Like most firearm companies, Remington burns a lot of midnight oil coming up with ways to convince hunters and shooters they need to buy more than just one of a particular model. Among the enticements are styling changes and limited editions produced only during a specified period of time, a year being typical. It has to be that way in order for most firearms to survive.
A Model 700 BDL built in 1962, its first year of production, is still one of my favorite rifles, but had the Model 700 stayed exactly the same and had never been offered in other variations, it might not be with us today. Instead, the same basic rife has been available in about three zillion different styles, variants and calibers, and for that reason, along with the fact it was a good design to begin with, it remains the most successful sporting rife of American design.
The Model 700 Classic wearing a stock of true American classical styling appeared during the 1970s and is an example of a subtle change in marketing strategy afecting the sales of a rife in a positive way. For a while it sold like ice water in the Sahara, but it eventually ran its course and was discontinued. Just when most hunters had forgotten it, a limited-edition version of the exact same rife was ofered in a diferent caliber each year beginning with the 7x57 Mauser in 1981. Tat series lasted until 2005 with the .308 Win. as the fnal ofering. Tousands were sold.
The Model 700 CDL SF is another example of the same song being repeated annually, and since it has been playing for several years, it, too, is obviously paying of for Remington. I am not certain when this series started, but I believe it was the 2006 commemoration of the .3006’s centennial. It was followed, in order, by the .17 Fireball, .260 Rem., .257 Roberts, .280 Rem., 6mm Rem., 7mm Rem. Mag., .300 Win. Mag. and .223 Rem.
The 2015 edition, with the familiar “Model 700 Limited” roll marked on the left side of its receiver, commemorates the company’s 50th year of loading the .22-250 Rem. and chambering rifes for it. Engraving on the hinged aluminum floor-plate reads “50th Anniversary 1965-2015” and “.22-250 Remington” along with a facsimile of the cartridge. Te floor-plate lacks the laser-applied scroll engraving of my 2007 rife in .17 Fireball and so appears rather plain in comparison.
The CDL is one of the more handsome Model 700 stock variations. Of satin-finished American walnut, it has quick-detach sling swivel posts along with a black fore-end tip and a half-inch thick recoil pad of the same color. Cross-bolt plugs in the stock are also black. Laser-cut 24-line checkering is applied in a point pattern with no border overruns revealed by my trusty magnifying glass. Coverage is adequate on the fore-end but skimpy at the wrist. With a circumference of 413/16 inches at the small of its grip and four inches around the midpoint of its fore-end, the stock is quite trim.
Fit between barreled action and stock is very good but considerably short of perfection around the trigger guard. A properly applied coat of epoxy-type finish on the exterior as well as all surfaces of the inlet looks nice and discourages entry of moisture.
The 24-inch stainless steel barrel measures 0.655 inch at the muzzle and has five cooling flutes measuring just over 17 inches long. Its 1:14 rifling pitch is standard for the .22-250. Accidentally whack the muzzle against a rock in the field and a target-style crown should protect the rifling. With the exceptions of a pressure point just forward of the receiver and another directly behind the fore-end tip, the barrel free-floats in the stock.
The body of the bolt has an engine-turned finish. To check the amount of surface engagement between its locking lugs and their seats in the receiver, I used a felt-tipped marker to coat the lugs prior to accuracy testing. After just over 100 rounds were fired, surface contact was approximately 85 percent for the left lug and 70 percent for the right. That’s not bad for any mass-produced rife as it is not uncommon to see rifles from some manufacturers with only one of a pair of lugs making contact, which is not a good thing for accuracy.
As is common for today’s Model 700 rifles, the Model CDL SF has the fully adjustable X-Mark Pro trigger.
Ten pulls with a Lyman digital scale averaged 48 ounces with a maximum variation of 11 ounces. Icicles in December don’t break any more crisply, and I couldn’t detect any creep or over-travel. If the rife were mine, I would lighten the pull a bit, but I doubt its factory weight made a great difference in my ability to shoot the rife to its full accuracy potential.
Varmint rifles ft into two basic categories: those made heavy for sitting in one spot and banging away all day and those made lighter for walking. Te Remington weighed seven pounds, 3.6 ounces. Adding a Nightforce SHV 3-10x42mm scope (21.1 ounces) in a Talley lightweight mount (2.2 ounces) and five cartridges (2.7 ounces) took its hunt-ready weight (except for a sling) to eight pounds, 10.6 ounces. That’s light enough for leaving tracks over plenty of country in search of varmints from groundhogs to feral pigs. And since porkers have become a popular target for varmint shooters, this would have been an excellent opportunity for Remington to follow Nosler’s lead with that company’s Model 48 rife by using a twist rate of 1:8. Many bullets weighing up to 75 grains and stout enough for consistent clean kills on hogs are available, but few are stabilized by a 1:14 twist.
According to a 2015 press release, Remington “introduced” the .22-250 in 1965. Well, not exactly. More correctly put, during that year the company began loading the cartridge, added the chamber to the list of options for the Model 700 Varmint Special and 40-X target rifles and renamed it .22-250 Rem. At that time riflemen across America had been bumping of varmints with the same cartridge for about three decades. And Remington wasn’t the first to offer the .22-250 chamber in a factory rife. Browning beat it to the punch in 1963 with the High Power rife built on a Sako action. This was quite unusual for a major gun company because no factory ammo was available at the time.
Necking down the .250-3000 Savage case to .22 caliber was such a natural thing to do during the golden era of wildcat cartridges that it is likely a number of people did it as far back as the 1920s. But gunsmith Jerry Gebby and his friend custom ammunition maker J. Bushnell Smith did more than anyone else to bring it to the attention of varmint shooters across the country.
I believe just as strongly that Charles Newton was the originator of the idea. In addition to designing his own line of rifles and center-fire cartridges, Newton had developed a couple of cartridges for Savage for use in the company’s Model 99 rife. First to be introduced was the .22 Savage Hi-Power in 1912. Tree years later came the .250-3000 Savage on a shortened .30-06 Springfeld case. Newton followed up by necking down the .250 Savage case for the .227-inch bullet of the .22 Hi-Power, but Savage never got around to chamber production rifles for it.
During a visit with Newton in 1919, Gebby obtained a sample of the cartridge and began chambering rifles for it during the 1930s. Gebby, though, wisely chose to use the more popular bullet diameter of .224 inch and slightly increased shoulder angle to 28 degrees. He called it the “.22 Special.” After only a few rifles were chambered for it, Smith suggested “.22 Varminter,” and the name stuck. Having the name trademarked seemed like a good idea, but it accomplished nothing. Gunsmiths who were chambering rifles for the cartridge avoided the obstacle by stamping “.22-250” on barrels.
The .22-250 went on to become extremely popular among varmint shooters. When modern bench-rest competition was in its infancy during the late 1940s, it enjoyed considerable popularity there as well. Until a smaller wildcat called .219 Donaldson Wasp came along, the .22-250 and a sharp-shouldered version of the .220 Swift called .220 Arrow held a number of accuracy records in that game. Col. Townsend Whelen described the .22-250 as the most popular of all wildcat cartridges and included load data for it in his book Why Not Load Your Own? Depending on who built the rife, the cartridge went by different names, so to keep everybody happy, Whelen identified it as .22-250 Varminter.
I first shot a custom rife in .22-250 during the late 1950s. A heavy-barrel job on a ’98 Mauser action, it belonged to an old-timer who lived up the road from our farm. Built by Jerry Gebby during the 1940s, the rife wore a Lyman Super Targetspot 15X scope.
In those days, match-grade, military surplus .30-06 cases were only slightly more expensive than dirt and were of better quality than some commercial brass. So rather than necking down the more expensive .250 Savage cases, the owner of the rife used a set of RCBS dies to form .22-250 cases from military match brass. Unlike .30-06 ammunition loaded for the battlefield, those cases did not have crimped-in primers.
I eventually horse-traded the .22-250 from its original owner, and he included the case-forming and reloading dies. Te powder he used was military surplus sold by Bruce Hodgdon who called it H380 because 38.0 grains behind the 55-grain Sierra was his favorite .22-250 varmint medicine. And that’s the combination I used.
It was the first rife I owned that was capable of closely approaching half-minute-of angle for five shots. I still had the rife when Remington began loading the .22-250, and while accuracy of the factory ammo was not bad, groups punched in paper were considerably larger than those fired with hand-loads.
A Cerrosafe casting of its chamber revealed that Remington had precisely duplicated Gebby’s chamber dimensions. In an article written by Gebby, published in the September/October 1967 issue of Handloader, he expressed resentment toward Remington for receiving neither compensation nor acknowledgement for his many years of work with the cartridge.
Te first .22-250 load data I saw were developed by Speer Bullets and published in the 1965 Gun Digest under the heading “22-250 or Varminter.” Max velocities for 50- and 55-grain bullets were 3,855 and 3,784 fps respectively, about what handloaders expect from the cartridge today.
Returning to the present, I rounded up four factory loads for accuracy testing the Model 700 CDL SF. With the exception of a Browning B78 single shot, all rifles in .22-250 I have worked with through the years had heavy barrels, and all averaged less than an inch at 100 yards. Since the Model 700 Model CDL SF has a fairly thin barrel, I did not anticipate that level of accuracy, and it performed to my expectations.
Slightly less than perfectly round holes punched in paper by the 50-grain Barnes bullet indicated borderline stability from the 1:14 twist, and yet it was the second most accurate. Of the four loads tried, it has the toughest bullet, making it the best feral pig medicine.