500,
I assure you Merkels off the face is a fact..

I have seen several for sale at a very good price and the reason I did not buy them is that they were off the face....

Both were 416 Rigbys and it does not surprise me that they were off the face as a double is a 14 ton gun, and the Rigbys can churn up 60,000 PSI in a heartbeat...

I believe that Merkels shot off the face in 375 and 416 as a result of that, so its no big secret, the bean counters at Merkel are not gun people and apparantly havn't got since enough to pour piss out of a boot to make a double on a rimless caliber number one and number two to make it in high intensity cartridges...

They earned the reputation they got and I told them at Dallas SCI some 3 or 4 years ago that the 375 and 416 was a mistake, but it landed on deaf and dumb ears....

Today, most factory bean counters have one thing in mind and that is sales at any cost, they are the bain of the gun making world IMO....computerized morons in control of bit industry...Maybe the have to be that way to survive but I for one won't make it any easier for them when they produce inferior products...

Merkel in .470, 9.3x74 are probably very nice guns, they look and feel good but I don't know as I have not owned one but I do get a lot of field reports....