When I was a kid, most of the guys in our California deer camp shot Remington Autoloaders.
My dad was one of the multitudes in our deer camp who used one. His was a .30-'06 with hideously ugly stocking which included this tacky "basketweave checkering." He got it in 1969 after returning home from his squadron's last combat tour and mated it to a Redfield 3 -9 X variable in Redfield mounts a few years later. His favorite load came from the Sierra Bullets manual, and it was a mid-level charge of 4064 pushing a 165 gr. Sierra Game King Hollowpoint. His rifle would clover-leaf these at 100 yards from a cold barrel, and for him, that was all it needed to do. When I was a kid, he used to shoot the crap out of that rifle in the off season. He'd buy those GameKings direct from Sierra's old Santa Fe Springs, CA factory by the pound in paper sacks, and go through five or six pounds of them in a year. He used standard "non small base" RCBS dies to reload for that rifle. Never had any failures to feed, extract, or fire, either. I don't recall that he did anything special cleaning it, though every now and then, like every other year, he'd detail strip it and clean the gas piston, trigger group, and so on. People complain about the triggers on these, but it also seemed light and crisp and totally usable to me.
He affectionately calls this rifle, which he still owns, his "machine gun" -but I can only remember one time when he fired more than one shot out of it on a game animal. That animal was a mule deer buck, which was a mighty long poke away, and he shot it three times, continuing to shoot while it wobbled on its feet after abosrbing the first shot. All three sounded like hits, having that dull, thumping slap-back echo you get when your shot connects. When we finally got to the downed buck, it had three entrance holes with the farthest being about 5" apart. Any one of the three would have killed the deer with reasonable quickness.
As a kid, I'd witness my dad and various uncles shoot game from a few yards to over 400 with Remington autoloaders and they usually felled their game with just one shot. I never believed that they didn't make for fine hunting rifles because I'd seen them in action.
I think that if the OP gives his an honest try, it might well become the cherished field companion for him that the type became for so many of my relations who relied upon them for decades and found them to be accurate, dynamic handling, ergonomic, utterly reliable, and durable over the long haul. Aside from my Pop, all of those men I hunted with are dead now. Their Remington Autoloaders languish unused in the possesion of people who have no real interest in shooting sport or hunting, but they'd probably have another lifetime or two of service in them, if someone would just take them out and use them.
JP
