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Before you stock in the next 10,000 rounds of ammo, maybe you should stop and think.

jpk said:
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
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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.
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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......
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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?
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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?
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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.... [laugh]
 
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Broccoli Iglesias said:
🤔

Maybe it runs flawlessly because you never use it.
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That's not a bad observation.

But, (yeah, everything before the "but" doesn't matter - example "I support the 2nd Amendment, but, blah, blah, blah); consider this please.

She bought the gun about 8 years ago when she was learning how to shoot a pistol. She shot it a lot for a couple of years while we hunted for the right carry and competition guns for her. She's left handed and has less upper body strength than I do. She hates my Glocks and doesn't much care for my revolvers. In all the time we've owned it, once we found its preferred ammo, it's never given us a problem.

She carried the Sig 232 and 238 for a while while I hunted for a 9mm that she'd like. Finally got her to shoot my Kimber Target II in competition, and found an HonorGuard for a carry gun. Once she was shooting those, she pretty much quit shooting the Mosquito. A year after she started shooting the Kimber, she bought a Sig P320.

So, for the last couple of years, the Mosquito, the 232 and the 238's have all sat in the safe - she's been shooting the HonorGuard and the P320.

The other day we took a couple of 22's along with the 9mm's just because they're fun. As I said, the Mosquito ran flawlessly.

Now it will probably sit in the safe for another six months or so.
 
daveyburt said:
@Brewer , that video - i think - will go down here as epic!

Good job!!!
:)
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It is already in the NES hall of fame, with threads such as:

Animal tracks ooOOooOO.
The bird sh*tting on Prepers mirror.
The mirror falling off the Jeep.

And a few others.
 
A coworker of mine.recently bought his first pistol and rifle. Along with them, he bought 3 boxes of 9mm and 5 boxes of 556. So 8 boxes of ammo. I've seen estimates that there were 2 million new gun owners in the first half of this year. If each one bought 8 boxes, that's 16 million boxes of ammo that were bought up by people that weren't even in the equation 6 or 7 months ago.
 
jpk said:
I can see some of that/not others

Things IMHO are worse now than under Oblunder....especially @2012
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I am not seeing that right now, but I am seeing a trend where they have the POTENTIAL to be worse, certainly.

Fed back then was buying huge volumes of ammo further reducing avail......the f***ing dept of ed bought millions of rounds of various calibers as I recall correctly.....add that up across state/fed agencies and its a black hole for supply
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Lol, that's a tinfoiler half fake news item that got a lot of legs, but ultimately didn't amount to much. People acted like the feds buying a few million rounds of ammo here and there was the end of the world. A lot of it was .40, too, lol. That stuff is one and done, and it wasn't the first time the government bought a ton of ammo. It just made peoples moisture count go up because of the tinfoiler phantasms caused by Obama being in office... Yeah sure, it was likely market disruptive, but I bet joe american types still bought way more ammo than the feds did
that year..... no contest. .

Ammo sales are up 140% if you believe reports
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Yes, I do, and I've seen it with my own eyes, on both side of the counter, so to speak.

I don't think the peak demand is as high as it was in March-April though, not even close. But that is basically like saying "we went from ludicrous speed back down to insane"... it's still
pretty high.....

In past election cycles I've never seen all of the major online sellers completely sold out of 9, 45, 556 and to a lesser degree 7.62 except for chi chi loads
Click to expand...

Then you weren't paying attention during Obamascares, because most of them were blown clean, at different points. Anyone who wanted ammo online literally had to
sit around waiting for that handful of cases or whatever to get listed, bam, gone in an hour, etc, so on. Some of that IS happening now, but not comparable to obamascare from
what I keep seeing.

I do think that "now" has the potential to be worse over a longer period of time because the demographic span of the people buying the ammo is much, much
wider. So even if trump wins, we might be in for a slow ammo recovery.

Some of this stuff is in same situation PT lumber is in......partly due to rona, partly due to demand.....
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The PT thing is because a bunch of broads made guys run out and put a deck on their house, or a bunch of guys decided to build a deck so they could get away from their annoying wife.

I was hoping someone would chime in on specifics of Powder and Primer manuffacture
Click to expand...
You don't really need specifics- it's easy to see reality- If you've ever watched more than one ammo plant video, think about the specialized equipment, fixtures, and purpose designed buildings you have to use to make that stuff. Again, even at max capacity, you can only make so much of it. Eventually when the demand falls below a certain point, you get a surplus and availability goes up and price will come down a little, barring sticky price, of course. Think about scalability in manufacturing, that's where most of the bottlenecks are. This is a capital intensive business that requires large buildings, expensive, likely finicky machines... and then a bunch of people to run them properly.[/QUOTE]
 
allen-1 said:
It's funny, I've read so many critical postings re the Sig Mosquito here. We must have a unicorn one. I bought my wife one probably about 8 years ago because she wanted a full size pistol with "normal" controls chambered in .22. I bought one from a friend who swore it worked, and I ran a couple different types of ammo through it. Settled on a round that's "optimized for the AR-22", and it's run flawlessly ever since.

And since it's purple - she named it "Barney".

We're going to the range in an hour or two - maybe we'll take it with us - it hasn't been out of the safe in a couple of years.
Click to expand...

I bought the wife's (Cowgirlup's) her first pistol around 2005 (at the "Old classic Riley's in Hookset, NH" .... and man do I miss the "Old Rileys" when it was still in its prime). It was not her first firearm (her dad built custom black powder rifles back in the 50's & 60's)

Yes, that pistol was a sig mosquito. And unfortunately, It was a jammo-matic right from the get-go.
It seems like most of the Gen-1's were.

So Rileys sent it back to sig .... for several months.

They ended-up sending us back a whole new & different mosquito in stainless (free upgrade).

That one works fine. I later picked-up a gemtec threaded barrel for it, and so its also a host for a 22 suppressor.

= Its a good little backyard-range plinking gun now.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyways, to stay on topic = there is def. NO shortage of 22LR here at our Ammo Fort :)[laugh]😁
(the last purchase of 5K was back in August 2019)

The wife took a picture of me adding it to the fort:

1595940082197.png
 
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jpk said:
I can see some of that/not others

Things IMHO are worse now than under Oblunder....especially @2012

Fed back then was buying huge volumes of ammo further reducing avail......the f***ing dept of ed bought millions of rounds of various calibers as I recall correctly.....add that up across state/fed agencies and its a black hole for supply

Ammo sales are up 140% if you believe reports

In past election cycles I've never seen all of the major online sellers completely sold out of 9, 45, 556 and to a lesser degree 7.62 except for chi chi loads

Primers are pretty much same outside of large rifle magnums

Rinse and repeat for common.popular powders

Some of this stuff is in same situation PT lumber is in......partly due to rona, partly due to demand.....

I was hoping someone would chime in on specifics of Powder and Primer manuffacture
Click to expand...

I would believe 150% increase, easily. With a huge uptick of first time buyers, comes a bigger (huge-er?) consumption of ammo for those first time buyers.

Like stated above, happens every election cycle, on both the fed and state level. Candidate X is going to take your guns- Panic buy. Candidate X is wining is going to cause an uprising- panic buy.

Primers and powder haven't cut production down, the demand is at an all time high for- ammo manufacturers. First time re-loaders, because theres no ammo, long time reloaders stocking up. A lot of projo's are 4 to 6 weeks out from order as well. No idea on new brass. Again, panic shortage.
Its all cyclical.

Pressure treated (i'm told) is due to a switch in chemicals and mill shutdowns. Prior chemicals used came from China. New stuff isn't as good but more eco-friendly. I'm also told its horrible and won't last anywhere near as long as the stuff made prior. Thats from a friend in the trade that orders the stuff by the trailer-truck load for a business.
 
Also, has anyone bothered to check the classifieds?

I see stuff in there for sale, and I'm willing to bet if you put in a w.t.b. advert for Primer brand X, Powder Brand X and Projo diameter and gr weight X, there'd be a dozen p.m.'s in your inbox by the end of the day.

Again, the general public panic-buy mindset. Don't limit yourself to one l.g.s. or online vendor, be resourceful.
 
TrashcanDan said:
Also, has anyone bothered to check the classifieds?

I see stuff in there for sale, and I'm willing to bet if you put in a w.t.b. advert for Primer brand X, Powder Brand X and Projo diameter and gr weight X, there'd be a dozen p.m.'s in your inbox by the end of the day.

Again, the general public panic-buy mindset. Don't limit yourself to one l.g.s. or online vendor, be resourceful.
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True.. there are some great people here willing to help, and others willing to take advantage. LOL
 
masssheltie said:
In one of the classes that I took, the instructor suggested keeping 4,000 rounds for every caliber of gun in your collection.

In reading some of the posts here, I'm hearing that people are stockpiling 10, 20 and 30,000 rounds of ammo and up, and they're still buying more.

Just like the folks who descended upon the stores to clean out the paper towels, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer, panic buying is great for you, but it prevents the rest of us from getting any. It also drives prices through the roof.

I usually buy my summer's supply of ammo in the spring, but because of the panic, I've not been able to get any.

Yes, you have the right to stockpile hundreds of thousands of rounds, but when you do this, you screw everyone else who is worried about the civil unrest situation, or having enough ammo to maintain qualification.

Just a thought.
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Joe Biden said all I needed was a shotgun to defend me and my family yet when I go to the gun shop they don't have ANY shotguns. People are buying MORE THAN ONE and I can't understand how they can be so inconsiderate. I failed to plan properly and it is your fault for buying MORE THAN ONE shotgun. Please think about it next time you are filling out your 4473.

On a related note, the only handguns I can fund are used bodyguard 380s. I want a nice P365 with that awesome thumb safety and I want to pay the same $499 that everyone was advertising them for last year. I don't understand why no one has them in stock and when they do they want SO MUCH MONEY for them. They are so inconsiderate. Price gauging. Profiting. How dare they insist that the cost will be $600 for that P365 that only a few months ago I could get for $499. What is wrong with gun dealers?

There aught to be a law (or two)
 
Just bought three thousand rounds of 9mm for myself and one friend yesterday (he got a case) getting it while it's still out there... prices are steep but still able to get stuff but lower than internet market price,I think that's going to end soon though.....
 
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Now is a good time to sign up for the bullet casting seminar.
I see everyone in this thread is keeping their stockpile below 4K to share the wealth.

www.northeastshooters.com

2020 Cast Bullet Signup Thread

It’s time for hot lead again!! This is the perfect time to learn to cast bullets. Don’t rely on the local shop and don’t wait weeks and weeks for your bullet order to show. This is a great way to spend less on your bullets and more on your primers and powder. You won’t save money but you’ll...
www.northeastshooters.com www.northeastshooters.com
 

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je5SBsCW7NE


Another 1000 rounds of 9mm today, because its Friday. [laugh]

Plus some more 00 buck and .22 LR. I am "taking a break" on 9mm now, at least until prices recede a bit. God only knows when that will be. Even then though, it will be on to Birdshot/target shotguns loads, primers, bullets and other stuff.
 
I think for US manufactured ammo the powder will be the biggest issue.
Theres just not a lot of powder made in the US.
you have General Dynamics making ball powders in FL and Cananda. Maybe a few shotgun powders.
Go ahead and look at you powder containers see where they are made.
I need to fill some LP tanks on the way home i will stop in local shop and grab a few pounds of 2400. It goes a long way and i can shoot 200 yards with decent accuracy with cast out of any rifle. With 16 grains or so.
 
mac1911 said:
I think for US manufactured ammo the powder will be the biggest issue.
Theres just not a lot of powder made in the US.
you have General Dynamics making ball powders in FL and Cananda. Maybe a few shotgun powders.
Go ahead and look at you powder containers see where they are made.
I need to fill some LP tanks on the way home i will stop in local shop and grab a few pounds of 2400. It goes a long way and i can shoot 200 yards with decent accuracy with cast out of any rifle. With 16 grains or so.
Click to expand...

UPS delivered 6 lbs of TiteGroup Friday. To go with the 5 lbs I had on the shelf.
I did the math last week, 700 grains / 4.0 grains = approx 1750 rounds per pound.
 

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