Welcome to March! It’s been a busy past week. I was hoping to have more updates and content on the site but it just has not panned out. We did get the family moved from Texas. It was a bit of a blitz, drove over Friday, got in early morning Saturday. Loaded up the vehicles and drove back all day Sunday. I figure I spent 28 hours total on the road during the span of 72 hours. We are all in one place again, but the new home looks like a disaster zone…such is moving.
Anyway, the little bit I did do on the site was to upload an email conversation I had over the summer. I’ve pulled some information that would identify the sender, but everything else was left untouched. I do value the conversations I have with subscribers, and will do everything I can to protect your privacy. If you’d like to read the conversation you can find it here: [7-15-2020] Ballistic QC Equipment
Some brief comments on the primer shortage we are seeing. I do not know how many people are aware of the details of Remington’s bankruptcy. Remington was essentially broken up and sold off in pieces to the highest bidder. During this process all cashflow was stopped, meaning the purchase of raw materials could not take place. Effectively Remington was completely shutdown, and who knows what state the plant was left in during shutdown. Only recently has cash flow restarted and operations are beginning to resume.
Why is this important? Well, Remington’s Lonoke Arkansas facility represents roughly 1/3 of the industries production of primers. Primers cannot be built over night, there are some aspects of primer construction where the primer’s have to age, or more accurately, dry out for a period of time. I seem to remember it was about 30 days, but it could be longer. All this means that if Remington restarted operations and was in full production by tomorrow, it would likely mean we would not see Remington primers on the shelf for at least 60 to 90 days.
With that said, I do not know what the Remington restart looks like. I do know not all processes can simply resume at the flip of the switch. Even when they do resume there is typically a ramp up period. New employees need to be trained, processes need to reach a steady state, and Remington is likely going to dedicate it’s primer production to satisfy it’s own needs for ammunition prior to selling to the handloading market. All of this is to say, even with Remington back in operations we are likely not to see a reprieve in the primer shortage for many months.
In the mean time companies that sourced Remington primers for their own manufacture of ammunition, have had to go elsewhere. This combined with a year of political unrest, about 8 million new firearms owners, a flipped election, and the fact everyone who cannot find ammo is suddenly jumping into reloading, has created the perfect storm of market conditions where no one gets primers. If this seems like a soft rebuttal of some of the conspiracy theories going around, it is.
It will take a bit, but we will see things get back to normal, in the meantime, it’s really frustrating for a lot of folks. Especially those whose livelihoods depend on the slim margin of profit made on ammunition sales. It’s a hard market right now.
That is all I have for this week. As always if you are looking to get in touch, best way is to send me an email jay@theballisticassistant.com. You may check us out on Parler, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. If you’d like to submit a load to our load database the instructions are here.
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The Ballistic Assistant