Re:There Is a Tennis Ball Shortage Too Now
by SV_BubbleTime on Saturday August 14, 2021 @06:53PM
(#28184632)
As far as automation and larger throughput, the machine exist, but at the scale of the market under normal conditions, it doesn’t make sense to plan on panics. At least it didn’t traditionally.
If Federal or Sellier invest in a n% more machines now, they will be a year or two out, and who knows what the market will look like then? Under Trump, the market was fairly slow and these companies would have had too much capacity for their sales.
Normally, I’m told the ammo companies like to plan perfectly filling one shift. Then on panics being able to run 3 shifts a day (which they all are now). Being set up to run your 10 big machines for 24hr at a time is a better plan than 30 machines and 20 normally sitting idle, because in the scenario you COULD run 30 machines at 24hr, you are going to run out of components anyhow.
That is another issue, it isn’t the assembly that is the ultimate bottleneck, almost powder comes out of maybe four places in the world, same for primers. Right now as I understand, it’s really a primer shortage, but no on is sitting on mountains of spare powder either.
I’ve had 20k primers carved out on order of 200k for 9 months now. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon.
If Federal or Sellier invest in a n% more machines now, they will be a year or two out, and who knows what the market will look like then? Under Trump, the market was fairly slow and these companies would have had too much capacity for their sales.
Normally, I’m told the ammo companies like to plan perfectly filling one shift. Then on panics being able to run 3 shifts a day (which they all are now). Being set up to run your 10 big machines for 24hr at a time is a better plan than 30 machines and 20 normally sitting idle, because in the scenario you COULD run 30 machines at 24hr, you are going to run out of components anyhow.
That is another issue, it isn’t the assembly that is the ultimate bottleneck, almost powder comes out of maybe four places in the world, same for primers. Right now as I understand, it’s really a primer shortage, but no on is sitting on mountains of spare powder either.
I’ve had 20k primers carved out on order of 200k for 9 months now. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon.