Hi All,
Well I must say that I was darned lucky when I brought my Rigby. The dealer had not noticed the Rigby name on the barrel
and didn't know what he had. You see people do not associate Rigbys' with the Mannlicher rifle. although it was quite a few years ago now, at least 6 years, that I got it the price I gave was £225 ($405US)
You can see it does not have a bolt tail peep, the customer a Mr C.W. Dent of London didn't order it with one only the stand and two leaves which are of course 100 for the stand and 200 & 300 for the folding leaves of the express rear sight.
Here she is laying in the sun.
The express sight set up ( Hmm I need to take a better picture of them some day)
Now Mauser at Obendorf offered a large selection of Sporting rifles. Although listed as three main models there was then the choice of not only chamberings but barrel styles like Half octagonal and full octagonal, different types of sights, and then we get to stock styles. BSA of Birmingham also offered a number of models although until 1953 they were all based upon Military actions such as the Lee enfield or Lee Metford Carbine, P-14/17 (BSA produced a run of just over 14,000 rifles based on the P-14/17's in three chamberings which were .303,.270, .30 Springfield in five models during the period 1949-1953) BSA of cousre also made up some sporting rifles on Mauser actions and the Martini. In 1923 they produced a model 1923 Hi-Velocity which chambered three propietry high velocity cartridges however it was a bad time to launch suck a rifle and they failed only making a few of each. These rifle built on new P-14 recievers were large and quite heavy. I have only seen one and not being sure exactly what it was went away to do some reaseach which took a few weeks, when I returned I found that the shop had closed
It was one of only seven made in that chambering .330 Hi-Vel.
Here in the UK the market was of course different and it started to really fail after WW2 and the break up of the Empire, Britian alone is not a large enough market to sustain large firearms makers and for some reason their marketing in the US was done is a slapshod manner
.