Remington R51: Rumors and Responses

I called Remington Customer Service to see if they had anything to offer on the problems I found with the chamber of my R51 and its failure to chamber some factory ammo other than Remington. I had also lost a pin (since found) and inquired about a replacement (no spare parts available). He was having trouble getting my info entered in his database and the conversation went something like this:

REM CS: "Sorry for the delay, the system is acting up."

Me: "Been there"

REM CS: "We paid a lot of money for this, you'd expect it to work."

Me: Yeah, a lot people think that about their guns,

REM CS: [long pause] Oh! right.

Anyway, he wasn't interested in talking about the chamber, but did get interested when I mentioned the "pimpled" primers. Said that was caused by firing out of battery and I needed to send in the gun. Which brings me to this:

A post on GlockTalk says that a Remington rep at the NRA convention disclosed that they had found problems with slides being "out of spec" and not interfacing with the breechblock properly causing the out of battery problems being reported. (I suspect it could also cause the loose sight problems as well) The post goes on to say that engineers are on site, production has been halted, and the Para plant has been shut down until the problem has been resolved, perhaps late May or early June. This suggests there may be a recall in the future for guns already released.

An out of tolerance slide could cause a lot of problems, if it allows the breechblock to move too much when it is supposed to be in battery. Fixing this is imperative, but it still doesn't address the problems with the chamber not allowing rounds to fully chamber. In fact, fixing the slide could aggravate this problem as there might be no play in the breechblock to accommodate the not fully chambered round, causing even more out of battery conditions.

This post on the Remington Owners Forum says the breechblocks are being modified and the slides are being replaced to deal with loose sight issues.

There is also a rumor that Remington is reworking the firing pin in some way to address the primer flow pimples.

 Remington has sent me an RMA packet, but since my gun seems to be less problematic than most except for the chamber which I can work around by being careful of the ammo I use, I think I will wait until there is more clarity to send it in. I don't want to sit without the gun for 2 months when I could be shooting it.