Rather than start another thread......can anyone with greater insight/knowledge of manufacture of components shed light into the shortages of ammo/components we're seeing/going to see in coming months?
Covid has fooked supply chain/markets
IMHO the worst stuff with covid is that, I bet it was possible at the peak that some plants were closed, and even if an ammo plant was only
closed for a week.... that's 168 hours of production.... that's a metric f*** ton of ammunition or components.
Copper globally is in short supply.....hence projectile shortages and finished ammunition being in short supply/elevated prices.
Meh, copper is used in lots of shit like wire, etc. If I call up an electrician he can still buy wire. At best copper is "just more expensive" which might be part of the
fundamental price hike that happened before full lockdown retardation happened. I doubt it is causing meaningful supply problems. Not to mention these days at
least with some pistol ammo you can use shit like plastic (eg, like Federal Syntech) and still make good ammo, and if the copper thing was a huge issue, everyone would be
making pistol ammo at least that wasn't copper jacketed, theyd use plastic, brass, something else that would do the trick.
Most US lead comes from Missouri as I understand it.....and those mines were largely shut down for a while......
Yes, but theres tons of sources for recycled lead, too. Is it hard to buy a car battery? No. Then there is no shortage of lead. Maybe the price went up (like
above). That's not a "hard" supply problem, though.
Say we make a wild assed assumption that copper and lead are more expensive, that doesn't make your ammo unavailable, it just made that $160 case of
9mm become "fundamentally $200" instead, as an extreme example.
Brass? Not seeing a shortage of brass per se
Primers are in short supply.....also higher demand......any insight into the manufacturing process that would cause shortages/manufacturing issues?
Primers are in short supply because they feed ammunition manufacturing, too... so there's less production "left over" for reloading.
The EZ mode reason why there are problems - ammunition manufacturing, the processes to do so, the plants, lines and equipment, are not scalable in the sense that
you can't quickly, easily, and affordably add meaningful amounts of production capacity. The best you can do is run 3 shifts of workers on existing equipment. Expansion takes too long and is too risky, although I have no doubt that some manufacturers have made expansions since Obama was in power, in terms of not wanting to be caught flat footed again. In relative terms this shit we have now is patty cake stuff, compared to the Obamascares. Anyone who was there before, knows what I'm talking about. I can run out tomorrow and buy more shit. During Obamascares, SH scare bs, etc... most of us were like Roy Batty, thinking it was going to be the last box of ammo ever...
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTzA_xesrL8
Also ammo manufacturers can't do the skinflint bullshit that some manufacturers did during various scares- EG, an ammo manufacturer can't intentionally let his defect rate
go up. If Smith sells 1 in 10 people a broken gun they can get away with it. If federal cartridge or whoever makes slipshod ammunition and someone gets hurt or injured DIRECTLY
by that, thats a HUUUUUUUGE real life liability problem. Broken guns can be dismissed with a handwave, a rifle that exploded because the ammo was proven to be crap, not so
much.
FWIW... the silver lining here, IMHO..... this is my belief... If the manufacturers were still set up at 2008 standards, all the ammo would have been gone by like late May, at best, and we'd be fighting over 1 box rations at every gun shop. This current level of suffering is best described at like 7 out of 10 on an annoyance scale.
Rinse and repeat with powder....most of the common/popular varieties are sold out or intermittently avail....I have no insight into the manufacturing process for powder.....anyone?
Production runs of different powder vary. Those operations use special equipment and aren't easily scalable, it's not like say, a farm, where you rent some guys field and just process another field of crops.
A lot of powder (Eg, Vihtavouri, a couple others?) is also imported. It ain't flown over on an airplane, that's for sure. It comes on a container ship. The distributors only buy that stuff a few containers at a time, maybe, if that.
Also, with demand on ammo being so high... who do you think is getting the smokeless first? The ammo factories. They're going to get priority, from whoever the
manufacturer is. Places like St. Marks, owned by gen dynamics, sells powder to all kinds of ammo companies, as one example.
It's pretty easy to see where the constrictions in the supplies come from if you look at thing that way.
I haven't heard any rumors of shit like "ammo company XYZ only operating at 50% capacity because of lack of raw materials" so I think that stuff is a myth. I think the chain is just hit
hard with demand. When that happens, things get bonkers... and they stay bonkers, until people start running out of money or drive to buy ammunition.
There are only a few ways this stops....
1- people run out of money (problem here, is there are two out of three huge echelons of gun owners buying shit right now!)
-Generic rona panickers/1st time gun buyers - these people are done, thankfully...
-Riot fear panickers (some of these include first time gun buyers, others include people prepping for home defense etc)
-Hardcore "Gun People" (like most of us here on nes) laying in supplies to stay ahead
-Political panic types - there are various people who, both existing and "new" gun owners, think that if Trump loses, that somehow, he will ban everything. This "wing" hasn't really
-gotten its motor going yet but these people will go full retard as the election heats up.
A bunch of us here have "seen this movie before" and it only ends when people finish setting their wallet on fire. The 2nd stimulus thing isn't going to
help either....