Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Kimber 89 BGR

What is the opinion on the Kimber 89 BGR rifles. There is one on sale at the local Cabela's. It is a 30-06. Where they good rifles? This is an older one that was made in Oregon, I beleive that it is different from the current model 84's and 8400's.

Buy a Dakota or a new Kimber.

Heard that they had some issues.

Do a search with dogzapper as the name and Kimber as the key word. You may have to go back a couple of years.

I wouldn't touch that rifle.

I had three of them.The wood work ,inletting and blueing were fantastic.One shot very good,one OK and one not so good.One had issues with the extractor that Kimber took care of.On a whole I had better experience with the BGR`s than the new ones.

I have a 30-06 that is doing fine. However, I have only put 40 rounds through it; so that is no real test.

I have had two. Their emphasis was on looks, not quality. That said, both actions were very solid and the stock shape was nice. The barrels were mediocre at best, although the rifles both shot well in spite of that.

Looks aside, the present FN M70 is 100X the rifle.

j

I think you are right.Their model 82 & 84 were really fine rifles all the way around.Something happened during the time when they were making BGR`s.A lot of the really bad ones were made after they were sold and BGR`s were put together from remaining stock.This was also when they were peddling the converted Mo.96 & 98 Mauser`s.

I had a M89 BGR in .375 H&H from the good days, and it looked great and shot very well as well. You should have someone who knows rifles look at this one before plunking down the bucks. There were some serious problems with the 89s when rifles were assembled and shipped to get $$$.

jim

Does anyone what time frame that the BGR had so many problems or was it during the entire production run? Reason I ask is because I bought a Super America in .280 in Oct of 89. The only issue I had was the floor plate would fly open on recoil and it took some fiddling to get that corrected. The gun has been a very consistent 1" performer throughout it's life but I have shot many groups around 3/4"(3 shots). It does have an awfully long
throat but that hasn't really bothered me.

John

John,

I'm up in the middle of the night with incredible spinal pain, so I might as well answer your question.

The entire production of the BGR was over a rather compressed time period, so it would be impossible to predict a problem rifle simply from the build date

Added to that is another great confusion. Greg was not so good about paying the corporate bills and at the time, he owed Cali'co Hardwoods a large amount of money. Kimber of Oregon was rapidly going under and was being shut down periodically by the Feds, both for non-payment of employee withholding taxes and messing with serial numbers.

So, the owner of Cali'co Hardwoods literally arrived at the front door at Kimber and took a significant percentage of the total production of BGRs, plus any M-82, M-84 and Predator pistols that he could get his hands on. Rather than recieve another wad of lies, empty promises and bullshit from Greg Warne, the Cali'co owner simply took firearms and took them home to California.

I was in-plant when the Cali'co truck arrived. It was a total surprise and the owner of Cali'co WAS NOT TAKING "NO" FOR AN ANSWER. He and his guys simply arrived and started loading up their empty freight truck with product.

Distribution of that truckload of Kimbers was a sometimes thing. Cali'co Hardwoods ( http://www.calicohardwoods.com/ ) was literally selling them for whatever they could get for them, simply to turn the product back into money.

A lot of the M-89s that were actually fired (which is a small precentage because most Kimber owners simply bought them "for show") came back for warranty repairs. Of course, Greg tried to wiggle out of warranty repairs on the rifles that Cali'co Hardwoods confiscated. Obviously, these rifles weren't sold through normal channels; the Official Kimber Dealers, so confusion reigned. There were some really unhappy customers. In truth, the M-89s were not a perfected product ... some worked and some didn't ... and that's the truth.

Also, Greg and others were selling M-89BGRs out the back door for from $350 to $400 a rifle. Lots of local gun stores, here in Portland, were selling BGRs for $450 to $500.

Some shot well, a few shot and functioned WAY BETTER than they had any right to and others were "not so much." Quite honestly, my friend, I hope and pray that you got one of the wonderful ones ... I truly do.

In general, however, the horribly cheap barrels sucked, chambers quite often had probs, the hacked-together safety was often mis-timed, the ejectors sometimes had probs and most had floorplate issues. The sights often just plain fell off (the original .416 Rigby did that on me). Literally ALL Kimber of Oregon rifles had their recoil lugs bedded in 5-Minute Epoxy and that added not a little to consumer compliants.

I cannot tell you how many returned Kimbers I've personally rebedded, simply to do the owners a favour. I always thought it to be cruel to sell the unwitting public a gorgeous semi-custom rifle like that and bed it with 5-Minute Epoxy.

The entire issue borders on the comical ... and I'd laugh if it wasn't so sad for everyone involved ... the customer, most of all.

I walked away from Lyin' Little Greg and test-shooting all of the KofO rifles about that time.

What a frackin' balls-up situation. Kimber of Oregon could have been such a success story, but Greg single-handedly drove it into the ground, all to die in the jungle of Costa Rica . It's a sad, sad story.

Steve

I bought my M89BGR from a local California shop that builds its own bespoke guns and has gunsmiths on staff, so I was confident it would work or they would fix it.

jim

ps hope your back gets better!

The 270 I had was blessed with a .350" throat. It shot into an inch in spite of that.

The finish was a 30 second spray on type that muddied the wood more than it displayed it.

I can say that after Greydog on this site rebarreled it to 6.5-06 with a PN and refinished it, along with a few other things, it was a lovely rifle. That action was a good one.

The 300Win, I never shot much before I flipped it.

Steve, nice to have you back.

Thanks Rick and Jim.

The receivers were cast by Precision Cast Parts, here in Milwaukie, Oregon. They did a really great job and most of the guys at PCP are gunny, so they incorporated a bunch of their own little tweaks in it.

Basically, the BGR action is pretty darned good and they really make a darned good foundation for a custom rifle. And the trigger is decent. Lots also had well-timed safety mechanisms.

I've fired several that were consistent under-MOA rifles. As many were four-MOA shooters, but that was the fault of the barrel and the bedding.

I believe the thing that pissed me off the most was Greg's attitude of lots of beautiful finish on the outside and "the customer will never know about the inside." Sorry, but ALL gunnys are my brothers and that hurt me.

Kinda like Forrest Gump's Box of Chocolates, when you buy or trade into a Kimber BGR, you really don't know what you're gonna get. Sometimes you get less than you hoped for and just as often you get a rifle that is GOLDEN.

But then, that could easily have been truthfully said about all Ruger rifles for many, many years.

By the way, I was kind of a satellite on the BGR design committee and I recommended that medium scope rings be cast as part of the receiver. The lower scope halves, the ones integral with the receiver, would have replaceable nuts, so if a screw stripped out, it could be replaced. I still think that would have made a marvy and horseproof combination.

I also recommended a stainless steel version with a synthetic stock. Bear in mind that NO SS rifles were on the market then and the guys at Precision Cast Parts assured me that it was not a problem. Kimber of Oregon, if they'd just perfected the BGR a little more and offered a stainless/synthetic version, could have owned a unique and HUGE corner of the practical hunting gun market. Dumbshits.

Like lots of corporate committee dealings, most of the decisions were made by the non-gunny unknowing. We are diminished whenever this sort of thing happens.

Steve

Steve, sorry about your back pain and I hope you get better. When I got my gun I thought it was about the best looking rife that I had ever seen and I didn't learn of the different problems until years later. I was not too far out of college and money was pretty tight then and had I known of those problems when I bought it I would have been SICK. Today the gun mostly sits in the safe as I have replaced it with a custom .280. I had both rifles out last fall because I hadn't shot the Kimber in a few years and it turned in a perfect 3/4" group 2 1/2" above bull @ 100 yrd. One other thing. I pulled the barrled action out of the stock to adjust the trigger years ago and I was shocked. The inletting looked like it had been done by a blind man with a hatchet.

Regards, John.

Friend John,

Yeah, looking inside a KofA, any of them is a revelation. The beauty is truly skin deep.

One of the things that got me was the recoil lug on the M-84 (.223s and such); it's dovetailed into the bottom of the front receiver bridge. Hey, I'm a goldsmith and fully familiar with negative contours ... just try to pull the M-84 out of the 5-Minute Epoxy bedding without ripping the devil out of the bedding.

Considering the price, the consumer ... you and me ... we deserved better.

I'm glad your Kimber 89 is a shooter, my friend. You dipped into a box of Gump's Chocolates and came out a winner!!!

God Bless,

Steve

Steve,
Thanks for the information on the Kimber 89 BGR's. I think that I will pass on the one that is for sale at Cabela's. The asking price is to high for the problems that may be encountered with the rifle. I hope you are feeling better.
Stan