Remington R51 (Gen 2) was famously recalled in 2014 and redesigned. This redesigned version finally went on sale on August 12th. I immediately purchased this brand new Remington R51 Generation 2 (2016 version) new in box from my local gun store. I took it home, cleaned it up, and got it ready for a 600 rounds of 9mm ammunition. Watch this full and honest review to see how it fared.

Transcript ….

– So here we go.

Remington R51 Gen 2 review.

The first release was so bad that Remington, America’s oldest gun maker, had to recall all of them.

Every single one.

That was two years ago.

And at SHOT this past year they had none on display and wouldn’t even talk about it.

The kicker, the gun is basically a modern version of the old model 51 that was designed in 1917.

Worked flawlessly and sold well.

So with modern manufacturing capacity, capabilities, and techniques, it should have been great.

But in reality, the quality control was so horrendous, that pistols left the factory with rear-sights that came loose right out of the box, among a slew of other problems.

So now they have a second chance.

But first let’s check out some of the features of the R51.

The sights are a pretty typical three dot arrangement.

Nothing special here.

Unlike the original gun, this one has a slide catch, which is nice.

And the mag release is ambidextrous.

The gun is also sized right for me, but a little larger than most people’s carry guns.

This definitely falls into the small enough to conceal, large enough to fight with, category.

Now the trigger’s light, but the reset is neither audible, nor does it provide much feedback to the user.

You don’t feel that nice click that lets you know the gun is ready to go bang again.

The distant to reset is also average.

So for this test, I brought up 600 rounds of ammo.

Including 11 different brands.

Including steel, brass, nickel, 115 up to 147 grain, and so on, to be as comprehensive as possible.

So let’s go.

All right so first shots ever with my brand new Remington R51 Generation 2.

Let’s see how they go.

(gun firing) Not looking good after the first shot.

All right so, basically what happened is the round seemed to nose dive in the magazine, and didn’t get picked up, but let’s go ahead and try again.

(gun firing) All right here goes the Brown Bear steel case 115 grain.

(gun firing) Little misfire there.

(gun firing) Another one.

It’s got another nose dive problem here.

(gun firing) And it’s, it’s pretty locked up right now.

Didn’t like the steel-cased ammo very much.

Let’s keep moving forward.

All right here goes 2013 production 124 grain Winchester NATO stamped stuff, which is really, really good ammo.

(gun firing) All right it seems to like that stuff pretty well.

Let’s keep going through the different ammo types.

(gun firing) All right so failure rate so far with 144 grain stuff has been zero.

It’s actually worked fantastically.

Hopefully it’s kinda getting broken and it’ll work great with the 115 grain.

I’m still a little less than optimistic because of what happened at first, but let’s keep going.

Okay now we’re on to the Magtech 115 grain plus P hollow-points, let’s see how it handles those.

(gun firing) Not bad.

I’m ringing the pate and I’m actually 27 yards away so, let’s keep on going.

All right now it’s time for two magazines worth of Gold Dots.

(gun firing) You know it just seems like this thing likes hot ammo.

With the 124 grain stuff and the plus P stuff, it’s running great.

But if by the end of the day it’s not running 115 grain range ammo perfectly, then I’m gonna be kinda disappointed because we can’t practice with basically the cheapest ammo available, that’s a bit detriment to your carry gun, in my opinion.

Okay now we’re back to some cheap stuff.

This is 115 grain Tula steel-cased.

(gun firing) And again we’ve got a nose-dive with that.

The round just kinda doesn’t hit the feed ramp.

(gun firing) Or set the primer off.

(gun firing) Again, another nose dive.

And there, it just didn’t chamber the round properly.

(gun firing) Another nose-dive.

This is starting to get frustrating, not like Nambu-bad but, pretty annoying.

(clicking) (gun firing) You know that Tula steel-case works in every other 9mm I have.

So, it’s really bizarre it’s not running well in this.

All right so I’ve loaded up some Fiocchi 115 grain, let’s see how that works.

Or doesn’t.

(gun firing) Fiocchi runs great.

Well, two magazines worth.

Let’s keep going.

(gun firing) So problems keep arising with the gun nose-diving and as you can see, trying to get it in focus here, When the slide rides back over the bullet, it leaves these very weird marks.

And you can see how it’s not quite tilted up all the way in the magazine.

And this is good quality ammunition.

This is German-made ammunition.

124 grain stuff so, let’s keep on going.

You know I’ve always had good luck with this 124 grain immien German stuff in everything.

It’ll run in even a German MP40 which is notoriously kinda finicky.

Oozies gobble it up, MP5s, all my nine milometer pistols do very well with this stuff.

I’m very disappointed that it’s having these hang ups with this gun.

(gun firing) Okay that’s weird, it didn’t go forward and into battery.

(gun firing) So far it’s looking like this is a gun I’d want my enemy to have in a gun fight.

I’d rather have my original.

Okay we’re back to 115 grain stuff.

(gun firing) So at this point I just started shooting through the rest of my 115 grain brass cased ammunition, including Speer, Federal, Winchester white box, Fiocchi, and, I believe one other brand, and it ran great.

It actually ran 10 magazines of seven rounds each.

So 70 rounds without a malfunction, which was great.

Quite a few mags of 115 grain brass case stuff now, mixed stuff.

Basically I run everything in that big Crown Royal bag.

Let’s move on to the steel case again.

I wanna see if it functions with the Brown Bear.

Okay so now we’re back to the steel cased ammo.

(clicking) Not only did I flinch, but it didn’t go off.

(gun firing) Another nose dive in the magazine.

(clicking) And it didn’t go off.

(gun firing) You know, no matter what I do, it’s just not likin’ that 115 grain Brown Bear.

(clicking) (frustrated sigh) (gun firing) You know the failure rate with this steel case stuff is frustrating.

It keeps nose diving in the magazine, and the firing pin is not igniting the round, which is not good for a carry gun.

All right now we’re back to brass.

(gun firing) I can’t really tell because it’s happening so fast, but it looks like the injection pattern is a little sporadic.

Not really a deal-breaker for me as long as it’s not hitting me in the face or anything.

(gun firing) Oh, one nose dive.

Seems like a lot of these problems are due to the magazine.

(gun firing) One thing I like to tell people to do with a carry gun, or potential carry gun is to practice shooting it one-handed because you never know what kinda situation you’ll be in.

You might end up in a car-jacking or something where you only have enough time and enough space to maneuver to where you can only get one hand out and draw very quickly.

You might not have time to get an ideal stance and line up your sights.

Really, point shooting is something people don’t practice as much as they should so I’m gonna practice one-handed a little bit and see if that induces a malfunction.

(gun firing) I mean it seems like as long as you’re strong-arming it pretty good, it doesn’t matter much.

But I’m gonna keep doing that.

(gun firing) So far so good.

(gun firing) I will say this thing is damn accurate.

I’m usually not good with small handguns, that’s why I don’t shoot them a lot.

For recreation or on TV, I simply don’t like ’em.

This is just on the cusp of being a large handgun and I like that about it.

(gun firing) You know we’re burning through all the brass case stuff we have, think we’ve only got a few more magazines.

(gun firing) It sure likes that 124 grain plus P.

(gun firing) I say that and then it jammed on one.

(gun firing) All right here’s the final six rounds of brass case ammunition that I have.

(gun firing) And that’s it.

So let’s go ahead and get to the final thoughts.

So I put quite a few rounds through the Remington R51 Generation 2 today.

And experienced quite a few malfunctions.

Now it did run a little bit better towards the end of the day, with the brass case ammo only.

It did not run steel, it did not like steel.

It had trouble igniting the primers, the ammunition wouldn’t go off, and it had a tendency to nose dive.

I think a lot of that was from the friction of the magazine.

Also we did have some nose dives with brass case as well.

So it wasn’t limited to just steel case.

Now, I would not carry this gun right now, it had too many malfunctions and the failure rate was too high.

If you’re gonna trust your life to something, it needs to function very well right out of the box.

Seriously, I mean, if you’re at the store and you’re buying a fire extinguisher and the guy says well this has a failure rate of one in 500, and this one costs the same and has a failure rate of one in 10,000, that’s gonna be a no-brainer.

And that’s kinda where I’m at with this gun.

You can get a glock 42 or 43 for about the same price, and in my opinion it’s a better gun.

Now it might not be as comfortable, whatever, that’s a personal choice, and opinion I guess.

But I wouldn’t feel comfortable carrying this right now.

I’d like to put another 500 rounds through it.

I probably wouldn’t do that on camera.

I would do it and then report back.

This is a very time-intensive and very expensive ordeal when I do something like this.

Takes about half a day.

Filming, setting up, travel to the range, and from, and everything like that, but it is what it is.

It didn’t perform as well as I’d like it to, and take the information as you will.

I know a lot of you guys are just gonna say, junk, it had some malfunctions in the beginning and then write it off, that’s fine, whatever.

A lot to you guys are gonna be interested and say well it did start working, maybe it needs to break in.

But the fact of the matter is guns like the glocks these days and stuff, don’t need a break-in, they work right out of the box.

So do a lot of other pocket pistols.

This one is not like that and that’s unfortunate.

Anyways this is Alex C. with TFB TV.

Big thanks to Ventura Munitions for helping us out with the cost of ammo.

We hope to see you all next time.