I am late to this thread but will chime in on the Luxus.
Luxus was located in southern Ohio just east of Cincinnati. I cannot remember their name but it was not originally Luxus. The local owners partnered with a,I believe, Iranian gentleman on wood. They purchased high grade walnut from cutters all through the mideast. They imported it by the container load and graded it. They picked the best for their use and sold the rest. I used to go there pretty often because they would let you pick through entire ricks of blanks and pick out 5 for $375. These were the blanks left after they had taken theirs out for internal use. I used the best of what I got and sold the remainder on eBay and made a good profit.
Their original business was a cottage industry of making completed very high grade stock sets for Ruger No. 1's. They had developed a CNC cutting system where the stocks and forearms were carved on one side, flipped and indexed and finished. If something happened to one it went in a wheelie bin and sold as project wood.
The stocks were finished and checkered by the guy's wife and they were works of art. They sold them online for $700-900, if I remember. She showed me the whole process one day and this wasn't a small operation they had an entire bay of a sizeable warehouse set up with CNC's grinding out stocks. The finishing sectio clean room area had several dozen stocks in one batch being completed.
They got into the gun business and developed the gun which was pretty unique. It had a pivot system that carried no load when firing and looks to be pretty impervious to wear by design. For a two piece gun they were wickedly accurate and lightweight. The intent was a high end, portable travelling gun with a couple of barrels for mixed hunts.
They ended up making very few of them. I don't know that anyone knows the exact number of them made (in a couple of grades), but I suspect it was in the low hundreds. Jacquas bought, I believe, the last of the inventory ans sold them off one at a time for a few years. I bought one in .22 Hornet and it is a tremendous little varmint rifle. Very accurate, low weight, very good trigger and great wood and case color finish. The serial number was a single digit number and this was at the end of production.
I suspect that the problem no one could accept was a break action rifle that expensive. They were well built in my opinion and as flexible as a gun could be. I like the side lever action but it could have been finished to match the action better.
