• @jordanlund@lemmy.worldM
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    fedilink
    21 year ago

    I can’t speak to the military market, but on the CONSUMER market, the pandemic exposed a HUGE bottleneck.

    A bullet consists of a few key pieces… the projectile itself, gunpowder, the shell that holds the whole thing together, and the primer which is what gets struck by the firing pin and makes the whole thing work.

    Most of this is dead simple tech, people have been making their own projectiles, shells, and gunpowder for centuries.

    But during the pandemic, the supply line on primers fell apart, and if you can’t get primers, you can’t make bullets.

    https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/ammo-shortage-2023/

    “Fiocchi, the Italian ammunition manufacturer, announced in November (2022) that it is building a $41 million primer manufacturing facility in Little Rock, Arkansas. The press release announcing the plant’s establishment noted that there are only five other primer manufacturing operations in the U.S. At least one other large manufacturer is looking at establishing a primer production operation in order to satisfy demand, but a principal for the company noted that groundbreaking for the new facility is at least a year away.”

    The same article notes the other problem in the post pandemic world… staffing. Even if you have enough primers, you still need the people to make the bullets and it’s not like a construction line is a work from home gig.

    "Mike Stock, general manager of Winchester Ammunition’s Oxford, Mississippi, plant:

    “It’s getting a little better every month, but I could pay an employee all the overtime they would ever want to make right now,” says Stock, whose facility is absorbing part of the $145 million contract Winchester received last year to deliver pistol ammunition to the U.S. Army. “Put it this way, we can’t hire enough people quickly enough.”"

    And they’re choosing what to make, in the above example, they’re making pistol ammo for an Army contract, well, that means their lines aren’t making rifle ammo for anyone else. Common calibers get precedent, uncommon or older ones get lost in the shuffle.