Picked it up yesterday. Really love the style and how it fits in my hands and the fit/finish is superb. I find my grip needs to be just about perfect for the safety lever to allow it to fire so, because of this I don't think it will share carry duty with my Shield anytime soon. Maybe thicker grip panel inserts will improve this and I would like to hear from some of you guys who have them on your pistols.

One question I have to ask is what was Remington thinking with this trigger! The R51 is a beauty and deserves much better. Not so much the function, although it could be improved, but the fit, feel and look of it, WTH!. It feels cheap and wiggles around like a loose tooth ready to fall out. I can see myself spending time in the shop making an aluminum replacement as soon as the pistol gets some range time to prove itself. What are your thoughts on the trigger?

Will be hitting the range this week. I will have a report by the weekend.

Trigger is kinda crappy. hard to keep site movement down while dry firing. Two handed its doable, one handed, forget it. I love the grip, but I have small hands.

The trigger is very short. With the minimized muzzle flip, it is so easy to shoot this gun fast and stay relatively accurate.

With the rebate, I managed to snag a second r51 for $185. If they run the rebate again, I'd probably buy a third.

mr220v wrote:With the rebate, I managed to snag a second r51 for $185. If they run the rebate again, I'd probably buy a third.

With sales numbers down across the industry I have no doubt there will be more fantastic deals to be had next year. I wouldn't mind another R51 and RM380 to put away.

Depends what break even on this gun is. If they are losing money at this price, they will liquidate existing stock, start firing people, cut production, and charge a higher price to serve narrower demand.

On the other hand, if they can break even, they may continue with these prices to gain market penetration even though they aren't optimally profitable. Main thing is they can't keep losing money. They've been doing that for years.

Or they might liquidate the inventory and just discontinue the r51. We could thank the reviewers for that.

First range trip today, the good and bad.

First the good

-Fired 264 rounds of various ammo (see pic) with only one FTFeed. The one FTF, Blazer Brass 115gr, was the last round from the magazine. It stovepiped but did feed and fire when fed from the mag again. All others fed, fired and ejected without issue.

-Very accurate and easy to keep on target with low recoil. The 6" target in the pic below was from the first 84 rounds (2 mags of each brand) fired at 10 yards. The first mag or two I fired slowly to get my POA vs POI but the rest I let rip when I could (see the bad). Only one round off the target, the one you can see in the middle of the trigger guard.

Now the bad

-The trigger would intermittently fail to reset. Sometimes it would reset after all 7 fired rounds but this was maybe one in five mags. Most always would fail to reset once and as many as 3 times per magazine.

-Initially one mag would only accept 6 rounds. No matter what I tried, #7 would just not go. I found that mag spring was slightly tweaked causing it to stack and bind under one side of the follower. I managed to fix it and the mag worked fine but I will call Remington and see if they will send me a new spring.

Good range report. The only thing I can think of regarding trigger reset is the ammo might be a bit on the weak side, especially for break in. It likes hot ammo for the first 200, and after that it should be ok with any ammo. Winchester 124 gr NATO is a warmer round and fairly economical for break in.

5 iron wrote:Good range report. The only thing I can think of regarding trigger reset is the ammo might be a bit on the weak side, especially for break in. It likes hot ammo for the first 200, and after that it should be ok with any ammo. Winchester 124 gr NATO is a warmer round and fairly economical for break in.

It's definitely something within the trigger group. I can easily duplicate the non-reset with the slide removed.

Since yesterday, I pulled the backstrap, thoroughly cleaned and re-lubed it with the same result. When it does this I can feel the trigger try to catch, and if I just lightly rap the frame it will reset.

Okay, so today I discovered why the trigger was not resetting reliably and corrected it. I still need to get back to the range but I'm confident it is going to be 100%. All function checks pass and I can no longer duplicate the trigger problem.

As it turns out the trigger reset is just a matter of the trigger bar returning to the forward side of the sear, which in the case of my pistol's function was happening every time as it should. Where the problem came from was that the disconnector was not pulling the trigger bar up high enough on one side to reliably engage the sear.

The fix was to simply reduce the excessive gap on the trigger bar where it hooks around the disconnector on the right (loose) side. A picture is worth a thousand words, see pics below.

Hit the range today and the fix did the trick. 125+ rounds and zero problems except on a few occasions the slide locked back with one round left in the magazine. The spent shell was ejected and the last round was sitting in the mag like it was just inserted. Not too worried because every time the slide locked back it happened using the same magazine and the other one never caused it.