[303 hunter]

I recently purchased a Remington 597 AAC-SD "tactical" 22 semi-auto rifle. It has a 16" threaded barrel(I installed an A2 flash hider). Great looking rifle, but not as accurate as I expected. Has anyone else had experience with this rifle? What ammo does it like? I have tried Winchester and Federal 36gr. h.p. ammo with mediocre results. It will drive nails with CCI subsonic, but will not cycle the action. I need some advice before I buy a bunch of 22 LR. Thanks

[spazzymcgee]

With my buddy's 597, he needs to clean the chamber about every 50 rounds with a cotton swab, or it won't cycle anything. That might be its problem with the CCI.

[303 hunter]

The subsonic CCI at 879 fps is too weak to cycle. The rifle cycles other bullets fine. The accuracy is not good enough though.

[r3825]

rimfirecentral.com has all the info you'll ever need about the 597

[Deadheadted37]

I own a 597 and it is very accurate but very unreliable.
There are two main causes for it unreliability, the magazines and the extractor.

The magazines are made of die-cast aluminum and are unfinished, they get dirty and crud-ed up from the ammo and also from powder residue. This causes the rounds to not strip off the mag consistently causing mis-feeds. One of the remedies I found was to clean the the mags periodically with a brass brush to polish them and remove any crude and oxidation. But this is a PITA!!!

The stock extractor is a cheep piece of stamped steel with a machined edge that wore out in about 600-800 rounds. It would hold onto the case for just a bit slowing the timing and then stove piping when the bolt closed. I replaced the extractor with a Volquartsen extractor and that made a huge difference.
When shooting decent ammo there is more consistency and I don't get as many stove pipes. However when I shoot bulk box ammo (Federal, Remington and Winchester) the rounds are not as consistent throwing the timing off causing more stove piping.

Since this gun is a POS I don't feel bad about messing around with it trying some different ideas out on it. So I replaced the recoil buffer with very hard one trying to slow the timing down. It has seemed to work.

Now I back to the crappy magazine feeding issues.

I hope I didn't ramble to bad.:o