Savage has a good reputation for "deer rifles" but their large caliber rifles have pretty much flopped. Much of this may be to snobbery but the larger caliber rifles have had some issues with staying together.
My personal experience with a Savage 116 in 375 H&H mag has been thus:
The Accu-Trigger itself and safety froze up and neither would not move for any reason. Luckily the safety froze in the fire position as one could still work the bolt and unload the gun. I say fortunately as the firing pin released when I removed the stock. Some small, flimsy metal part bent due to recoil. I fixed the problem with a Timney trigger.
The front and rear sights fell off due to recoil once each. Different sights were attached by my gunsmith.
Scope base screws sheared off due to recoil, redrilled and tapped to larger screw.
The stock is very light and flimsy with a poor recoil pad. Found a better pad that fit more or less and filled the stock with foam to deaden the plastic drum noise somewhat. It still recoils a fair bit, even with factory loads.
Finding a better stock is difficult, at least for reasonable money. The bolt spacing seems a little longer than other long actions as well as the blind magazine well looking to be long. With a normal long action stock, opening the magazine well does not appear to leave much wood around the front screw to handle recoil.
It is very accurate, even with the poor stock, at 100 yards it would put a full magazine inside an 1.5" of whatever factory load I ran through it. It does not like 250 gr Sierra bullets at any speed though.
As I recall, these had a shelf price of $550-600 in the early 2000s. I picked mine up for half that in 2006 as the shop wanted it gone. At that price I was willing to gamble on it. It was worth what I paid for it but to fix the problems I had one could easily have picked up a better choice by Winchester, CZ, Ruger, Remington, or any number of other makes and still be able to get most of thier initial investment back.
