Is factory ammo really this bad?

I have had double powder loads in Lawman, I have seen no powder in a WWB round that squibbed, I have pretty much shot enough to see every type of failure you can imagine. Shoot long and hard enough you'll get a QC failure/ the one that slipped through the crack.

I would be amazed if it were as low as 1%. Manufactured by humans means imperfect. An in spec rate of 99% would make ammo manufacturers the envy of the manufacturing world. 1-2% may be what quality control is capable of holding it to. Also keep in mind that going bang and being in spec are two different things.

1% would be a failure every 100 rounds. I shoot about 5,000 rounds a year and I see a couple a year. S&B and WWB mostly. I sort of thought for a while that was why WWB had an extra round in the box for this reason. I never worried about it, you buy cheap, you get cheap. Losing a round here and there still means its economical. I did not see where they were light strikes. I looked at the dents and they seemed as deep as the ones that fired.

Sometimes bad lots happen. Happens with small arms and happens with artillery rounds. I don't know if its worse now or if we just shoot a lot more. I do know the military tracks lot numbers and failure rates and will pull a lot from inventory. I did have a double charged factory .38 special blow up a model 66 .357 back in the 80s, you don't hear about that happening much today.

Shoot very little factory ammo any more, but up until a decade ago, everything I shot was factory. So for the previous 40 years I never had a centerfire round fail, this includes Mil Surp and cheap WWB. This does not mean I haven't come across a round in a box I didn't attempt to shoot. Rimfire is another story. 35 years ago I bought two bricks of Winchester "wildcat" .22 LR. Probably 10 outta 50 would split the cases when shot. Still have a brick left. While I still find a few failures with most bulk pac .22LR. none has ever been that bad. All in all, I think quality control for ammo produced in this country by reputable manufacturers is pretty good overall. There will always be exceptions and a few bad lots. Most times these ammo companies are good at replacing bad ammo. .22 LR is pretty much a "you get what you pay for". This also goes for the cheap discount stuff that comes from who knows where.

The reason I dislike Remington Golden Bullet so much is I had a 550 round bulk pack that seemed to have one dud out of every six rounds. I have disliked it ever since.

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^^ THIS ^^

More than one brick. Different lots, different times.
I'll never use Remington .22 ammo again.

Bulk pack .22LR ammo is the only ammo I've have problems with. All center fire ammo I've shot has been fine.

jakk280rem said:

An in spec rate of 99% would make ammo manufacturers the envy of the manufacturing world. 1-2% may be what quality control is capable of holding it to.

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LMAO!! An in spec rate of only 99% (1 defect out of 100) would pretty much put any major manufacturer out of business. There are very few high-volume manufacturing operations that don't use something similar to Six Sigma process improvement methods today. I would be very surprised if the major ammo manufacturers weren't aware of these process control and improvement methods.

A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of the products manufactured are statistically expected to be free of defects (3.4 defects per million)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

Tula/Wolf in 9mm was terrible several years ago. Tried in maybe 6-7 guns, including a Ruger Convertible. Around 4-6 FTFire rounds in 50. AMAZING(ly bad)

For the most part I really have not had one brass FTFire and consider factory ammo to be reliable. There is ONE noticeable exception. Just two weeks ago at the range. Remington 6.8SPC. Nice deep primer strike. No bang. Hmmmmm.....

I have only had one centerfire cartridge fail to fire. It was an American Eagle 158 gr 357 mag cartridge. The cartridge had no powder in it. Yet, the primer itself was enough to clear the barrel. Using CCI rimfire ammo I don't recall any duds. The only duds I have encountered were in bulk packs of 22 LR ammo.

When I see those posts saying I had a high number of misfires I think the OP has a broken firing pin. When just the tip of a firing pin breaks it's difficult to spot without a new firing pin for comparison.

I usually only have issues with factory handgun loads, such as the .357 or .44, The loads function fine, but are quite anemic. It's like they've had their "you know what" snippy snipped snipped.

Thankfully there are still guys out there like Kevin Underwood who wants to sell reloads an outstanding price.

As long as I've stayed away from old military surplus, or steel cased junk like Wolf / Tula, I've been able to make do.

About two and a half years ago there was a big consolidation in the ammo industry which makes many brands. Brands which were tried and true were having issues. Was told this by an instructor. If I hadn't heard it from him I wouldn't have believed it. In the mid to late 2000s I was shooting on the order of 10000 rounds a year for two or three years of mostly WWB and never had a single round not go bang. Out of those, only two rounds looked like mfg defects that I didn't shoot. Now that Im married and have little rug rats I don't shoot nearly as much but my brother does. He has had issues with WWB and this fits with what the instructor told me. Other brands other than web have been impacted as well. That's all I know. Hope it helps.

I recently bought three boxes of Independence brand 223 from Walmart. Had 1 failure to fire out of each box, and horrible accuracy out of a very accurate rifle. Grabbed a box of my usual ammo for this rifle and it worked fine. So yeah, I think factory ammo is going downhill.

Anything that's mass-produced at high speed by the millions, you're gonna have a few bad ones slip through, that's inevitable. But some companies probably have more than others. And I wouldn't be surprised if many of the name brands on the ammo don't really make it anymore, they farm it out.

I've put about a thousand rounds through my Browning BPS. I had two failures, both Remington Gun Club shells where the hulls came apart in the gun after firing (they both fired okay). I've only ever bought about four boxes of Remington Gun Club, so that was a 2% failure rate for me. Never had any problems with Estate or Federal target loads (what I mainly shoot).

Another shooter at my club had the same thing happen with a Remington Gun Club hull that same summer. I think they must have shipped a bad batch to Medford.

I reload, and get a rare dud on Tula SR primers

When the prices get back to normal I will probably go back to CCI 41s

Winchester rifle ammo. Junk in my experience. Last time I tried it, though I already knew better, I was ready to wrap a new 3"-100 yard grouping Browning Hi Wall .22-250 around a column until I caught myself, remembered, and switched to the Remington and Fed I had also bought to test. Immediately MOA. NEVER bought Win again and that was a long time ago...

The bullets are the worst I'm told...

Disregarding the well-known and thoroughly despised "American Ammo" from Miami, FL (Head stamped A-MERC) the worst I have run across is the Remington "Thunderbolt" .22LR stuff.

Opened up one of the little plastic cans of plain lead Dud-er-bolt, appropriately shaped like a small trash can, and the lead was oxidized to the point some of it would not chamber in my MKII or 10/22.

As a teen-ager I had a Rem 'Nylon 66' that would always choke on the 36-Gr hollow point "Golden bullet". figure that one out...a Rem rifle that choked on Rem ammo...

Take an inflation guide, and take the price per 50 rounds bulk pack .22LR back to what you remember paying for a box of fifty back when all .22 ammo was perfect.

My day was about 1960. Good .22 ammo was 50 cents a box of fifty. Inflation means that same ammo should cost $3.75 for fifty, $7.50 for a hundred rounds. About what I recall buying CCI MiniMags and Winchester SuperX in the hundred round box a couple of years ago.

You wanna get 550 rounds of .22LR for the price of 100 or 150 rounds of decent .22 ammo, live with the duds.

GECO 9mm I bought to use for range practice gave me 3 failure to fire in the first box.
Rounds seemed to be too big in diameter and looked like a light primer strike. In two different Glock pistols 34 and 19.

Mostly I have had very good luck with factory ammo except for Remington .22LR stuff. It is awful. I had a failure rate of at least 1 out of 10 with another 2 or 3 that were seriously underpowered and another 2 or 3 that were seriously over powered. And the stuff was incredibly dirty the last time I shot it. I'm talking shooting 100 rounds in a bolt action, single shot then having to clean the bolt because I couldn't get it to cycle as hard a I could push it. I was lucky to get it out to clean it. I have had that rifle for over 30 years and I probably didn't clean it more than a dozen times but I had to clean it 3 times with 200 rounds of Remington through it. I'll never fire another round of that stuff in one of my guns.

Factory ammo - junk. Remington ammo - even worse.

Cheap guns will more than likely give cheap performance. Cheap ammo will typically do the same. There are exceptions to both rules. But why do we expect cheap ammo to function like custom hand loads? The laws of probability and the imperfections of anything man made clearly determine that sometimes things just don't work. I watched a guy the other day hunting on TV. He was shooting Weatherby ammo. Had 3 FTF's in a row on 3 consecutive rounds. He stated, on camera, "I will never use this ammo again". It wasn't cheap ammo. It was just man made. It happens.

I can't really hold inaccurracy against any factory ammo unless it's extremely bad. Being a reloader for the last 30 yrs I know that each gun is different and will perform better with a particular load it likes. It's just that it's a rare day that I find factory ammo my guns like.
Now function is another story altogether. Factory ammo that sqibs, hangfires, or is an outright dud is inexcusable in my opinion.
I shot some 22 ammo recently that shot fine and was reasonably accurate, but some rounds were much louder than others. Come to find out the velocity was borderline subsonic and most were breaking the sound barrier while some were not and sounded like squibs.

Reefinmike said:

I had a box of tula 380(.355") with 9mm mak bullets (.365") needless to say, they failed to go into battery.

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I think they had a whole batch of these go out like that. I kept finding thread after thread about Tula .380 not going into battery in a gun model I was researching.

I picked up a box of Tula .380 two days ago. I could have bought more, but didn't know if they would work. They cycled by hand just fine and a quick magazine dump worked fine. I went back to buy my limit of three boxes per day yesterday but was pleased to find more options! I bought two boxes of Winchester white box (100 rounds each, $36 each) and one box of Tula .380 (50 rounds, $15).

For what it is worth, I've only had a couple of rounds of Russian surplus rifle ammo that failed to fire, even with a nice dent in the primer. That is two rounds out of 500 and the stuff is over 30 years old. I've never had a problem with any of my other center fire pistol or rifle ammo. I don't really pay attention to the rimfire stuff. I'm sure I've throw a couple away here and there after it did not fire. I've NEVER had a squib, but thanks to this site I think I would recognize it and know to take the gun apart and clear the barrel.

Jim

I can not think of one time I had commercial loaded centerfire ammo not go bang when it was supposed to. Rimfire on the other hand I can not say the same about. I remember working at a summer camp rifle range and we would have one misfire every 6-7 rounds. That ammo was eventually gone through, but it took forever. We wound up keeping the misfires in a bucket and pulled the bullet out of the case, brass to one scrap metal guy and lead to another. The brand I remember having the most misfires was PMC, followed up by remington. I remember the winchester ammo we had almost never gave any headaches, but it was more expensive.

In 40+ years of shooting I have had only one center fire round that didn't fire the way it should and it was a hangfire in a 30-30 Winchester 94. It was a Remington 170 grain Soft point. Now 22LR is a completely different animal. I have a half a brick of federal 22's I am not sure what I am going to do with yet. I had 7 out of 10 last time out that failed to fire even after waiting to see if it was going to go off and trying to refire it in another gun they still failed to fire. I buried the ones that didn't fire in a two feet deep hole.