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Remington’s Amazing Model 552 Speedmaster BY DAN SHIDELER

I type the same way I play piano – badly, and with two fi ngers. But today I’m using only one fi nger to type this because my left hand is holding a palmful of .22 Shorts.

There’s something about a .22 Short that just makes me giggle. How tiny it is, how oddly proportioned, like a miniature howitzer shell. And when I see one with a hollowpoint, that dinky little hollowpoint that couldn’t possibly expand unless it hit the grille of a ’55 Buick Roadmaster – well, I just lose all my composure and practically wet myself.

I love the .22 Short – and the Long, and the Long Rifle. Nowadays the high-performance .22 and .17 rimfires get all the attention, but there was a time, laddie, when there were only three rimfires worth mentioning: the .22 Short, the .22 Long, and the .22 Long Rifle. Remember when every .22 bolt-action, pump or lever gun was marked on its barrel “.22 S – L – LR”? I wonder how many kids today wouldn’t even know what the S and the L stood for.

In my day, sonny, you could walk into a Guarantee Auto hardware store with a $5 bill and come out with enough .22 Shorts or Longs to keep a kid occupied for an entire month. You’d buy the Long Rifles for serious work like rabbit hunting, but for perforating cans the Shorts and Longs did just fi ne. As a matter of fact, the high-velocity Shorts didn’t do a half-bad job on rabbits, either. You bought Longs if they were on sale, but that was about it.

Over the course of the last 35 years, I’ve accumulated several coffee cans of mixed .22 rimfire ammunition: Shorts (thousands of them), Longs (just a few of those), Long Rifles, birdshot, Kleanbore, Wildcat, C-I-L, Peters, Stingers, Mohawk, Yellow Jackets, you name it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a rifle – a semiauto, maybe – that would shoot all of it?

22 Short, Long or Long Rifle. The Model 552 will gobble them all up and beg for more.

Well, I do. It’s a Remington 552 Speedmaster, one of the greatest .22s ever made.

In the pantheon of great .22 semiautos, the Remington 552 Speedmaster is right up there with the Marlin Model 60 and the Ruger 10/22. Yet the 552 has a singular advantage over the Marlin and the Ruger: it’ll gobble up Shorts, Longs and Long Rifles with nary a hiccup. To me, what with my considerable inventory of oddball .22 rimfire ammunition, this is a very big deal indeed.

The 552’s bolt handle is on the left side of the receiver. Watch your thumb!

The Model 552 Speedmaster was introduced in 1957, which means that it celebrated its Golden Anniversary in 2007. It took the place of the Model 550 in Remington’s lineup, though the two competing models were produced simultaneously for a time. (According to Remington, the Model 550-1 was made right up until 1970, though I certainly don’t remember seeing any of them new on dealers’ shelves as late as that.)

Introduced in 1941, the Model 550 was the first American semi-auto to fire .22 Shorts, Longs and Long Rifles interchangeably. It did this through a floating-chamber design that has been attributed to Marsh “Carbine” Williams. In Williams’ design, the 550’s chamber contained a floating front end that allowed lower-powered cartridges to amplify their back-thrust against the bolt face and thus cycle the action.

If there was ever a practical problem with the Model 550, I have yet to read about it or experience it. The only deficiencies of the 550 were that 1) it was relatively expensive to manufacture, and 2) it looked a little clunky, as many ‘50s-vintage .22 rifles did. When Remington introduced the Model 552 Speedmaster in 1957, however, it solved both problems at once, giving us a rifle that still looks great and performs perfectly 50 years later.

The Model 552 dispensed with its predecessor’s floating chamber design in favor of a lightweight, buffered bolt that a .22 Short would cycle and a .22 Long Rifle wouldn’t batter to pieces. Shorts, Longs, Long Rifles -- as Henry Stebbins says of the Model 552 in Rifles: A Modern Encyclopedia, “You can mix ‘em up, but you can’t screw ‘em up.”

My 1970s-vintage Speedmaster will shoot any combination of .22 S - L - LR that you can dump into it, but apparently the earliest models were a bit glitchy in this respect. Writing in the 1958 edition of Gun Digest, a noticeably cranky Bob Wallack gave the Model 552 a mixed review after he loaded its magazine with alternating Short, Long and Long Rifle cartridges:

“Functionally the gun is excellent in all respects,” Wallack says. “[But] in my first try I found that the 552 does not handle mixed ammunition 100%, in fact I got a couple of jams by trying the stunt. . . .Remington should stop the publicity about this feature.”

Maybe Wallack got a bad one, or maybe Remington didn’t have all the bugs ironed out of its first-run guns. All I can say is that my two Model 552s have fl awlessly digested any mix of ammo I could fit into their tubular magazines with the exception of .22 CB and BB caps and Aguila’s primer-only .22 Colibri squirters. These subloads can be fired in the 552, of course, but you have to operate the bolt handle manually, and that gives iffy results as far as ejection is concerned.

Speaking of ejection, there’s no mistaking the 552 for anything else because of the shell deflector stuck on the right side of the receiver. Some may think it ugly, but there’s no question that it performs its job admirably. Fired shell cases fly well in front of the shooter and generally land in a tidy pile. I for one don’t think the defl ector is ugly, any more than I think the beauty mark on Elizabeth Taylor’s cheek is ugly. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch Cleopatra sometime. Wow.)

Let’s talk about the Model 552’s bolt handle for a minute. When I took my latest 552 out for a test-drive, I unthinkingly adopted an elbow-on-hip, cradle-the-receiver schuetzen posture to see how I could do offhand at 50 yards. At the first shot, that little bolt handle, which is mounted on the left side of the receiver, came racing back fast enough to remove a sizeable chunk of the pad of my left thumb. I mean a chunk big enough to bait a trotline with.That meant no hitch-hiking for a while, but I decided not to hold it against the rifle. (My thumb, that is.)

The Model 552 is no target gun. Its barrel is rifl ed for the standard 36- or 40-grain .22 Long Rifl e load, and indeed some 552s are capable of 1.5-inch 50-yard groups with such ammunition. But load up a tubeful of Shorts and the situation changes. The Short's 29-grain bullet is way overstabilized by the 552's rifl ing, and 50-yard groups open up considerably. For serious target shooters this is a real deal-killer, but for guys like me it's copasetic. If the Lord had wanted us to risk everything on one shot, He wouldn't have given us 20-round tubular magazines.

In 1957, the Model 552 Speedmaster had a suggested retail price of $52.25. That made the 552 a fairly expensive .22. The comparable Savage Model 6 retailed for $42.75; the Stevens Model 87 for $37.95; the Mossberg 98 for $43.95. But the Browning .22 Autoloading Rifl e carried a sticker price of $69.50, and Winchester's legendary Model 63 sold for a whopping $79.45. (Who thought up those prices, anyway? Seventy-nine dollars and forty-fi ve cents?!)

Today a new Model 552 will set you back around $400, defi nitely on the salty side. But if $200 of that is for the basic gun, the other $200 has got to be for style. In my opinion, the 552 Speedmaster looks every bit as good today as it did back in 1957. As I've suggested, I may be the only person left on the planet who shoots .22 Shorts anymore, and when I want to plink tin cans by the caseload, there's nothing like a Model 552 and a few boxes of Shorts to land me smack-dab on Cloud 9.

According to Remington, the Model 552 was made in two grades: the 552A Standard and the 552BDL. The BDL had fancier wood, nicer checkering, and a somewhat fi ner finish. Three variations were cataloged: the .22 Short-only 552GS Gallery Special; the 552C Carbine; and the 552 150th Anniversary Edition. All are considered collectible, at least as far as Model 552s go. Me, I’d love to have one of each.

If you run across a Model 552 at a good price, my advice is to buy it. You probably won’t regret it, and you might just rediscover how much fun the .22 Short can be.