Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
AH enthusiast
For sale is a beautiful dangerous game rifle from Empire in .416 Rigby in their Standard Model. It has a very nice, straight grained piece of walnut with an undulating wave to it, good light / dark contrast, ebony fore end, classic English lines, hand cut checkering, tasteful knurling on the bolt handle. All of the fine aesthetic details. It also features Empire’s own proprietary double square bridge Mauser 98 style action (Empire 98S Mauser), three position Winchester style flag safety, adjustable rear express sight, hooded front sight, and a front barrel band. I find the gun well balanced with a solid “between the hands” feel. Have only shot it off hand less than 10 times and I do not believe it was fired before me. It performed well in my simple minute of buffalo tests. Have not developed a load or mounted a scope yet.
As you probably recall, Empire Rifles had great success upon launch 20+ years ago. They served as a one stop shop for high end, semi-custom guns, built on their proprietary action and assembled by a vendor network of highly skilled gunsmiths. Unfortunately, their success ultimately overwhelmed the company. Empire found that their mini-outsourcing model to gunsmith artisans produced a fine end product but did not scale well. This led to some short cuts with quality diminishing at the end of Empire’s run about 12 years ago.
Why I am telling you all of this? In interest of full disclosure, I think that this is one of the later produced guns. I don’t know for sure, but bought it “as-is” from Morris Hallowell with a known magazine box issue (standard length cartridges did not fit). It has been to Matrix Gunsmithing where a new CZ magazine was installed, stock glass bedded, metal cerakoted, adjusted the feed ramp to the new magazine, and feed and function were confirmed. The barrel is stamped only “416” but Matrix did chamber cast to confirm it is a .416 Rigby. It needed a little more work after getting it back from Matrix so I sent it to Bailey Bradshaw. He took the gun apart, did a full deep dive, replaced, repaired a number of small parts including the bolt release spring, and made a new bolt release lever and extractor. His comment to me is that there were some parts that looked out of place. Cheaper and or not as new as the rest. That further confirmed my suspicion about being a later Empire gun. All of those errors have been addressed and the inner workings all brought up to the same high standard.
This is still good news for you. I took the risk of buying a lemon and fixed it up to be the beautiful and reliable DG rifle that it was meant to be. You can now purchase this gem for less than it cost new when they could still be had new in 2011. My guess is that this would have cost $8,500 then and at least 50% maybe even twice as much now. I am asking $6,495 for the rifle plus shipping to your FFL.
As you probably recall, Empire Rifles had great success upon launch 20+ years ago. They served as a one stop shop for high end, semi-custom guns, built on their proprietary action and assembled by a vendor network of highly skilled gunsmiths. Unfortunately, their success ultimately overwhelmed the company. Empire found that their mini-outsourcing model to gunsmith artisans produced a fine end product but did not scale well. This led to some short cuts with quality diminishing at the end of Empire’s run about 12 years ago.
Why I am telling you all of this? In interest of full disclosure, I think that this is one of the later produced guns. I don’t know for sure, but bought it “as-is” from Morris Hallowell with a known magazine box issue (standard length cartridges did not fit). It has been to Matrix Gunsmithing where a new CZ magazine was installed, stock glass bedded, metal cerakoted, adjusted the feed ramp to the new magazine, and feed and function were confirmed. The barrel is stamped only “416” but Matrix did chamber cast to confirm it is a .416 Rigby. It needed a little more work after getting it back from Matrix so I sent it to Bailey Bradshaw. He took the gun apart, did a full deep dive, replaced, repaired a number of small parts including the bolt release spring, and made a new bolt release lever and extractor. His comment to me is that there were some parts that looked out of place. Cheaper and or not as new as the rest. That further confirmed my suspicion about being a later Empire gun. All of those errors have been addressed and the inner workings all brought up to the same high standard.
This is still good news for you. I took the risk of buying a lemon and fixed it up to be the beautiful and reliable DG rifle that it was meant to be. You can now purchase this gem for less than it cost new when they could still be had new in 2011. My guess is that this would have cost $8,500 then and at least 50% maybe even twice as much now. I am asking $6,495 for the rifle plus shipping to your FFL.
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