Remington 514 restoration project

It’s been three years since I last posted here, as I’ve been mainly shooting archery and airguns since then and trying to sell off more of the “collectible” (I.e., completely impractical) guns in my collection. But then this rifle came my way.

I’ve always been a fan of simple (and not so simple) single shot .22s, and used to own several Stevens, Iver-Johnson, and Quackenbush .22s, and until recently still had my Chiappa Little Badger. My .22 collection until a few weeks ago consisted of a Stevens Model 25 and a Savage-Anschutz 10, and that was enough.

Then a good friend called to mention that he’d recently gotten back into shooting, and had purchased a .22 that had always interested him, and by the way, was I interested in a well-worn Remington 514 that he used to use in teaching marksmanship to Boy Scouts? Indeed I was.

The 514 is a simple rifle introduced in 1948 at a price of $14, hence the name. It was made until 1970s,  and during that time Remington made an estimated 757,624 of them. That initial $14 price works out to an inflation-adjusted $148 in 2020, which is still pretty reasonable, especially as making this gun required a lot more hand operations and manual machining than do the beginner single shots of today.

Sights are typical for the era: A simple leaf rear sight, and a post and dot front. There are no holes for mounting a scope or peep. My aging eyes make it difficult to use the sights, but if I twist my head enough, I can align the bifocal segment of my glasses with the sights. A small scope would be a reasonable accommodation to age.

My gun has a bit of rust and all the scratches, dents, and pitting you’d expect in a well-used .22 over half a century old, but the bore is clean, and everything works just fine. The buttplate is missing a chunk, but modern reproductions are available for under $20 and I could just as easily make a simple buttplate or add a $9 Pachmayer. The trigger pull is long, and not terribly crisp, but it’s very smooth- again, the product of decades of use.

My only testing has been indoors at 10 yards, using gallery loads (Aguila Super Colibri) and I’ve gotten acceptable, if not exactly stellar, results shooting offhand. I do much better shooting an an pistol at that range, offhand, but then my air pistols have better sights, triggers, and grips.

My first project will be to remove all the visible rust with #0000 steel wool and re-blue with Oxpho-Blue or another good phosphoric acid based cold blue. Next is the buttplate, and maybe I’ll rework the stock finish, giving it a good Tru-Oil matte finish, which looks better than the dipped lacquer finish typically seen on inexpensive rifles of the era.

I’m tempted to have a gunsmith drill and tap it for a scope, and mount one of my Burris Minis. Some might argue that this would take away from the collector value, but given the current value (around $50 in this condition) and the fact that three-quarters of a million were made, it’s not like I’d be destroying history. I see that Boyds has a custom, prefinshied stock available for $152, which is more than excellent examples are selling for. But that might be taking it a bit too far.