The Accurate Reloading Forums THE ACCURATE RELOADING.COM FORUMS Rifles Big Bores Winchester M70 future?Go | New | Find | Notify | Tools | Reply | |
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Gentlemen, This may be old news, but I'd like to share a bit of information I recently received. This is third hand, but my source is a close personal friend who is in the business and his source is a person on the Winchester payroll whom he has dealings with. To date, all previous information I've received through this source proved correct. In a nutshell, the plant closing was a necessary evil to get out of the union labor contract. The union was becoming increasingly difficult to work with while their product control was becoming increasingly abysmal. In the end, it was decided to close the plant and wait for the contract to expire. At that time, production can resume with the intention of having a better product. I was told something on the order of apprximately two years. If this information is correct, it appears that the corporate heads did not give up on the M70 but only gave up on that union labor contract. GVA | ||
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Then why did they sell off all the production equipment? I can see auctioning off some of the older machines that would be replaced with new, state-of-the-art, but they even got rid of filing cabinets. Tell me there will be high-tech filing cabinets in 2 years? If they start making firearms again, I doubt it will be in New Haven. | |||
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This should not come as a surprise to anyone..... and it would be the best guess that future M-70s will come from Miruku /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill | |||
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I read over at 24hour campfire that FN will be producing model 70s in South Carolina in the next year or 2. But as with all the "inside information" that makes its way to these sites, who knows if it is true. We'll see. If the M70 comes back I want to see it produced MUCH better than the junk they were selling the last few years. | |||
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I believe that FN's website shows the Winchester logo next to Browning's. The gunshop I frequent here in Texas told me that US Repeating Arms did not renew there 10 year lease on the Winchester trademark and that FN had picked it up from Olin corp. Also third hand info that only high end model 70's and shotguns would be produced in Belgium and Japan. Maybe I posted this too soon without much research but I'll see what can be found online and post any corrections. R. | |||
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Check out the homepage for fnherstal.com it comes up with an animated page then click on the homepage option, scroll down and the Winchester logo is to the right of Browning's.R. | |||
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from my understanding they will be produced by browning in japan by those miruku guys 577 BME 3"500 KILL ALL 358 GREMLIN 404-375 *we band of 45-70ers* (Founder) Single Shot Shooters Society S.S.S.S. (Founder) | |||
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Matt Williams of Williams Firearms Co, (Who supplies the one piece bottom metal for the M70 rifles) says that they are in talks right now with the FN plant in South Carolina. Frank "I don't know what there is about buffalo that frightens me so.....He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money." - Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter, 1953 NRA Life, SAF Life, CRPA Life, DRSS lite | |||
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Sounds like the people that paid high dollar for Modle 70 built in the last few years should dump them now. In a few years they will be as desirable as a Salt Browning. DR B | |||
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I doubt seriously they will be built in the SE part of the country...Remington has shown everybody those folks can't build 700's any cheaper than the union-made rifles out of Ilion, NY, and if you remember; that was the story back when they moved. IIRC, Remingtons story about taking Baikal onboard was to provide "a quality rifle at a workingman's price...". Turns out the 798 and 799 are C-R-A-P and as much if not more than the basic 700. Sooo, let me see if I can quantify this: Winchester/USRAC has to drop production in New Haven because the dastardly union is bankrupting them, not million dollar annual salaries for everybody in a suit. Remington moved to the south east for the same reason. But the dastardly non-union people there are not any better at their jobs than the union thugs. So now, Remington is replacing them, no make that augmenting their line up in 2007 by importing Zastava's/Charles Daly's with reduced quality versions with plywood stocks and slap-em-together technology. At the 1995 SHOT Show in Dallas, the place was abuzz that someone had paid $215 million for Remington...no one could figure out how they would service that tremendous debt and stay afloat. Educated guesses placed the company assets at a total value of just over 1/2 that, and that there was no such thing as a $100 million dollar "blue sky" to them. About that same time Ron Coburn took Savage private, and rugger went big time into the market with the 77's. Those two companies are taking all of the cream off of the milk bucket, and leaving the Big Two with skim milk. Ammunition sales were the money maker all along, we are now finding out. Olin got out early, separating the guns and ammo divisions twenty years ago. Remington can't figure out how to do it, because they have no equivalent to the CRF Model 70. Their marketing pitch was always "10-15% cheaper than a winchester...". Except now, they aren't. I keep seeing little catty remarks about unions here, as if they are the problem. How many of you don't want a pay raise in 2007? How many of you have a job where you can walk right into the Big Bosses office and tell him "we need to talk about a pay raise for me..." and just get one on the spot? Just as the company has a management team, the employees do with a union. I just read in Forbes Magazine that Ford is posting a $14.7 BILLION F***ing Dollar loss for 2006. The same article notes that the CEO of Ford NA's bonus, with stock options will run just over $9 million dollars. They are giving a guy a nine-million dollar bonus for costing them a $2000 net loss on every vehicle they sold!!!! He's getting a nine-million dollar bonus for a loss just over the net worth of more than forty third-world countries. I'd give him a 9mm bonus round! What a joke! Rich DRSS | |||
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This post belongs in the Politics forum with the other idiotic and insane posts. Such bull$hit from another stupid democrat! | |||
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WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! card carrying Republican, actually. The history of the world suggests that countries who go from producing hard goods as their primary focus to intellectual good and services soon fail. Got any idea where the clothes you are wearing are made? How about your car/truck? How about the computer you are posting from? You call your credit card company, what country are the people in who take your call? Why do we have a trade deficit in the trillions of dollars annually? Wake up moron, your job may move overseas next month! By the way, you didn't answer my question about where and how your next raise is coming from? Read up on history. The best thirty-five years in this country's history was 1935-1970...anybody who would work had a choice of decent to good paying jobs, the largest percentage of homeowners, married couples with mom staying home with the kids, and college affordable for anyone with the grades to make it. When we started sending manufacturing jobs overseas, the storyline was "...who wants those low paying jobs...?" Shoes and clothing first, then the steel mills, suddenly those good paying jobs, ie ones that would get you a home loan after a year in that union factory started leaving...then it was a little different, then we were too smart to devote our lives to manual labor. Now accounting and engineering (design) jobs are going, and everything else with good paychecks and benefits attached to it. The bill in Congress to raise minimum wage to $7.15 an hour is not designed to help out traditionally minimum wage jobholders, it's to try and keep displaced factory workers from defaulting on home loans and losing their houses. A college degree used to be the key to "the good life...". Last question on the Econ 101 Exam, why is it that the number of people in America buying trailers instead of houses is up about 23% since 1990? I'll give you a hint...it's tied to the economy moving to India and China. Oh, yeah, how will you fare if you or your wife needs an organ transplant or open heart surgery? Your employer does have a comprehensive health plan for you, doesn't he? Sit there with your rose-colored glasses and wait until the tax man comes for you. We have become a nation of consumers, not producers. you have my sympathies... Rich DRSS | |||
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" The history of the world suggests that countries who go from producing hard goods as their primary focus to intellectual good and services soon fail" Ok, I gotta ask.......what countries who have done that have "failed"? My biggest fear is when I die my wife will sell my guns for what I told her they cost. | |||
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Afterall is'nt it the industrial power of our nation that determines the value of our money since it is no longer gold and silver? By the way I work in the service industry not manufacturing. It should concern every American when plants close and industry goes abroad. R. | |||
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Snowwolfe, 1. what Rodney said. What do we offer the world these days? They could rename every state west of the Mississippi New Mexico. East of it, New Puerto Rico. WE have (by far) the largest welfare state in the world today. Read up on the history of Rome...we are just short of their third phase. WE are busy converting the US military into a mercenary army. 14% of the US troops are foreign-born and most are serving three or four year enlistments in exchange for US citizenship. Take the firearms industry...Winchester is done here for all intents and purposes...Remington now "features" russian made 798's and 799's. We are 300 million of the 7 billion souls here on earth. We consume nearly two and one half that much of the world's resources, percentage-wise. Ford MoCo lost 14.9 Billion dollars in 2006...how many years can that go on? The oil companies have cut just over 50% of their refinery capacity since 1985...and have built three new refineries since then. The japanese have ownership of over 40% of the steel mills in this country, and have shut down about one-third of those, or "mothballed" them. By legal (and content and place of manufacture)definition, Toyota and Nissan are the two biggest american truck manufacturers in the US. GM, Ford, and Dodge (oops! Daimler-Chrysler) build most of their fullsize pickups in the Maciadora (sp?) region south of the border with Mexico. My Dodge says Saltillo, Mexico mfg plant. Go to Wal-Mart...they should rename the company China-USA Outlet Mall. Call your credit card company about your statement and chances are you are talking to someone in India..."halloo neeboor". In 1900 most high schools offered language classes in Latin, German, and Spanish...today even the Ivy League Universities offer remedial english courses for incoming freshmen. Why do they call the midwest the "rust belt"? Drive thru any big city in the eastern half of the US and cruise the industrial section. Millions of square feet of empty brick buildings. In the 'sixties we began to ship low(er)-paying manufacturing jobs overseas...let "those people" have the crummy jobs...all Americans were going to have "careers". So, we sent the shoe and clothing factories to Asia...like Nike! You can pick up newspapers every month and Nike is in deep kimshee over children under the age of 12 working 14-16 hour days in their "sweat shops". Then in the early 'seventies we began exporting the light manufacturing jobs over seas, then the steel mills. Then the lumber products went. Today there are dozens of veneer mill Japanese ships sitting just off the shore of the pacific NW to be in international waters. They buy any stick of wood that they can get form us and make veneer for our deluxe grade particle board furniture. Nickel a pound cedar goes out to sea, and returns the next week as ten dollar a pound veneer. To take a moral stand, we murder over a million unborn children in the name of "freedom of choice" every year...except there are two people involved and the one inside the womb does not get to vote. We are almost at the 50-50 mark in single parent households. Children raising children. Know what a "Charter School" is? That's where the white middle class parents form their own public school, at taxpayer expense, and siphon off the dedicated teachers for their children's education without the distraction or the "dumbing down" by having any unprepared poor or illegals there who will require a nearly one-on-one teaching program to get them up to speed. Know what "english as a second language classes mean? That's where you bring your six year old to kindergarten to learn to speak english...and the kid was born here! Congress is trying to raise the minimum wage to $7.15 an hour. Why? So high school dropouts and illegals can make enough money to buy big screens and computers and video games like the rest of us. Buy a home? The US now includes a single-wide trailer in their definition of a home. 50% of the people in the US will NEVER have the $$$ or credit to buy a house. Guess how far down the economic ladder you are to only be able to rent a single-wide for a place to live and raise your kids? Speaking of kids, how many of your friends have a daughter that has a "steady boyfriend" and a kid or two? We, as a society have replaced the concept of responsibility for our own lives and actions with unbridled freedom...and NO responsibility for our actions. Young people live in an era of consequence-free freedom. CAll your school boards and get the figures on the number of high school girls with babies, and the drop out rate. I gotta stop, I'm making myself depressed. And I am optimistic because that is ONLY 1/2 the kids...but the other half that achieves will have to pay taxes to support the non-productive half. And don't even bring drugs into the equation. We are in the day of the gladiators, and we have many coliseums for them to perform in. Seen a new football or baseball stadium built lately for under 1/2 Billion dollars? regards, Rich DRSS | |||
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I've never seen a Model 70 that was junk, I've never seen a Rem 700 that wasn't junk! | |||
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Well Snowwolf I see you didn't get an answer to your question. Which was the same question I was going to ask. Nothing but more rhetoric. Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. | |||
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What the hell does this have to do with the rumors of Winchester coming back and doing production in SC, USA? We're talking Winchester here, not seven billion people in this world. Take that else where. | |||
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I am with you. I have several M70's and all but one shoot 1 MOA or better. The one that does not shoots 1.75 MOA. | |||
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I really like 700's, but they(to me) are not as good/desirable a basis for a hunting rifle as an old model 70 or a genuine Mauser 98. The Remington makes for a better pure accuracy platform. As far as the M70 future niche: I see them best as a $799.95 basic model hunting rifle, CRF of course. Sell a synthetic-stocked SS standard length action rifle for that. Add $200 for big magnum calibers or blued steel. Add another $400 for a nice wood stock. About where the rugger RSM starts out. IMHO, they can sell an awful lot of $1500-$2000 real Model 70's every year and make money as long as they resist the temptation to cut a few corners here and there. They need to use Savage as a business model, and then rugger. Those two companies know their market, build to a quality point, not a $$$ point; and sell at 95% production capacity. They also have ZERO!! debt structure and a 100% dedicated staff, production and management. Bill Ruger inculcated every new employee with a "Ruger against the world" mentality, and they bought into that philosophy hook, line, and sinker! Survival, revival, and then prosperity...in that order. Rich DRSS OM70 fan | |||
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Well, I have seen junk from all the different manufactures and good products from all of them as well. The other day I mosied up to the counter of Grady's Sporting Goods in Anderson, SC as a customer is looking at M70 Winchester. The customer and I both note that the forend of the stock is pressuring the barrel on one side and has about a 1/4 inch gap on the other. The gentlemen behind the counter says "well it probably just needs to be rebedded." I agree with him, but why do I want to buy a brand new rifle that I am almost assuredly going to have to start working on before I can make it shootable? Secondly, if the bedding work was this poorly done, what else did the workers that produced this rifle do a below par job on? I know... I know... Remington extractors break, their safeties are dangerous, and ruger's triggers are found lacking, but don't tell me that everything Winchester ever produced is a masterpiece of engineering. Believe it or not some of us inbred redneck hicks here in South Cackalacky actually take pride in our jobs and produce some nice goods. that is why alot of plants have moved here in the past few years and decided to stay. BMW, Michelin tires, and Titelist are a few examples that are very near to my residence. Sometimes I wish there weren't so many people coming here. Our lakes are overcrowed each Summer weekend and the Game Management property woods that border my 17 acres are now having million dollar homes built up on them. The Good Ole days maybe be gone and changes are certain to come in most aspects of our lives, but maybe icons like the Winchester can resurface in a new home and again start to produce "The Rifleman's Rifle." Yes Sharpshooter, I do agree, there are many severe challenges facing this nation today. I just pray that the nation is able to weather the storms ahead. This nation's past has always been somewhat tumultuous, but maybe we can remain driven as a nation and survive the forthcoming adversities. | |||
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To make the story credible? But I agree with you. I'd be real surprised if they resumed production in the USA anywhere. They should set up the new factory in Turkey, and use nothing but high-grade Turkish walnut for all M70 stocks....... "Bitte, trinks du nicht das Wasser. Dahin haben die Kuhen gesheissen." | |||
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What fjold mentioned would make sense that the FN/ Winchester model 70 would be produced in South Carolina. It would keep the import taxes out of the equation and they could make deals with local governments to employ "X" amount of people in an area in trade for other tax breaks etc. Isn't that why FN is already here along with Berreta, Toyoto, Honda and other foriegn based companies? As far as Winchester I think they will do well with FN. My 1963 safari grade Browning FN bolt gun is an excellent rifle so I'll be hoping for future quality in the model 70. R. | |||
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Walk down memory lane. A bunch of folks would have been stoned as false prophets awhile back.........  Hunting: Exercising dominion over creation at 2800 fps. | |||
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I see that I predicted made in Japan by Miruku...and of course I was wrong... Thanks for bring this back for us. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill | |||
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except we're a trillion dollars deeper in debt, and illegitimate births are over 50% for 2007. And european countries are busy buying US companies with cheap US dollars. Anybody here seen the new M70 yet? Rich DRSS Knowledge not shared is knowledge lost... | |||
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Winchester M70's are being built in the FN plant in S. Carolina in fair quantity. They are building up an inventory of Featherweights so they can ship to a broad range of dealers this month. They are contracting out the production of the walnut stocks and bottom metal, buying very good quality material. They are doing some bedding but essentially the stocks are ready to have the barreled actions inserted. Major change is an entirely new trigger system and an assurance of MOA accuracy at 100 yards. Some friends recently had the opportunity to shoot the two new rifles pulled from the assembly line (.300 WIn and a 30-06) and both shot into MOA. I was fortunate to participate in a hunt last fall with Winchester and we shot some antelope in Wyoming with both the new M70's and the then secret Browning X-Bolt. I can also share some "inside" info that might be of particular interest to AR members - they are bringing back the big bores in the M70. I was recently invited to tour the FN plant with a group of writers, had the trip set up and had to decline at the very last minute due to medical issues. They sent me a CD of the tour and lots of info, very positive stuff naturally. I have shot several of the new rifles and they were superior to my more recently purchased M-70's but - hard to beat a good Pre-64. I liked the original trigger design but will not say anything negative about the new one since it was very crisp and nicely set on all several rifles I shot during the hunt and at a pre-SHOT show shoot in Vegas last Feb. I felt the rifles were getting too expensive for the quality being put in them, this has been addressed. Hope this info is of interest. | |||
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Weatherby, do you have any information on when the big bores would be available? | |||
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I wish they would do the M70 in .458 Lott as well as .458 WM. | |||
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and the $64,000.00 question for those of us who care: will they be doing LH? | |||
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please spare us the bullshit and save it for the political forum....that's why it exists....for bullshit like this to be dumped.....I dump there as well! /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill | |||
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At a new products seminar in the Browning facility in Utah I believe we were told to be patient for lefties, implying they would be probably be on the way. Happened a while back, not sure where my notes are right now. Big bores caught me by surprise, might be at next SHOT I hope. I have never owned a M-70 in a caliber larger than .338 and hope to one day soon. As for the Lott, hope they do it also although my limited experience with the .458 Win has been positive. I would love to see a .416 Rigby also - might be a dream but who knows. | |||
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416 rigby on a m70 -- possbile, but not probable...the former custom shop made TWO, opinions vary band of bubbas and STC hunting Club Information on Ammoguide about the416AR, 458AR, 470AR, 500AR What is an AR round? Case Drawings 416-458-470AR and 500AR. 476AR, http://www.weaponsmith.com | |||
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LH 375 H&H and a 40+ caliber please. I almost hesitated to take my LH 375H&H to Namibia last month because of the fear of the airlines losing it and not being able to replace it. I compromised by insuring it for $5,000 and sweated it out until my Tuffcase was in my hands again at LAX. Frank "I don't know what there is about buffalo that frightens me so.....He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money." - Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter, 1953 NRA Life, SAF Life, CRPA Life, DRSS lite | |||
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