That Time Remington Made Nylon Guns
In the 1950s, guns were mostly wood and steel. There was only one exception, a Stevens break-top shotgun as well as that company’s .22 long rifle/.410 bore over-and-under, some of which sported plastic stocks the company called “Tenite.”
Then, Remington, looking at all these new plastics and polymers, decided to give something else a go – and that effort would result in two space-age-looking guns called the Nylon 66 and Nylon 76 rifles; the first was a semi-auto, the second was the only lever gun to bear the name “Remington.”
The Idea
In 1959, Remington was looking for a way to produce a reliable rimfire rifle that was, to put it bluntly, cheap to make and cheap for shooters to buy. To that end, they looked to the chemical company, DuPont. Remington told DuPont, “We want a plastic we can make a gunstock out of.” DuPont replied with a compound they called Zytel 101, which was DuPont’s trade name for nylon.
Remington wanted a material to replace not only the stock, but the receiver. Zytel 101 filled that bill, resulting in a .22 rifle that was resistant to the elements, required no lubrication, and functioned well in extreme cold.
The Nylon 66
The semi-auto was the first to be introduced, in 1959. Other than the materials used in its construction, the Nylon 66 was a pretty typical .22 of the time: A plinker and hunting rifle, lightweight, with either a tubular magazine in the stock or a simple box magazine. The stock and receiver were injection molded in two pieces, and the receiver was covered in sheet metal to give a more traditional appearance. The bolt rode on nylon rails, which not only needed no lubrication, but Remington specifically instructed shooters not to lubricate the weapons.
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The Nylon 66 came in several color schemes. The Mohawk Brown was the most popular, with 716,492 made. The Apache Black came in second, at 221,000. There was a Black Diamond, of which 56,000 were made, and a Bicentennial version of which a few over 10,000 were built. There were a few other variants that sold in lower numbers.
Reception to these odd-looking guns was, as I recall, mixed. Back in the day, mostly when I was behind the sporting goods counter at the Woolco department store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, I had the chance to handle a few of these guns. One of my buddies had one, and I shot it a few times. It was a fine enough piece for an inexpensive plinker; accurate and reliable. But I just couldn’t get past that plastic feel; even then, I liked wood and steel. The Nylon 66 did have a pretty respectable production run, being built from 1959 to 1989, with a total number built of just over a million examples. What’s more, the Nylon 66 did well enough to make Remington try another variation, and that gun became the only lever gun to wear the name “Remington.”
The Nylon 76
This rather odd-looking .22 caliber lever gun was rather innovative, but it didn’t blow up too many skirts; only about 27,000 of these were made, in the Mohawk Brown and Apache Black trims. The Nylon 76, like some versions of the Nylon 66, was loaded through a tubular magazine in the stock. It had a short lever throw of about 30 degrees, which made for fast shooting. But lever gun shooters tend to be more traditional, or at least, they did in the early 1960s, and so the Nylon 76 was only made from 1962 to 1965.
The Nylon 11Now this was a tad unusual; a .22 long rifle bolt gun, made of the same Zytel 101 as the 66 and 76 versions. The Nylon 11 had a Mannlicher-style butterknife bolt handle, and fed from a 5-round detachable box magazine. This rifle may have blown up even fewer skirts than the Model 76, though; it was in production from 1961 to 1964, and only about 22,400 were made.
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There was also the Nylon 10, a single-shot piece intended to be really cheap. I’ve never had the chance to examine one, so I can’t tell you too much about them; only 8,600 were made.
What Happened?
The Remington Nylon 66 and its synthetic kin may have just been a tad too far ahead of their time. I was around for most of the run of the Nylon 66, and the most common comment I heard about them was that they “felt funny.” Most folks back then were more traditional. The older guys were World War 2 veterans with a few old Great War guys around, and they had learned to appreciate walnut and steel in their ’03 Springfield, Pattern 17 Enfields, and M1 Garand rifles. Some of the young Vietnam veterans were arriving home after their service, but they didn’t seem to affect new gun development all that much; if they were interested in hunting and shooting, they tended to go right back to the walnut and blued steel they had grown up with.
Also, the plastics in use today have a sturdier feel than the nylon used in the Remington offerings.
Nowadays, of course, synthetic stocks are almost more common than wood. My favorite big-game bolt gun, a custom 98 Mauser in .338 Winchester Magnum, wears a Bell & Carlson stock made of fiberglass and Kevlar; it’s cut along traditional lines, is weatherproof, and tough. But I still reserve a lot of affection for fine walnut.
One could make a case that the Remington nylon guns were the forerunners, if not exactly of Tacticool, then certainly of the current trend of synthetics. And these guns still show up in collections from time to time, and you don’t see a lot of them on online auction sites; it seems people who have them are keeping them.
That’s pretty good for this interesting little piece of firearms history from Big Green.
