Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Saw a nice 99G today

That trip has done already been made..

Nice G, Roy. Sometimes they get ignored. I picked up a 99G similar to the Scheel's gun a couple years ago off gunbroker for a ridiculously low price after everybody ignored it. Why was it ignored? No idea.

That is a great looking rifle, for sure. Looks to be in great shape and I agree, that Lyman peep sight is sweet.

After the introduction of the .300 it would seem that a large portion of 99's to follow were in .300. Was that because Savage made them in those numbers and customers had to take what they could get, or did the cartridge take the shooting world by storm (like the 6.5 CM has in recent times) and people demanded a boat load of .300's? I own one .300 and that's plenty for me- if I want (rarely) more .30 caliber oomph than a .30-30 or .303, I have a pile of .30-06's that serve the purpose better IMO.

Opinions are like...........well you know.


Actually had a 30-06 at one time. They definitely do the job.

I think it took the hunting world by storm. Matching early 30-06 velocities in a short action, low recoil rifle? It outclassed the other cartridges available in the 99 by quite a bit.

Calhoun, that's a beauty too. I must not be visiting the right gun-shops often enough. All most all of the 99's I see are either real expensive or real beat. Fireball's new rifle seems to be priced right, but Gunbroker scares me. Have had a bad experience there, and would rather look at the rifle in person. Also i don't have the knowledge yet to know if the 99 is what it's supposed to be.

I'd sell the one it's replacing pretty reasonable, all things considered.

If the purpose is to have a powerful 30 caliber light handy mountain rifle built on a short action, then the 30-06 does not serve that purpose very well at all. That is why the 300 Savage sold so well even though people of that generation could have just as easily spent their money to buy a 30-06.

The 300 Savage was that generation's (1920's-1940's) 308 Winchester before there was a 308 Winchester

The only factory made light mountain rifle built on a short action that was chambered in 300 Savage was the Savage 1920 and there weren't many of them sold.

If the 300 Savage had really been popular, why aren't there more Winchester 54s and 70s chambered for it?

I don't think that the 300 Savage sold all that well in any rifle except the Savage 99.

It sold very well in the Remington Model 81

And Winchester wasn't very interested in promoting any Savage calibers.

When I was coming up I saw dozens of men hunting with 300 Savages in Model 99's and 81's.

I never saw a man in the country I was hunting carrying a Winchester 54 or 70 in any caliber. And neither of those models could be called short action mountain rifles. Certainly not as handy as pre war G, F or EG. Can't throw the model 81 in that category, but about the most powerful semiauto you could buy during it's production run from 1936-1950.

Just sayin...

Edit: Just to add: What would be the point of putting a 300 Savage in the same action and on the same platform in a 54 or 70 that you could put a 270 Win or 30-06. Ain't nobody going to buy that gun. Even the guys at Winchester knew that.

No disrespect, but I don't think that any one person's anecdotal experience is likely to be a very accurate reflection of any universe being discussed.

Please note that Winchester sold a lot of Model 70s that were chambered for cartridges shorter than the 270 and 30-06, just not very many in 250 or 300 Savage. Winchester didn't even bother to catalog a short action Model 70 until the 1980's.

There were only around 50,000 Remington 81s made. While it is likely that many of them were chambered in 300 Savage, even if all of them were, 50,000 isn't a very large production run over a 10 year span.

I don't have anything against the 300 Savage. I shot a couple of whitetails with a 760 in 300 Savage back in the 1980's and still have a few dozen on the shelf.

No disrespect or offense taken.

I will say this. I think the Savage 99 and Remington Model 81 and the 300 Savage were way more popular in the east than they were in the western states.

The guns and the caliber just suited "our mountain style" of hunting better at that period of time than a bolt action rifle and Remington and Savage recognized that need and demand at the time and capitalized on their market.

Nuff said about that.

Regardless of how popular the .300 Savage was as a cartridge was there's no finer a deer rifle than a M99G in .300 Savage. All the gun you need to kill deer and larger critters and as fine handling as a fine English "Best Grade" shotgun. Just sayin'.

Proving that we're all different, I prefer the 1950's style of 99F for deer hunting over any other style of 99.

That's why I selected a 99F when I wanted to put together a 99 in 260, the pinnacle of 99 deer rifles for me.