That’s a mighty purty Purdey. As it bloody well should be; the handmade British side-by-side shotty runs some $330k. Which is a hundred grand more than the bespoke Bentley Bentayga Field Sports Edition SUV by Mulliner malingering in the background. And here’s the full view . . .
of the Bentley, a smug looking model and a man in a wool coat.
Too pricey? If you were to be so déclassé as to forgo the handmade shotgun schlepping cabinet bolted into the Bentley’s back end that’d save you $30k.
As a former automotive journalist who’s had the good fortune to blag a Bentayga, I can assure you that the SUV looks, smells and drives like money. Especially when you unleash the British behemoth’s gas-sucking 6.0-litre W12 engine. (Don’t tell anyone but the engine was originally created for VW’s ill-fated Phaeton.)
Sad to say, I have never shot a Purdey. Even so, if I had to choose between the Germanobritish luxobarge and the storied shotgun there’s no contest. But why choose one when you can have both, since anyone who can afford one can probably afford the other?
Taken together, the $560k (plus VAT) package might just distinguish you from other motorized members of the landed gentry, whom the country’s liberals have rendered land rich and cash poor. And so escape their city digs for the countryside in horrid little four-bangers or ancient, arthritic Land Rovers.
Anyway, the caption under these photos at thisismoney.co.uk proclaims “Bentley’s hunting-ready SUV: It might look like any old £162,700 6.0-litre W12 Bentayga from the outside, but the boot is loaded with lethal weapons.”
The same could be said about JWT’s Tundra — and then some — but it’s horses for courses mate.
If you have to ask you can’t afford it.
Those are really fine looking stocks on those guns.
Over a quarter of a million for a shotgun. Unbefuckinglievable. Props to who ever is making and selling them however, you sir are the greatest salesman in history. Clearly whoever is paying that much doesn’t deserve the money and it’s better off in your hands.
You’d be surprised at the amount of people out there with very large amounts of disposable income.
I quit being shocked a couple years ago. Now I’m thankful they are out there.
No kidding, that’s still $50k over the price of a freaking McLaren 720S, a carbon fiber machine of pure lunacy. There is absolutely no way that shotgun has more value in materials, engineering, and craftsmanship than a supercar like that. How do they justify such an insane asking price? I guess when you’re talking about that kind of scratch, you don’t have to justify shit.
They don’t have to justify it, If someone is willing to pay that much, the builder is happy to charge that much. Remember craftsmanship, material cost, and time invested don’t decide what value is, WHAT SOMEONE IS WILLING TO PAY DOES!
If people are willing to pay 250K for that shotgun, thats what its worth.
Huh. Bernie Sanders supporter?
Some people think $1400 for my Beretta Xcel is too much for a shotgun. I’ve handled Purdeys, basically they are less gun and more work of art. If some captain of industry or the internet wants to blow some big money on shotgun art – while employing people and providing the economy with things people want – it’s pretty much their business. Have at it.
And it’s my business to call someone who would drop that kind of coin on a shotgun a fucking idiot, regardless if Sir Winchester Pennyworth III has $50,000,000,000 in the bank.
I know a superlatively well crafted, handmade anything by a master is going to cost a premium but I return to my point about the value of the materials, craftsmanship and engineering being so out of proportion. It’s because of that I don’t blink at that $1400 Beretta shotgun. Would I pay that for a SxS? No, I wouldn’t, but I also think it’s a reasonable value.
Bernie sanders supporter? Did you read my post? Did you actually read it? The whole thing not the first sentence. So you saw how I praised the salesman. Let me tell you something, it’s those who can swindle a stupid rich person out of their money, are some of the greatest people on earth. But yourself, you hate that they can do that. Sad!
And here in the Land of the Free, the poorest of us can still afford a simple pump shotgun, toss it in the back of our beat-up old truck and go blast a few clays on the weekend; all because our Elected Leaders are not allowed to tailor our gun laws to favor only the wealthy and well-connected… usually…
Are you non-Americans out there listening?
Why, yes, we are kind of smug about that.
I wandered in to the high priced stuff at LL Bean once. They had a couple priced about half of the Purdy. I asked how could anyone take such a thing out in the kind of weather we have up here for duck hunting. The salesman couldn’t offer an answer.
Those are grouse guns, not duck guns!
Lotta damned money for a boom-stick with no butt plate.
Cheap bastids….
Nice try photo man, but that dog’s never been close to the Bent. Not a singe dog hair on the cargo carpet and unless Old Yeller rides up front with his paws poking the heated leather, the dog prop is as fake as the shotguns having been fired. Probably even carried the Bent to the photo shoot on a flatbed.
But a man can dream…from a distance.
There seems to be no top end to fine smooth bores.
Yes, well, I have to wonder, and ask, since no one else has…
If you own a $330k shotgun, do you shoot the same Walmart ammo everybody else uses? Or do you have your butler hand-load quail rounds in full-brass shells?
I have my armourer craft gold shot shells loaded with shot crafted from the jewelry taken from my enemy’s corpses.
You have your butler individually weigh each grain of powder to a 1% tolerance and inspect with an eye loupe to ensure consistency, then have him load each full brass shell with not a weight, but specific number of perfectly uniform powder grains. Use Marilyn Monroe’s diaphragm as the wadding and shot cup and load it up with machined tungsten shot, then cap it with a Kugerand.
“Use Marilyn Monroe’s diaphragm as the wadding and shot cup…”
Nah.
Who knows in what condition her 55 year-old decomposing corpse is after that long in an LA cemetery?
That could introduce all kinds of corrosive crap from whatever the they embalmed her with to the bore…
Sheesh… 😉
Purdy shotguns are actually custom to the buyer from what i remember. When you order one the fly you to great britain and measure you. Length of pull, everything is custom fit to your body. Also all the work is done by hand. The engraving, soldering the barrels, and the the lock up is so tight if they can lock up the chamber with a piece of paper between them it is too loose and it goes back for rework. I saw a show on how they are made, and it was amazing to watch. They are true artists and very highly skilled.
They said there was a 3 year wait to get one after you order it.
A shotgun that costs as much as my house…. must be nice.
A hunting buddy of mine ordered up a double rifle from Heym.
Basically the same treatment, measured him all sorts of ways, and he had to wait a year before the rifle was delivered.
See below, in which it is reprised that Peter Seller’ bespoke gun took almost four years, and, well…..
Now I’m mentally frozen on the image of Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau holding a bespoke firearm :
“Excuse me, does your gun fire?”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue0fZfwHfzo
I can never forget the deep melancholia I experienced, suddenly crushed as I was upon hearing of that event which every decent shooter, having even an ounce of sympathy within, must concur was the epitome of human suffering and nature’s injustice, a reality inflicting such grief as no drug, licit or banned, could, in non-lethal dosage, adequately dull the mental horror, as I learned that exactly one month after his death, Peter Sellers’ London Best Gun was finally ready for delivery to him.
It is with only mild discomfort that I confess what happened at Thanksgiving dinner two years ago. I casually announced that my next bolt rifle chambered in Holland’s .375 Nitro Express was going to be a Purdey 30803 in .375. My wife drily commented that it certainly wouldn’t occur during our marriage. My mother sternly asserted that it was unlikely to happen before she passed away. I could only reply to them that such a pair of circumstances could only augur well for the satisfaction I’d feel when the piece was delivered to me. Nonetheless we all managed to eat and, more keenly, drink …our fill. Quite a fine holiday repast.
So, how bad did the divorce ream you? 😉
Geoff PR, I must confess than none of the events came to pass. My wife started playing to my favorite activities, and my dear mother is still alive, and can even climb the stairs, and has me paying her bills and trading her retirement funds. You can well understand, then, that I threw in the towel and settled for a Winchester Model 70 in .375 with a decent 1.5-5 24 scope. I love it, BTW. People often say the unthinkable after a good bit of holiday grog…
Seriously, though, I’ll never be buying such an expensive rifle. Instead I buy nice ordinary guns and have them restocked. The Brits often make me laugh, especially the Sloan Square set who throw their Barbour coats into a highly visible position as they park their Range Rovers. But the old piles, those country houses, now you’re talking about something worth buying, or, well, for me, just visiting, not that I get invited to house parties very frequently. My grandfather left me one beautiful engraved quail gun. However he left all his very good guns to his surviving son, who promptly sold them, as he was secretly going broke. Figures. Guess I was born under a bad star.
And if my wife ever does leave me, I’ll henceforth be shooting 22LR at the county range. I hope that’s fun? Laugh.
For every person who take the field in a Bentley SUV with Purdey shotguns there’s a lot more of us who’ll head to the Outback in a Toyota Landcruiser with an Adler.
Once over the Great Dividing Range (which fails on all three) there are very few European SUVs. It’s not called Landcruiser country for nothing.
4runner with a Mossberg. I don’t think we can get Adlers here in California.
Not Purdey but well worth taking the time to watch if you’re into finely crafted firearms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diFgAlRbi-A
Thanks for linking that!
Other H&H shop vids were posted in the past, this one I think goes into more detail on a lot of the specifics Dyspeptic mentions in his comments.
In particular, the last two min. of the vid shows the full process for ‘timing’ screws properly and making them ‘perfectly’ flush…
I’m unimpressed with what are basically Veblen goods whose primary purpose is to show how much money you have. While Purdy shotguns are exemplars of functional beauty I could get a fully bespoke gun from WW Greener or an Italian maker for 1/3 the price. The Bentley is even more wasteful since it’s basically a gussied up VW Touraeg and a Range Rover Autobiography with a gun drawer is better off road, and only $180,000 optioned out.
I see the same with modern Leica cameras where a limited edition pre-worn digital body sells for stupid money while performing worse than a good Japanese camera that’s a fraction of the price.
The money charged is far beyond the intrinsic value of the item, both the labor and the utility.
And THAT, sir, is why prices do not equal values. Thomas Sowell, FTW.
“I see the same with modern Leica cameras where a limited edition pre-worn digital body sells for stupid money while performing worse than a good Japanese camera that’s a fraction of the price.”
As G. Gordon Liddy once wrote – “The Leicas whispered and the Nikons went “Clunk””…
Nikon F goes clunk, Nikon S whispers, and back in the early 50s David Douglas Duncan led the stampede from Leica to Nikon after seeing how much sharper a Nikkor was than a Summicron. Also in 2017, a Fuji is just as quiet, as sharp or sharper and has both a lower price and no cultural baggage.
Well, yes, Joe. And my only semi-fancy gun is a bespoke 28 gauge quail gun built on a Greener cross-bolt action. Bespoke, yes, but for an ancestor one foot shorter than me. It’s light, elegant, and I don’t dare have it restocked. I’ve shot it, but all agreed I looked ridiculous hunched over the tiny little stock. As for the Veblen bit, the Leisure of Theory Class, or the other way around, was the first economics book I ever read. I was 16, and my step-father was a hippy Columbia dropout. I read all the books he didn’t, though he kept them. Actually, given the tuition the University charged to keep my son at a distance and occupied for four years, I’ll stick with the unoriginal “the L of the T C” title. Bastards.
That Bentley, is it a Shooting Brake or a more mundane SUV?
http://frankdale.com/1-stocklist/231/1947-bentley-mk-vi
Always wanted a Range Rover, never going to get one.
Doubt quality is same as ones of years ago.
The older rovers were no more reliable and in a lot of cases less reliable than any of their contemporaries. Their saving grace, like most of the older vehicles was that you could work on one with a reasonable chance of getting it going again. You, the average car owner, could bang away on one and bring it back to life.
Not so the new vehicles. You need to be a computer specialists and there is no having the local blacksmith forge a part for your cars defective computer system.
My daughter worked at a jag/rover/volvo dealership for years. I finally let her talk me into driving a rover. At that time it was a 65 thousand dollar car. My 20 yo Toyota was a better road car and had better quality.
Pretty shitty to call a Purdey a shotty.
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