Take Down Trouble

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Today was the day I decided to tackle the take down of my new Remington 870.
Before I ever touched it, I read the manual and then flipped through and hit the high points again. There were a few things that were still unclear to me, so I hit the net in search of a little clarification. I found this awesome video:


I asked around of a few net friends about the accuracy of this video and the consensus with Remy870 owners was that it was spot on. Super.

I went to the my little local hardware store and bought a pin punch and I was ready to go for it.

Instruction #1: Unscrew the magazine cap. Says it in the vid, says it in the manual. Great…but…there’s not one.

Let’s review the 870 that my peeps are talking about. Here’s a pic from the net (not mine).


Here’s mine.


Note the difference here.


Yep. That’s an extended magazine tube with no cap and I didn’t know what the heck to do about it other than try to follow the directions anyway. So I tried unscrewing it from here.


Guess what? You can’t. You know that old saying to help you remember which way to turn something to tighten or loosen it? Well, in this case it was “righty tighty, lefty tighty too”. I struggled with it for a bit until I was ready to admit defeat and turned to a net friend who dug up an archive of thehighroad.org specifically addressing this same problem from a fellow 870 extended mag tube owner.

Here’s the culprit.


I found out you have to unscrew that clamp and take it off, then unscrew that magazine (which is not capped – that’s all one molded solid piece of metal). After the spring came out and then the barrel came off, I took the bolt & bolt carrier out. Then I punched out the pins. Being really new and not broken in at all yet, everything was hard to move. The trigger assembly did not “just slip right out”. Not until I yanked the daylights out of it… but then something really bad happened. The follower was MIA.
I looked and looked, but that little sucker was flung pretty dang hard. I searched high. I searched low. I checked in the barrel to see. I moved my chair, and the computer tower…no follower. I rechecked in the gun. I looked everywhere. It might be important to note here, that there is nothing orange (or even close to orange) in my room. The follower, however is BLAZE ORANGE. You wouldn’t think it’d be all that hard to spot.
By now I’m sort of getting ticked about it and I’m rummaging through every thing in the open that it could possibly be flung into; the bookcase, the junk on my desk, a laundry basket, the greenery on the shelves on my walls… no follower. It was then that I turned back to friendly suggestions from the net pal who promptly told me to “check the barrel of the gun”. Why didn’t I think of that? :p
Anyhow, after a bit more searching, I found the follower and then all my good luck until that point was over.

After cleaning everything and oiling it with Hoppes, it was time to reassemble. Speed version: The trigger assembly fought valiantly, but I won. The spring sproinged, the carrier wouldn’t stay in the little slots for it, the bolt kept coming off the carrier before I could get it in place, and you have to have fingers like a concert pianist monkey to move the right and left shell stop levers out of the way of the carrier at the same time while jockeying the bolt & bolt carrier into position while not dropping anything.
Finally, it went. I replaced the captured fugitive follower, the spring and the extended mag tube (remember…the one that doesn’t have a cap like all the instructions and video) and then put the barrel back on. I finished it all up with replacing the clamp that’s never mentioned and performed a quick function check. Yay me.
And it only took an hour. *sigh*