Should you come across one, we feel their best use is for a custom long range shooting project in a better caliber than the 7mm. The Remington Rolling Block rifle is an interesting and forgotten piece of history. 50 caliber rolling block from breech to muzzle with 750 grains of black powder (about 10 times the recommended load), 40 bullets and two wads in an attempt to make the rifle fail. They never even came close. In the 1870s the Belgian proof house at Liege loaded a. The rifle was more widely used against buffalo than the more commonly known Sharps rifle of the period. General Custer famously used the single shot rolling block on many hunting expeditions on the Great Plains. In 1867 at the Imperial Exposition in Paris, the Remington Rolling Block was unanimously selected by the High Commission on Firearms as “the finest rifle in the world” and was awarded the Silver Medal of the Exposition, the highest award for military and sporting arms. The reason for the overall fame of the Rolling Block design is its strength. We’ve fired more accurate rifles, but this performed a little better than we’d anticipated. We fired some 175 grain Spanish surplus ammunition we had sitting around. Improper headspace can cause case separation while shooting and despite the strength of a rolling block action, this can lead to catastrophic failure, as 7mm Mauser is a smokeless round. Should you come across one of these rifles always check the headspace. Apparently a previous owner had a gunsmith take more corrective action on the chamber, which made the rifle compatible with modern off-the-shelf 7mm Mauser ammunition. Some shooters solve this challenge by fire forming their cases, neck sizing the brass and only using that brass with the rifle. The end result is that modern 7mm Mauser cartridges can have excessive head space in the chambers of some of these rifles. This is significant, should you attempt to fire a 7mm Rolling Block:īack when the 7X57mm cartridge was standardized by SAMMI (Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute) in the 1920s, the powers that be settled on a case length that was slightly shorter than the original 7mm Mauser cartridge for which these rolling blocks were chambered since 1892. With everything secure on the rifle, we checked the headspace with a set of 7mm Go and No Go Gauges, confirming that the rifle was still in spec and safe to shoot. After replacing the rifle’s furniture, we cleaned the hell out of it. The grain and color closely matched the butt stock and we saw no numbers or cartouches on any of the wood that would create a mix master. The wood parts we bought from Womack’s were not reproductions, but actual wood that came off an original Remington Rolling Block No. Further information revealed Womack’s was within fifty miles of us, and we were able to pick up what we needed without shipping costs or delays. A quick look through the website confirmed we needed a forend and upper handguard. We knew we had a British No.5 chambered in 7mm Mauser. Then we came across Womack’s Rolling Block Parts. The next question was: Where do we find replacement wood for this piece? The usual gun parts suppliers all turned out to be dead ends. Closer inspection revealed that all the metal was intact aside from some corrosion. Yet we saw no other signs of damage beyond the wood. The metal was a brownish patina from decades of neglect while in the property room and whatever it went through the century before that. The remnants of this rifle caught our eye, not because we were particularly a fan of the rolling block, but because the left side of the rifle was obviously on the receiving end of a shotgun blast. They had formerly been in the possession of the nearby Lyon County Sheriff’s office and were in various conditions, from “Destroyed” to “Fair”. One Saturday night at our local Cabela’s in Reno, Nevada, a load of firearms came in on consignment. Almost a hundred years later, one of these rifles came into our hands. In the midst of World War I, the British Royal Navy purchased 4,500 of these rifles chambered in 7mm Mauser for crewmen of various ships. These are the most common types found on the surplus market. Many were sold to Mexico and other Central American countries. 30-06 Springfield, 7×57mm Mauser, and 8×50mmR Lebel.Īccording to factory records, Remington made close to 46,450 of the No. Yet many more were manufactured in (or later converted to). Known for its strong action, the rifle was one of the few mid-19th century designs that could handle the new (at the time) smokeless powders of the late 19th century.Ĭhambered in a host of rimfire and centerfire calibers, we’ve seen these rifles built for various 12.17 mm calibers formerly favored by the Swedish and Norwegians as well as. The Remington Rolling Block rifle was a breech-loading rifle produced from 1866 to around 1920. WTW: Remington’s Rugged Rolling Block Restoration