The First Plastic Gun

 

When the Glock 17 was announced in 1982 much was made of the fact that this was a "plastic" gun Of course, it was mostly metal, and many other guns with plastic frames have come on the market since, but it was the first plastic gun, right? Wrong. Back in the mid-1950s, Remington, who had no .22 auto to compete with guns from Colt and Winchester, looked at traditional .22 auto designs to see if there wasn't some way they could make a quality gun at a lower cost. They decided on a radical path: Replace the traditional carved wooden stock and machined receiver with a single injection-molded plastic part.

At the time, Remington was owned by DuPont. (This may seem strange to modern day readers. But DuPont got its start in 1802 as a maker of black powder, and only became a modern materials science company in the 1920s.) This relationship gave Remington designers good access to DuPon't chemists, who were able to suggest a Nylon resin that they thought would have the necessary properties for the gun Remington had in mind. The first gun was tested by firing 75,000 rounds through, and  and had a reported failure rate of  .005%.

Several prototypes were then distributed to their sales force, who spent the next three years field testing them. The word came back: You could drop this gun, dunk it in water, stick it in the dirt, never clean it, never lube it... and it just kept on firing. Remington was finally ready to take it to the market. They did so with a massive marketing campaign, putting on public demonstrations designed to show off the ruggedness and reliability of the gun.  But would the public accept a plastic gun?

They did, buying around 1,058,000 Nylon 66s and variants guns over a period of 22 years, from 1959 to 1989. (Besides the original tubular magazine fed  Nylon 66, there was also the magazine fed Nylon 77, and two bolt action .22. ) They were especially popular with Arctic hunters, who discovered that the Nylon 66 was the most reliable- perhaps the only reliable .22 when the temperature dropped well below freezing. With no lubricants to thicken up, it just kept on cycling.

While the numbers for the Nylon Remington look impressive, they're a lot smaller than those for the Ruger 10/22 (5 million units since 1964) and the king of them all, the Marlin 60 (11 million units since 1960.) But it remains a great gun, and there are still countless Nylon 66s out there being used to bag small game. A solid shooter will cost you at least $200 today, and a mint collector's gun will run you $450 or more. Are they worth it? A lot of shooters seem to think so.