The Hawkeye All Weather didn't fail. Ruger's marketing and design departments failed the Hawkeye.
The design guys should have figured that the customers wanting a hard core hunting rifle would have preferred a better synthetic rather than the craptasticly ugly laminated stock. With a heavy duty, synthetic stock that looked better than the factory synthetic that looked fresh from the Fischer Price mold line, Ruger could have sold the Hawkeyes to a different audience.
Which brings me to the marketing guys. The Ruger M77/Mk II/Hawkeye seemed to have originally been sold to the public as a reasonably priced, tough rifle for Joe Everyman. At some point, the rifle got priced out of poor Joe's budget, only to be replaced by cheap plastic crapola (aka the RAR). So instead of rebranding the Hawkeye as a hard use rifle, Ruger has set up the Hawkeye line as an outlet for the old fogies who still like controlled round feed, blued metal, quaint old chamberings, and wood stocks.
The discontinuation of the Hawkeye All Weather is very unfortunate for those who want the most bullet-proof rifle design out there, as the combination of open trigger, controlled round feed, stainless construction, and built-in scope bases was just about as tough as a guy could ask for. Yet the SS Hawkeye is no more, outside the used gun rack and for a short time the catalog of CDNN.
Get one while you can, for I see nothing as hardy on the market.
