mauser inheritance, the thing riflemen meant when they said an action felt like it was on your side, was gone, replaced by a push-feed bolt. The receiver was forged rather than milled from bar. The bolt handle was made separately and joined on.

The trigger guard came out of alloy instead of steel, >> [music] >> and the checkering was pressed into the wood instead of cut. Whether the new rifle was genuinely worse is still argued [music] today. More than one account calls the redesigned action stronger, better at handling gas if a case [music] let go, and plenty accurate.

The engineering case for 1964 was not a stupid one, but the checkering >> [music] >> was the tell. A man at a counter cannot evaluate a bolt face. He cannot measure a receiver’s stiffness with his hands. He can run a thumb across the grip and know instantly whether a human being cut [music] that pattern or a machine stamped it. He runs his thumb across it.

He puts the rifle back on the rack. >> [music] >> Serial number 700,000. That’s where the market drew its line, and it drew it hard. And it drew it in a place Winchester never intended a line to exist at all. Jack O’Connor had been warned. Winchester told him the rifle was being redesigned, and he wrote later that he treated the news as a cue to lay in a few more of the old ones before the company, in his phrase, loused the rifle up.

Then he saw the pilot model. He described the moment as something close to fainting. A man whose entire professional authority rested on that rifle, writing to a readership that had spent 25 years taking his word for what a hunting rifle ought to be. The press turned. Not all of it, and not evenly, but enough.

Hunters started buying up the old guns wherever they could find them, and a used rifle that had been merely a used rifle in 1963 became something else entirely by 1965. Here’s the part almost nobody tells you. The new rifle sold. It out sold the beloved one by a considerable margin and because it cost so much less to build, Winchester finally started making money on the Model 70 after years of the old one quietly bleeding them.

Read that again. [music] The rifle everyone blames for ruining Winchester was the first version that actually paid. So, if it sold better and it earned money and a fair number of shooters conceded it shot fine, what exactly did Winchester lose in 1964? The answer had already been written down not in New Haven in Ilion 16 years earlier inside [music] the company that was about to win.

In 1948, the year the Model 721 [music] reached dealers, Mike Walker proposed a change to the fire control design he had drawn himself. Documents unsealed in later litigation and reported by CNBC show that Remington concluded Walker’s version was the better design. The objection was never that he was wrong.

The objection was the expenditure required to convert to it. The same memo tallied that expense. >> [music] >> 5 and 1/2 cents per gun. There is more in the file. A letter from a Remington patent attorney dated the 31st of August 1948 noting the company’s exposure given that some Model 721 safeties had malfunctioned.

Memos from DuPont, Remington’s owner at the time, already flagging cost overruns on the new rifle the year before, $4,000 in 1947. Remington long disputed the defect theory that grew out of all this and maintained its own testing never reproduced the problem. That argument belongs to the courts and it stayed there for decades.

But the memo is the memo. Sit with what it actually means. The cost sheet that gutted the Winchester Model 700 in 1964 was not a Winchester document and it was not a Winchester idea. It was already running Remington in 1948. It had already overruled Remington’s own designer on his own rifle over 5 and 1/2 cents before a single hunter had ever compared the two guns on a rack.

The cost sheet has no side. It never did. And the man who lost that argument spent the next 60 years being celebrated for the rifle he wasn’t allowed to finish. The Model 700 arrived in 1962 and never really left. More than 5 million built. It became the thing other rifles get measured against, [music] the default, the reference, the action a gunsmith reaches for when the only goal is a small group.

Walker stayed 37 years, director of research, head of the custom shop at Illion. By any measure that counts in this business, he won everything there was to win. Walk into a gun shop today and ask who designed the Model 700. Almost nobody knows. 5 [music] million rifles carry his work. None of them carry his name. And there is a second name here that carries even less.

The Model 721 lists a co-designer of record, Homer W. Young. He’s on the paperwork. He’s in the company’s own history of the model. That is very nearly all that survives. No interviews, no columns, no book, no voice. Whatever he pushed for in those rooms in the mid-40s, [music] whatever he argued against is simply gone.

We can tell you what O’Connor believed because O’Connor published for 31 years. >> [music] >> We can tell you what Walker believed because a camera crew and eventually a courtroom asked him. Homer Young left a name on a drawing and nothing else. >> [music] >> That is what winning looked like from the inside of the winning company.

Winchester started taking 1964 back almost immediately. In 1968, [music] 4 years in, the company added an anti-bind feature to smooth the action, [music] brought back a steel floor plate, put a stainless follower in the magazine. Real improvements and shooters [music] noticed. The alloy trigger guard stayed.

Then in 1992, Winchester put controlled round feed back into the Model 70 and called the rifle the classic, [music] which is a marketing word, but it’s also a confession. 28 years to walk back a decision the company made in [music] one. 28 years is longer than most rifles stay in production. It’s longer than most careers on that factory floor.

Somewhere in New Haven there was an old hand who’d been told in 1964 that the claw extractor was a relic, an expensive habit the market had outgrown, and who lived long enough to watch it come back through the same door it had gone out of. Nobody has ever seriously argued Winchester’s engineers were fools. The 1964 case was real, but if the feature came back and stayed back and became [music] the selling point all over again, then was it ever really a cost problem or was it a nerve problem? None of it saved the building.

In 1980, a labor dispute at New Haven became a walkout and Olin, which had owned Winchester’s gun making since pulling it out of depression-era bankruptcy, decided [music] it had seen enough. That December, the company announced it was leaving the firearms business. It kept the ammunition. Ammunition still paid.

In 1981, the plant was sold to the people who worked in it. They formed the US Repeating Arms Company and took a license to keep putting Winchester on the side of a rifle. They lasted 8 years. >> [music] >> USRAC went bankrupt in 1989 and was picked up by the Belgians at FN Herstal. Production kept sliding and by the early 2000s, the volumes coming out of New Haven had fallen by roughly half.

In 2006, the plant closed. [music] About 140 years of rifles finished. Picture the last shift. Not a ceremony, a Tuesday. A man carrying a box out of a building his father carried a box out of past machines that were already somebody else’s problem. Now, the site is housing now.

People sleep in the footprint of the rooms where the Model 70 was made, and almost none of them know it. One more thing about New Haven. In nearly every public account of this, the men who actually signed off on the 1964 changes go unnamed. We know what the writers said. We know what the shooters said. The people who made the decision left the record to everybody else.

The building that lost this argument went dark in 2006. The building that won had 18 years left. Mike Walker finally talked when he was 98. In 2010, a CNBC crew sat down with him for a documentary about the Model 700 and the fire control he’d drawn in the 40s. He answered their questions, and he knew exactly what he was doing while he did it.

He told them on camera that they were going to get him in trouble with Remington. He was right about that, too. In January 2011, he was questioned under oath across two days by lawyers for both sides. 98 years old on oxygen. Sessions capped at two hours a day because two hours was all he had. What he said under oath is not a clean story, and it shouldn’t be told as one.

He confirmed he had proposed an alternative design. He said he’d complained that the metal in some of the parts wasn’t durable enough. He also defended his work, said he had never personally seen a bad safety on the rifles he designed, and disputed some of what had been represented to him about the number of incidents.

Remington, for its part, called him a revered inventor and objected publicly to the way that interview had been obtained. >> [music] >> He is not a whistleblower. He is not a villain. He’s an engineer who was right about one thing in 1948, was overruled for 5 and 1/2 cents, and got asked about it for the rest of his life.

He died on the 6th of March, 2013, at 101. The videotape outlived him. Lawyers kept playing it in rooms he never walked into. So, who was right? The Craft side was right that something real went out of American rifles in 1964, and wrong about what it was. It wasn’t accuracy. It wasn’t strength. It was the evidence of a decision.

[music] Proof that somewhere in that building a person had chosen the harder way, because the harder way was [music] better. Cut checkering is a signature. Press checkering is a schedule. The engineering side was right that the cheap rifle shot beautifully, [music] and wrong that shooting beautifully settled the matter.

A rifle isn’t only a device for putting a bullet in a particular place. >> [music] >> It’s a thing a man hands to his son and expects to be handed back. And nobody in this story is clean. In 1972, 8 [music] years after he’d taken Winchester’s redesign apart in front of a national readership, Jack O’Connor accepted the Winchester Western Outdoorsman of the Year Award, chosen by a poll of thousands of outdoor writers and conservationists.

>> [music] >> He took it. They gave it. Everyone involved understood the arrangement perfectly well. The gun press fought the company, drank at the company’s farm, and accepted [music] the company’s trophies. None of that made O’Connor wrong about the checkering. Which of them actually lost? Remington filed for bankruptcy in 2018, then again in 2020, [music] and that time the company didn’t come out whole.

It was broken up and sold at auction, piece by piece, the way an estate gets settled. The Ilion plant went to the Round Hill Group, operating as Rem Arms, and for a while it looked as though the oldest gunmaker in America might simply keep going in the valley where Eliphalet Remington had made his first barrel in 1816. Then at the end of 2023, the letter went to the union.

Operations at Ilion would conclude on or about the 4th of March, 2024. Somewhere between 270 and 300 people. 208 years of gun making in one town, and the notice landed in the weeks before Christmas. The United Mine Workers answered in four words, “Merry Christmas from Rem Arms.” Production moved to Georgia, 60 years. That’s how long it took the arithmetic that started this fight to finish it.

It closed New Haven, and then it closed Ilion, and at no point did it care which of them had been right. Both buildings are quiet now. The argument isn’t. Walk into a gun shop this weekend, and it’s still sitting on the rack. A Model 70 from before 1964 will cost you a serious premium over a rifle built 5 years later, and most of that premium has nothing to do with accuracy or strength.

It’s a belief that something unmeasurable was lost in 1964, and that this particular rifle still has it. 3 ft away, a Model 700 action waits to be turned into something precise, because that is what it has been for 60 years. Two buyers, one reaches for the cut checkering and couldn’t tell you why. The other asks what it groups.

Neither of them has heard of Mike Walker or Jack O’Connor. They’re running 1962 anyway. There is a Model 70 from before 1964 hanging on a wall in Connecticut in a house standing on ground where the plant used to be. There is a Model 700 in a rack in Georgia with Ilion, New York stamped on a rifle that isn’t made there anymore.

And in a court file, there is a videotape of a very old man on oxygen being asked to remember 1948 filed beside a memo from that year with a number written on it smaller than a nickel. Every one of those objects is telling the truth. Not one of them agrees with the others. If this held you, hit like and subscribe.

It genuinely helps these get found. And tell me in the comments which side of that counter you’d be standing on. I already know how that thread goes.