What's the verdict?

[noisemaker]

I see many of you have received the Gen 2, did Remington get it right? Does anyone have a R51 made at the new plant? I'm not seeing very many reviews on the web, except for RyeonHam and I don't quite trust his knowledge. I figure once it hits the stores there will be more field test, but what have you folks experienced? Thanks for any information.

[wa2bop]

It's been a while since I've been to the range, but I got there today.
In an earlier thread I described how dry fire had broken my firing pin spring.  I believe a modern firearm should be able to be dry fired without harm, however every thing has a finite fail rate, so who knows?
The good news is Remington was very responsive, I broke the spring on Thursday afternoon and had a new breech block by early the next Monday.  Since then I've been to the range twice.  On my very first trip I used the gen1 mags and they functioned perfectly, on these last two post new breech block trips I only had gen2 mags.

I used factory hardball and Speer Gold Dot +P as well as my own weak hand loads. On my first two range trips I had fail to cycle with my hand loads, but good function with factory loads.  After a clean I returned to the range today.  To briefly summarize,
Factory hardball functioned perfectly, the Speer loads had only about a 10% fail to feed the last round in the mag.  By the end of the session my weak hand loads were working 100%
There was no case bulging or other signs of over pressure, Remington Golden Saber work well on earlier sessions, so I've obtained more of these to test after another cleaning.
So the tale continues.
Barry

[noisemaker]

One of the good things about living in Dallas there are plenty of gun shops. Today I found a R51 gen 2 and bought it. I brought it home to disassemble and clean it before going to the range. I had forgotten what a chore it was to disassemble and reassemble, but a YouTube video refreshed my memory. It was very wet and lots of bright metal flakes in the slide, cleaned it up and lightly oiled it.

I went to the range and honestly I didn't expect much, the first one was such a disappointment. I took an assortment of ammo, everything that I previously had the most failures with. I ran 325 rounds thru it, hard ball and hollow points, 115, 124, 147 and some StandOne Armory completion loads. I had two failures, lite primer strikes on the first round from the magazine. There was slight bulging on all the brass and slight puckering on some of the primers. But it ran everything.

The R51 shot two inches low at five yards with all ammo except with the StandOne ammo, that hit a little higher for some reason but still below point of aim. Maybe I've gotten too used to my 1911's and Walther Q5 triggers or was just having a very bad day, but my groups were awful. My gun is stamped North Carolina and I made the dealer confirm this was a new Gen 2. I never carry a gun till I get a thousand reliable rounds thru it, so I've got a lot more shooting before my final verdict. At this point the gen 2 is more reliable than my first one, but I've added many guns to my collection since. Granted most of them are more expensive guns, but the R51 still might be a keeper, time and bullets will tell.