I was chatting with a friend who is close with one of the well known American custom double rifle makers, and does alot of regulation of various doubles.
In the last year, he has been tearing his hair out over regulation with one lot of Hornady, he sends the rifle back to the owner, who uses a different lot of Hornady and it doesn't shoot on a pie plate!!
Seems with the Ukraine war going on, and ammo makers loading tons of 223, 308, etc there is a shortage of powders and brass.
Seems Hornady is switching powders on thier Nitro Express rounds as available!! Apparently they use 4831, 3031, and Reloader 15 loaded to the correct muzzle velocity. Problem is, the speed of powder burn, and bullet dwell time in the barrel is different!! This causes very wonky results with Double Rifle accuracy!! More than Minute of Buffalo or Elephant!!
I have not noticed this yet with my 470 or 450-400 3", but I haven't bought ammo recently!!
Just a caution, check the accuracy of each box of Hornady NE ammo in your doubles before hunting with it!!
This gunmaker spent some time with the Hornady reps at SCI!! They had little interest!!
This is rather disappointing news as this has always been a go to for my 450-400 3"!! I shoot Federals with Woodleighs in my 470...
I am hearing that the massive amount of new shooters with thier AR's, go to the range and shoot up hundreds of rounds and leave the brass!! No handloading, and no recycling!! Everyone suffers!! Oh well, I guess the proposed Bidumb Assault Weapon ban may resolve this??!!

Not the first time Hornady ammo screwed up with a new product. I well recall the first time they marketed Interbond ammo and it became interbomd ammo, fragmenting with little penetration.

I have personally had a lot of trouble with their 500 NE ammo. Rims were out of specs. Some didn’t shoot . Primers that could fall out/removed with a fingernail. Poor performance of the bullets.

quote:

Originally posted by larryshores:
I have personally had a lot of trouble with their 500 NE ammo. Rims were out of specs. Some didn’t shoot . Primers that could fall out/removed with a fingernail. Poor performance of the bullets.

Do they make their own brass or is this farmed out?

Kynoch had four suppliers for their brass when they started up ammunition production again, one of them was Bertram, but after some quality issues they took over manufacture of their own brass.

It sounds like Hornady could have that same issue. I have some new Hornady 404 brass but haven't used any yet so don't know what the quality is like.

I have no idea. To be fair, my ammo is several years old . Things may have changed.

Nothing wrong with Hornady

quote:

This gunmaker spent some time with the Hornady reps at SCI!! They had little interest!!

This has been my experience with Hornady, I had the same experience with Heym, bought a $25k rifle regulated w Hornady ammo, had trouble and couldn't get either to give me the time of day. Went to the show thinking surely they couldn't ignore me in person, I was mistaken.

Some hornady stuff works well.

Unfortunately, they tend to do things like this (or changing construction of the bullet…, or changing dimensions on brass…) with some regularity and not either mentioning it or being willing to admit it.

For gun guys they don’t seem to get that consistency is important.

Double gun ammo is going to be rather powder sensitive… so the argument that it makes velocity and pressure specs isn’t quite as valid as it might be with bolt gun ammo- and regulation isn’t something that the user can adjust on their own.

I’m very happy with hornady for my target stuff. I’m equally convinced there are better choices for my dangerous game ammo.

Let me expand on the issues I mentioned earlier.

MY first 500 NE would not shoot. One of the reasons was that every single Hornady round I purchased had the rims out of tolerance.

We shoot the Hornady ammo for target practice. One day while we were shooting, a friend of mine shooting the same ammo as mine had some rounds that were duds. They did not fire. Can you imagine if that happened with something big and nasty was bearing down on you at bad breath range with bad intent?

I picked up a round one day and noticed no primer. it had fallen out. Then I got to noticing primers that were so loose that I could pull them out with my fingernail.

The performance of the bullets had not been the best. We have recovered solids that were twisted all to hell and back.

The price is right.