John,

The Wby Vanguard is definitely price based and also Nioa are effective with the gun shops. But a Rem 700 here would be closer in price to a Sako (as a percentage) than in the US and because we have import costs associated with both rifles.

As a side note the 300 Wby is not the original as most people think. The 270 Wby was the first although the 220 Wby Rocket might have been first but never made it to factory status.

The 300 Wby is the biggest seller but contrary to popular opinion the 257 is not the number 2 seller, the number 2 is the 270 Wby. However, in custom shop wood guns I have been told the 460 is number 2 after the 300.

There is only one part of Weatherby where the 300 is not the number one seller and that is Accumarks that come from the Custom Shop and the 30/378 leads there.

As strange as it might seem there is one area where Wby runs parallel with Mauser type guns. With custom shop wood guns it is all 378, 416, 460 and 300 Wby. The 30/378 (and 338/378) is dead in the wood custom guns at Wby and the chap that runs the custom shop was telling me that one of the reasons for this is that with high cost wood custom guns people tend to go very practical when it comes to small bores which he basically defined as 338 bore and down.

You do see a similar thing thing with the expensive Mauser based custom rifles in that you have plenty in 500 Jeffery, 505 Gibbs and even wildcats like 585 Nyati. I think you would agree that none of those 3 calibres would be chosen on the basis of practicality

But when you get to the smaller bores the calibres in the expensive custom Mauser and M70 based rifles tend to be very standard calibres.

Mike