Commercial reloaders of .223 and .308

I bet there would be a huge market for this in Canada if someone stepped up to the plate.

I used to buy remanufactured ammo in 9x19 and .223 from a place in idaho. They would bring 1000 round crates to a gunshow in WA, and for 1000 fired cases and about US$125, you got a 1000 reloads.
(about 15 year old prices, admittedly, and no longer exportable now)
 
I have a couple of 50 round boxes of Gold Cross Ammunition Ltd. .308 Win Match 155gr Remanufactured ammunition. They were out of Mississauga, ON.
I Googled them one time but didn't find anything....
 
I suspect it is more difficult to re manufacture rifle ammo for a couple of reasons:

-More case preparation work
-Harder to find large quantities of once-fired brass
 
Back of the envelope, if you were to start up a company from scratch to re-manufacture just one of those calibres, it'd cost you $100,000 just to get all your equipment and licences in order. That's assuming you already have a facility that the CFO deems suitable for commercial manufacture of ammunition.
 
rather than speculate if it is possible or viable, lets hear how many would support a company that did re-manufacture .223 or .308 in quantity.
If the price was not hugely more than it costs for me to do it myself, i would buy a crate.
 
tootall said:
rather than speculate if it is possible or viable, lets hear how many would support a company that did re-manufacture .223 or .308 in quantity.
If the price was not hugely more than it costs for me to do it myself, i would buy a crate.
Click to expand...

A crate? If it is not a bunch more then it is for me to crank them out, and they shoot as good or better, put me down for 10K.
 
I'm probably the one on the board who's come closest to filling such a demand, and I doubt I could or would do it again.

Several years ago, I was able to tap into a large supply of once fired police range .223Rem brass. I invested in the extra tool head, automatic case trimmer, and a ton of spare time.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the brass was Winchester. For consistancy, I would sort by headstamp the brass, and only processed the Winchester.

I'd clean the cases in walnut media overnight, retumble in fresh corncob to remove the dust, then lube the cases with Dillon spray lube.

I'd then run the cases through the 1050 using the carbide sizing die, adjusted with thier headspace guage. The cases were also primer pocket swaged, and trimmed with the Dillon trimmer, set to just barely size the neck only.

Then the cases went back into the corn cob media for a few hours to eliminate the lube and to knock off any remaining burrs from the case mouth.

Finally, the cases made a second pass through the press with an undersized Lee collet die to open up the case mouth from being sized again in the trimmer, and to clear any media from the primer pocket.

Things were fine when I used up my supply of Winchester brass. While I would pull one round per bin and double check the case in the Dillon headspacing guage, once set, the press never neaded any adjustment.

And then the supply dried up, and I began using Federal and Federal NT brass. Holy sheep dip, what a nightmare. Dies that produced perfect cases with Winchester brass, would produce Federal cases that fell below the minimum line on the guage.

Keep in mind, all this was just processing brass, not loading ammo. Having this much variability between brass types would seriously discourage me from any attempt to reload mixed brass.

I don't thing reloading commercially could possibly pay enough to make the labour worth while.
 
And yet Quality Ammo from Pocatello, ID was able to do just that, with all brands of headstamps.
I blew out a couple of crates with no problems.

(not that I am argueing with you, I found your post and proceedure interesting)
 
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