Agree with above posters. I have seen Ballard Hiwall rifles made in Montana and loved, (but could not afford) them. IMO, the C.Sharps 1885s are a better buy, 'tho, if you just gotta have a Hiwall.
My new C.Sharps .44-40 is the nuts; beautiful and shoots. I am having a hard time not buying another in .22LR now that they have a discount on December orders......
These guns 1) weren't designed for scopes, and 2) weren't designed for rimless ctgs, and ESPECIALLY for big-ass belted magnums. They can be adapted for scopes without too much hassle, but you need to tailor the scope to the rifle, and that limits your choices quite a bit. Hiwalls WERE made in rimless ctgs., but they were very limited runs for special (Olympic) use and as prototypes or for ctg. test "mules." If they ever made any for belted ctgs., they were experimental only or for mules to test ctgs. when Winchester was in the ctg. biz.
They are strong enough for belted mags, but nothing else about them is "right" for such usage. You need to look at a Miroku 1878 or 1885 ("Browning" or " Winchester") to see the many changes that need to be made to adapt a true Hiwall to be a modern sporter that uses modern ctgs. And then you wonder why anyone bothers--like a .405 Win can't handle big stuff? Or a .219 can't shoot varmints? Or a .30-40 can't do it all?
All that said, I think the 1885 design is at least as popular now as it was when Winchester (NOT Miroku) was making them. Back THEN it was mostly either a specialty (BIG game or serious target shooting) gun, or was bought because it was significantly cheaper than a Winchester repeater (most of our forbears could buy 5 years worth of ammo for the difference in price). NOW it is bought for its own undoubted virtues, and more-or-less, "money be damned"!
I wish I knew how many 1885s have been made since Winchester stopped making them. My C.Sharps (made in summer of '09) has a serial number in the high '800s, so I guess that they have made less than a thousand since they began production (some of them were apparently sold with special "requested" serial numbers as is C.Sharps' practice). I would also GUESS that more have been made overseas by Miroku and Uberti than made in the US, if you consider the foriegn models real Hiwalls (I guess I do, they certainly preserve the basic concepts--what do you think? Are they Hiwalls, or not?).
