Bad Winchester Ammo

I bought a box of Winchester ammo this year for my 270 since I don't have any bullets or some of comments . It's the worst box of factory ammo I've ever seen, thought about calling but sure they wouldn't do anything anyways.

In the world of qc they failed

Lack of workforce. Training new lackeys. In a hurry to meet ammo demands. Results in bad QC. I noticed the new Federal match 22lr have less velocity.

I have had this private thought for a while.....

I trust no one and for darn good reason, I especially do not trust fat cat executives who have cornered the market (Vista sports).

Say for the sake of my paranoia Vista took a side with the Anti gun and they ran "poor quality ammo" how many guns could you destroy? More importantly say with the recent attempt to create a national gun registry it was to go through and is formed as well as restrictions are placed on ammo as has been done in California in recent years. HOW DO YOU GET AMMO?

You get the ammo quietly from the ammo hoarders of years past who bought this (questionable) ammo and are now selling for quite a profit. This ammo is sabotaged from the factory and we begin a campaign of systematic destruction of firearms because if it is not on the registry you can't own it.

How many can be destroyed using this tactic? Who knows

I am not buying new production powder or factory ammo currently because of this thought.

Is there a chance anti-gun spy’s could be infiltrating the plants and planting dangerous ammo in the boxes before they ship?

rust collector said:

Okay, the thread was about unfortunate quality control noted in Winchester 45-70, and you're going off on Vista (CCI, Federal, Remington) trying to blow guns up. How about product liability? How about repeat sales when there are no guns? But I appreciate your not buying new ammo or components, because that increases my chance of obtaining them.

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Hey it's a crazy world and we don't know who is in bed with who. Quality control is not difficult to maintain in a production setting where components are mated together. I ran Qcr for a variety of product lines to determine how best to handle tool changes and implement preventive maintaince outages.

Regardless of manufacturer the ammo on market today is pitiful and all we can do is question why?

There are human eyes at every point in the manufacturing process and no one is asking questions! GIVE ME BREAK!

Then gun owners are buying it and for the most part not asking questions because they do not know to ask the hard questions, it's a nefarious down hill slide to something more sinister.

KY DAN said:

I have had this private thought for a while.....

I trust no one and for darn good reason, I especially do not trust fat cat executives who have cornered the market (Vista sports).

Say for the sake of my paranoia Vista took a side with the Anti gun and they ran "poor quality ammo" how many guns could you destroy? More importantly say with the recent attempt to create a national gun registry it was to go through and is formed as well as restrictions are placed on ammo as has been done in California in recent years. HOW DO YOU GET AMMO?

You get the ammo quietly from the ammo hoarders of years past who bought this (questionable) ammo and are now selling for quite a profit. This ammo is sabotaged from the factory and we begin a campaign of systematic destruction of firearms because if it is not on the registry you can't own it.

How many can be destroyed using this tactic? Who knows

I am not buying new production powder or factory ammo currently because of this thought.

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https://giphy.com/clips/romy-billy-madison-WS7RGsscLqgxfIEeOv

I think after things get settled down. And new workers learn their skills and jobs. QC will improve. It's not just the firearms/ammo industries being affected.

Winchester ammunition quality has been falling for at least the last 12 years.

If people keep buying crappy products, manufacturers will keep making crappy products.

The best thing that ever happened for US car buyers was the arrival of Japanese imports and the realization by American car makers that people now had an affordable, better quality choice.

Once they no longer felt that they had a captive audience, quality and innovation improved.

Winchester used to be my favorite, but in the last 10 years I've moved to makers like Starline, PPU and Lapua for my purchased brass.

If you've seen me shoot, you could tell I'm not good enough to tell if one brand is more or less accurate than another, but I have not had any trouble with Winchester in various common calibers. I don't doubt others' reports, and I always take a quick look at what I load.

KY DAN said:

Hey it's a crazy world and we don't know who is in bed with who. Quality control is not difficult to maintain in a production setting where components are mated together. I ran Qcr for a variety of product lines to determine how best to handle tool changes and implement preventive maintenance outages.

Regardless of manufacturer the ammo on market today is pitiful and all we can do is question why?

There are human eyes at every point in the manufacturing process and no one is asking questions!

Click to expand...

When Companies are purchased by investment groups, those investment groups core out the company to the maximum extent and then flip it to the next fool. You are seeing this all the time, old established companies, purchased by individuals who are in it for the short term, and those companies are loaded up with debt, and run into the ground. A relatively recent example was Toy's R US

The Demise of Toys ‘R’ Us Is a Warning

It used to be that Winchester was great ammunition, I preferentially looked for their brass, especially in 223. It was good stuff. But, that was a couple of decades ago. If more and more defective Winchester ammunition is making it to the market, it is because of deliberate decisions by the front Office to let the factory fall apart, hire cheap 20 something's, make work difficult so they will leave before they get expensive. And to ship non conforming material to the public. And the shooting public is at fault for buying any buffalo chip that chambers in their boom stick, regardless of how it stinks. Also, our Political Class has protected these greedy, sloppy, ammunition manufacturer's by banning ammunition imports from China and Russia, so there is a lack of competition on price and quality. If there was competition on quality and price, Winchester and the other investor group owned ammunition companies would surely fail through lack of sales. Won't happen though, the customer continues to have fewer and fewer choices.

Its called, chrony capitalism.

1.5" group at 100 yards with a .45-70
That's good ammo with a bad crimp.
Go kill some deer.

CoalCrackerAl said:

Lack of workforce. Training new lackeys. In a hurry to meet ammo demands. Results in bad QC. I noticed the new Federal match 22lr have less velocity.

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Yes, I have a hard time shooting those out of my Mark II. They jam rather consistently. Plus there's a lot of squibs that seem primer-only, where I have to check the barrel. Switch to CCI Mini-mags, and there's no issue.

We have a strange combination of crony capitalism and communism at the same time. Also a strange combination of federal government trying to burn the country down while large segments of local governments are trying to save it. It’s like a weird quiet war is going.

I avoid Winchester now. I’ve found standard 115gr 9mm ammo in a box of NATO 9mm, bad crimps and a 44MAG case in a bag of 357mag cases.

If you don't contact Winchester (or any other ammunition company) with quality issues, then you can be sure they won't do anything about it for you as a customer, and perhaps as a company QC issue as a whole.

What does it take to contact them, especially these days?

Not much more than it takes to post here, in fact.

Find their contact info then "shoot" them an email, complete with pictures even, informing them of the product problem. Include the lot number from the box.

Give a brief, professionally worded, description of the issue.

The difference between doing that, and not doing anything at all, is the former actually communicates a problem needing resolution while the latter does not. One MAY get you tangible results, the other will not.

Good luck!

(Historical story...Winchester once sent me a 50 round box of. 22 WMR in the early 80s when I wrote to them about a single creased cartridge I found in a box I had just bought.)

The only bad Winchester ammo that I've come across has been the white box in .22LR and .22WRM. I called Winchester to alert them of the problem when it kept jamming in my Ruger LCR. Their response was to offer a box of ammo...no acknowledgement of the problem. That was a few years ago and I see it still continues and has spread to centerfire ammo. It's the poor quality control culture with Winchester's ammo manufacturing process that needs to be addressed. I steer clear of all Winchester manufactured ammo when I can now.

The worst of what is speculative about Winchester ammo is exactly what the auto parts chains have done. Then, it was all family men with children. Now, it's all minimum wage employees with no experience with a mid 30's manager and the rest part time retirees.

If there was a question about front drum brakes, who do you think the owner would approach at the counter now? Yup, the old guys. Im certain most of those are gone at ammo plants, a few knowledgeable mid age guys adequately compensated and all the rest machine operators who can't set up and just shut it down when it's coming out messed up. When they notice. You don't get guys who start off knowing nothing and after two years do set up and first article for the other guys. Too little consideration and too much stress. Now imagine who's left being told it's gonna be five 12 hour shifts, they are on evenings, and Saturdays extra, just to make quota because management keeps moving the goal posts and getting sold to another holding company who demands even higher profitability.

Quickest way to make numbers is ship more ammo regardless of quality. You can't cut wages or overhead in America, you work them into the ground and hire newbies to fill the vacancies out of who you get to apply in a market where everybody has worked for Winchester but the plant staff has less than five years average experience on the floor. And Management does not care.

No, it wasn't Winchester I worked at, but one factory to the other, it's all the same when you ask around. And guns blowing up? Liability and lost lawsuits prevent that, it's more profitable to make cheap but good ammo than have your product poison more people than cure. That's a different discussion.

RetiredUSNChief said:

If you don't contact Winchester (or any other ammunition company) with quality issues, then you can be sure they won't do anything about it for you as a customer, and perhaps as a company QC issue as a whole.

What does it take to contact them, especially these days?

Not much more than it takes to post here, in fact.

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^^^This. Over the years I have gotten both bad loaded factory ammo and defective reloading components from reputable manufacturers. In every instance, I contacted the company and received some form of compensation. Sometimes it took no more than a photo, sometimes it took sending the bad stuff to them so they could inspect and make sure it wasn't something that happened after it left the factory. For the life of me, I have never understood why folks come to a public forum like this first to complain, instead of going directly to the source. What I see from the photos is bullets set too deep in the case resulting in less case capacity and probably higher pressures if fired.......i.e., unsafe ammo. I'd be surprised if Winchester would not want to know about this and the lot#.

WheelGunMan said:

The only bad Winchester ammo that I've come across has been the white box in .22LR and .22WRM. I called Winchester to alert them of the problem when it kept jamming in my Ruger LCR. Their response was to offer a box of ammo...no acknowledgement of the problem.

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It Is not in the nature of Corporations to admit failure. I do recommend reading the book

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

The author makes the case that you can model the personality of a Corporation as a human psychopath. Human psychopaths are grandiose, self centered, lie without guilt or shame, have no guilt or shame, and never admit fault. The problems they create are always someone else’s fault. The thing is, since psychopaths think they are the best that has ever been, or every will be, failure chips away at that self delusion of awesome perfectness.

It is a good model, and something else to know, you can only have a master slave relationship with a psychopath. If you are negotiating, they know you are weak.

Winchester wants you as a repeat customers, so you might get a free box of ammunition to replace the bad, but understand, they won’t admit fault. And, don’t try to get them to admit fault. Play the part of a fanatical, ideologically loyal customer who can’t believe that this bad ammunition somehow made it out the door of their perfect factory.

Tirod said:

The worst of what is speculative about Winchester ammo is exactly what the auto parts chains have done. Then, it was all family men with children. Now, it's all minimum wage employees with no experience with a mid 30's manager and the rest part time retirees.

If there was a question about front drum brakes, who do you think the owner would approach at the counter now? Yup, the old guys. Im certain most of those are gone at ammo plants, a few knowledgeable mid age guys adequately compensated and all the rest machine operators who can't set up and just shut it down when it's coming out messed up. When they notice. You don't get guys who start off knowing nothing and after two years do set up and first article for the other guys. Too little consideration and too much stress. Now imagine who's left being told it's gonna be five 12 hour shifts, they are on evenings, and Saturdays extra, just to make quota because management keeps moving the goal posts and getting sold to another holding company who demands even higher profitability.

Quickest way to make numbers is ship more ammo regardless of quality. You can't cut wages or overhead in America, you work them into the ground and hire newbies to fill the vacancies out of who you get to apply in a market where everybody has worked for Winchester but the plant staff has less than five years average experience on the floor. And Management does not care.

No, it wasn't Winchester I worked at, but one factory to the other, it's all the same when you ask around. And guns blowing up? Liability and lost lawsuits prevent that, it's more profitable to make cheap but good ammo than have your product poison more people than cure. That's a different discussion.

Click to expand...

It is happening in most, of not all, American manufacturing.
The old hands are retiring.
The mid to senior hands are quitting because of mismanagement.
The junior people were pushed through training, all they know is push buttons, don't care about set up or quality. Then get a new hires to train them. If all you know is push a button, that is all you can teach.
The new hires, don't want to work, don't know how to work, and don't care about quality.
Management only cares that a position is filled, machine is running and inventory is made. Their bonus is based on production quota, not quality.
Then, you have morons expecting $15/hour to flip burgers and they're not capable of doing the job.

Sad state we lived in, but it will not improve, anytime soon.

I strongly doubt manufactured ammo quality is a conspiracy of any kind... Winchester has always made the spottiest ammunition in my experience. White box with 0.10" of variation in COAL, velocity all over the map is the standard, used to be the price justified it but I just load 9mm too now.