Hey Everyone, Each year as the "Ammo Sales" begin showing up in the various ads, I get to wondering just how well the Arms Manufacturers would do if they had a unique line of Firearms that shot very inexpensive non-reloadable factory ammo. As the Ammo Sales begin each year, you see a steady stream of folks going in to buy "what's On Sale" just for the Deer Season.

Back when Remington brought out the "710" rifles with the swaged in barrels, I got to thinking about it some more. Granted for those of us that like to spend a lot of time shooting and hunting, the "710s" are not normally our "initial" pick. Perhaps it is a bit of snob in us, how smooth the action works, or perhaps the accuracy reputation of the firearm, but it seems few of us on this Board mention having "710s".

Same for the excellently accurate Savages. There seems to be some kind of stigma attached to you if you use a Savage. One of my buddies killed about 200 Deer each year with a regular old Blue and Wood 30-06 until he retired it. He got another Savage in Stainless and Synthetic to replace it, also in 30-06 and kept the string moving right along.

Which gets me to the question(s).

1. If non-reloadable ammo was available at $5-6 for a box of 20, would you be interested in buying a somewhat inexpensive Deer rifle that would shoot it into 1.5"-2" at 100yds?

Calibers limited to say, a 24cal, 30cal and a 35cal in a short action 22" barrel. Wire brushed steel all over and rust-browned with as cheap a stock as they could find in either wood or synthetic. Operative specifications being CHEAP, but somewhat accurate.

2. What do you think would be a price that would keep the Manufacturers wide open making them to meet the demand?

Remember, we are talking about arming the guys that only go out to the Range once or twice a year, but enjoy going to hunt with their buddies. And of course, the Firearms Manufacturer needs to make a profit.

I see in another thread a lot of folks use the 7.62x39mm from what is noticed at the Range. So, I'm wondering if perhaps the American Arms folks aren't overlooking a market with an apparent high amount of sales. CHEAP and somewhat accurate.

quote:

Originally posted by Hot Core:

1. If non-reloadable ammo was available at $5-6 for a box of 20, would you be interested in buying a somewhat inexpensive Deer rifle that would shoot it into 1.5"-2" at 100yds?

No

2. What do you think would be a price that would keep the Manufacturers wide open making them to meet the demand?

They'd have to give them away. One of the serious problems arms manufacturers face today is that the market is saturated in the once or twice a year shooter area. The large sales rifle marketing programs are not slanted toward the knowledgable gun nuts, although it traps a large number of them also. IMO at best such an offering would fallow a similar sales cycle as the SKS but only at the sacrafice of sales in other rifles. It would be a rob peter to pay paul type of thing and who can do business with a sore peter.

I think if I were 25years younger I would buy one of those Ruger Scouts.

Now just stand back and watch this thread become a hit. roger

How cheap is "cheap"?

Currently you can get the latest line of Daly rifles for $260, the Remington 710 for $300, Spartan single-shots for $175, the Stevens 200 for $229, the Mossberg 100 for $227, Rossi single shot for $147, and the Handy-Rifles for $177.

Throw a $30 scope on any of them, and you have a "hunting rifle"...

Hey Steve, I agree. It looks like they would need to be very inexpensive.

I can remember before clinton got in office that the Gun Shows occasionally had some model(s) of the AK-47 variants On Sale for $79.99. And a wooden case of ammo for (maybe) $39.99.

quote:

Originally posted by bartsche:
...They'd have to give them away. One of the serious problems arms manufacturers face today is that the market is saturated in the once or twice a year shooter area. The large sales rifle marketing programs are not slanted toward the knowledgable gun nuts, although it traps a large number of them also. IMO at best such an offering would fallow a similar sales cycle as the SKS but only at the sacrafice of sales in other rifles. It would be a rob peter to pay paul type of thing and who can do business with a sore peter.

I think if I were 25years younger I would buy one of those Ruger Scouts.

Now just stand back and watch this thread become a hit. roger

Hey Roger, I do agree they would need to be very inexpensive. Just replied to Steve that I had the old cost of the AK-47s (or your reference to the SKSs) in mind from about 15 years ago.

One of my old MARINE buddies bought one of the SKS(or AK-47) type rifles back maybe 20 years ago along with a few cases of ammo. We talked just last week and he got to laughing about taking it to some Range near Ocala and seeing lots of guys with very expensive "new" rifles. He didn't buy it to impress anyone, but got it just to do some shooting and maybe blast a Hog on his way home from work.

After a couple of hours the other folks were still fiddling with scope adjustments and such stuff from their leather sand bags(he said that as a barb to me) and he asked if anyone was shooting at the soda can on the 100yd berm. Everyone told him to go ahead and try for it with his Iron Sights. So, he proceeded to dance it around the 100yd berm with a few shots Off-Hand. As he looked around at the rest of them, they couldn't believe it.

He finally used up all the ammo and sold the rifle for twice what he had in it.
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I also remember seeing some kind of Blue & Synthetic Black Powder Rifles at a Charlotte Gun Show maybe 10-12 years ago that were (I think) $59.99 and a Nickle plated version for maybe $74.99. Went home and looked at the cost to shoot one, figuring it would be REAL CHEAP and got a huge reality awakening. Hard to shoot them for under $1/shot if you are using Sabots and a Jacketed bullet. Patched round ball looked half way reasonable for some fun shooting, but I just never got into Black Powder.
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Do you think the Ruger Scouts would be able to shoot 1.5"-2" at 100yds?

You might say the non reloadable stuff is already to be had in the form of the steel cased Wolf ammo in a number of calibers . And they do sell quite a lot of it .

You can buy lots of mil surp ammo on the cheap also and I don't doubt quite a bit of it gets used for hunting , with no doubt variable results . I have a big stash of W. German 7.62 Nato ammo and it is very accurate stuff.

As to the "dispoable " rifle , I think the numerous SKS guns are already filling that niche.....

Hey sdgunslinger, Do you think it would even be possible for the USA manufacturers to compete with those prices?

Totally agree about the surplus ammo. How is your accuracy with it?

If you let the barrel cool between shots , it'll shoot into an inch @100 yards in a scoped FNFAL . Very good ammo .

I doubt we could make ammo as cheap as the Wolf here in the states ......cost of labor , overhead , etc. just alot higher.

I'm afraid our manufacturing base here in the USA will be totally in the toilet in short order . Even John Deere will sell you imported stuff if you need to replace a bearing.....pretty sad......

Hey sdgunslinger, That sure speaks well for it. Did you pick yours up at Gun Shows? What do you think the price was?

quote:

One of my buddies killed about 200 Deer each year with a regular old Blue and Wood 30-06 until he retired it.

How do you kill that many deer in one year legally

Predation Permits issued by the Wildlife Department covers it in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. You can kill Deer day and night until Deer Season opens "in some places". Then you have to switch over to the regular Hunting times of 1-hour prior to Sunrise until 1-hour after Sunset.

And it really isn't that hard to do during the actual Season if you have the time and people who can use the meat. Centerfire Deer Season for the SC Lowcountry opens 15Aug and runs through 1Jan. You can kill all the Bucks you see and can buy all the Doe Tags you want.

In some years a few of us killed a good many more than that. I just didn't want people to think it was some kind of Braggart Tale because it is not intended as such. Just lots of well fed Farm Hands and their famlies.
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There are plenty of places along the Coastal Lowcountry where it is easy to see 5000-8000 Deer in herds of 50-400 by just driving slowly along the roads during a Full Moon.

Hotcore,

Interesting in theory, but I have a real world better example which would make it more viable.

Model color ink jet printers. Manufacture gives the printers away, and makes money on the cartridges.

So lets model this into a rifle, lets make a POS rifle that is guaranteed to break, design it so the rifle couldn't last more than 5 years without major repair. Ok lets move the rifle out the door with the first box of propritory ammo in the box, all for $125.00.

Great next year that propritary ammo costs $40.00 a box. Hell lets call them 30 Cal Rim Fire Magnums or such nonsense. Now we have boned the customer for $160 per ammo over the five years where the damn thing promply breaks. No problem you run down to your local smith to fix it and its sorry noboby but XYZ ( Is their a Hewlett Packard in the gun industry? ) makes those parts, so you have to send it back to them. Ok you send it off to get fixed, and it costs $250 bucks. So decision is to buy another for $135 bucks ( they went up in five years ) or fix the damn thing.


Don't give the gun companies funny ideas, their marketing departments who have brought us such delights as WSM's and such dribble would wet their pants over the above crappy concept.

Let me tell you I think from the engineering side the concept it isn't much of a stretch. Lets not give the gun companies another option to build worse stuff than they currentlyy are. The concept makes me shutter...in short

CCI blazer ammo is non reloadable - aluminum cases - often split too. I tried it in 9mm a long time ago.

I seldom buy factory ammo anymore.

I think the US gun and ammo makers are missing two big opportunities to market the next big trend.

First of all, there needs to be "blazer" stlye ammo for most of the popular centerfire cartridges but marketed by the big boys under there normal trade names. American Eagle, USA, and UMC don't cut it at least in terms of marketing.

The first reason they don't make it is there is very little perceived connection between the promo loads and the parent brand (Winchester etc.) The packaging needs to mention the parent brand name much more prominently.

The second reason the promo loads don't do better is beacause there are very few opportunities to shoot a centerfire rifle during the offseason. In shotgunning, the average dude can take his bird gun and shoot trap, skeet, or sporting and if he's at least semi-competent, he will hit more than he misses and generally have a fine time doing it. Heck, he may even join a league. The problem with centerfire rifle ammo sales is that no such games exist for the casual rifleman. Think about it, can the ordinary shooter be even slightly successful at BR or silhouette? I think not. When the ammo companies get a clue, they will devise a game that the casual rifleman can enjoy and thereby generate additional "need" for their product.

The second item that would sell huge would be a pump action, clip fed, light weight, scopeable, affordable($300), 6.8 SPC, Remington model 766. The action should be a relatively simple two lug design similar to a Mini 14/30. In Wisconsin, this rifle would sell by the freight cars.

Both items could and maybe should happen, but don't hold your breath, I hear another SAUM WSSM coming!

Gabe

Hey Schromf, I agree that if the "El Cheapo" came on the market and fell apart after a couple of years that would be bad. Same for jacking up the cost of the ammo or to even STOP making the ammo like Remington did the 5mm Rimfire. They won't even make a run every 5 years or so - pitiful.

Not quite what I had in mind though. I totally agree they would actually need to be dependable and be rugged. The AK-47/SKS variants have shown that it is possible to make dependable, rugged and cheap, even in a self-feeder.
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Your mention of manufacturers giving away the color printers so they can sell the ink has been true at the lower end of the market for a long time. That does tie into the El Cheapo concept very well. Had a buddy go to buy cartridges for his HP Printer and discovered he could buy an entire "new" printer(non-HP) with Full Tanks for less.

If by chance you happen to be using a Canon Printer, I can recommend http://www.advantage-data.com for Compatable Ink. My Canon uses 4 separate Ink Tanks. To buy the 4 factory ink tanks it costs right at $55. At A-D, I get the 4 Compatable Ink Tanks for $8.36 and that includes FREE Shipping. No clogs and the color matches the Canon factory inks so closely in pictures that I can not tell them apart. They also sell Compatable Ink for other Printer Brands, but I've not tried them and don't know how they perform.
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Hey Loren, I agree about that aluminum case CCI ammo being a possibility for the concept. I've shot with some guys that really like that Blazer ammo and use it all the time to practice with. That plus the Steel Case ammo that sdgunslinger mentioned seems to be the kind of ammo needed to feed El Cheapo.
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Hey Gabe, I think you are 100% correct about the name recognition. Do you think if the ammo was "Cheap enough" that more people would begin actually shooting during the Off-Season?

And I really like your idea of a "Game" for rifle shooters that does not involve the Bench. I spend plenty of time on the Bench getting Loads Tested, but it would indeed be really nice to have something set up for Casual Competition where the whole family could be involved.

And your Pump Action has me all ears. Do you remember the "Timber Wolf" Pump which was made maybe 18-20 years ago? I remember it being available in a 38Spl/357Mag. I kept thinking they would offer it in a 44Mag or maybe a 357MAX, so I kept putting off buying one. Then there were some reports about the adjustable Stock splitting in the grip area. And once again I figured they would just go to a Synthetic to eliminate that problem. Well, they sure fooled me because they just quit making them.

Once I realized they had quit making them, it dawned on me I'd missed an opportunity to have an extremely light-weight, close-in Deer and Hog rifle. Of course, if I'd actually gotten one, the stock would probably have cracked as I took it out of the box.
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By the way folks, I believe the El Cheapo should be designed around "Removable Military Magazines". That way we don't have to be concerned about them being difficult to locate or expensive. We all know they Feed well just as they are, so no need to re-invent that.

And they are available in sizes right now to fit the 223Rem, 308Win, 30-06 and of course all the variants made from these Parent Cases.

quote:

El Cheapo" came on the market and fell apart after a couple of years that would be bad.

Again that would be from where your perspective is. From a industry that makes durable goods, that never wear out, this would look like a saving grace. Imagine they designed into this product that your going to be back as a customer in a couple of years. Imagine triggers assemblies that are injected plastic molded with a couple of metal wear and contact surfaces. If the case design was done right, all that would be required is a breech and a bearing surface.

Best marketing ploy in the book is make the magazine and the cartridge one and sell them that way. 4-5 rounds per mag pack, at a gouge. Hell smart way to go about it is make the magazine a integral part of the rifle, so it wouldn't really work without them. Then my $40 packs look even more attractive to the manufacuyurers, the consumer gets only a few rounds per magazine, and of course these are not going to be reloadable or recharable without a million dollars of specailised tooling.

No this is ground I don't want to see walked, and I know its not what you had in mind Hotcore but I would be concerned that its the direction it would follow.

Cheap ammo so the non hunter can afford to get out and shot, I am behind that. But the rifle part is a Frankenstien scenario lingering in the shadows. Remington is already servicing this market with the 710, now imagine that rifle with a couple of hundred dollars pulled out of the product, down is the only direction I see in this.

Call me whatever you like, snob, jerk, whatever, but I find the whole idea makes me retch. Junk rifles abound already, (710s, for example) and good to great ammo still costs barely an hour's wages per box for most folks. I don't see the market, honestly. Who the hell would want a disposeable rifle?

quote:

Originally posted by ratwhacker:
.... Who the hell would want a disposeable rifle?

Not me.

Where did you get the idea that we are discussing a "disposable rifle"? If you re-read my posts, I believe I said "Cheap and Rugged"(or words to that effect).

I'm just amazed at all the 22LR and 7.62x39 caes on the ground at the Ranges. It seems the market is there for centerfire rifles and ammo in those "same price ranges" that is being way overlooked to me.
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Hey Schromf, I really appreciate your thoughts and understand what you are talking about.

It reminds me of representing Quality in the old Functional Specification Development meetings. Someone in a Marketing Group would come up with an idea for a "New Product" and he would call the meeting to get a FunSpec written. By the time Engineering and the Bean Counters got through raking it over the coals, it would often be totally different than what Marketing had originally intended.

Sometimes it would be close enough that Marketing would go along with them and other times they would just remove the idea from discussion.

No doubt at all that what you visualized happening could actually happen, but then it wouldn't be what I was talking about.

Hotcore,

I understood your concept and never believed you were suggesting my scenario. You give to much credit and authority to engineers thoug, often our only lines of defense in this kind of dribble ideas, are one it can't be built, or two which is more relevant is it can't be built at you cost point.

Problem is once the seed gets plnated on this one, the major gun corps are going to look at this as a lifesaver with a rope attached. A means and method to revive a sagging industry, and get the balance sheets strong again.

I have little faith that corportate board rooms even care what they build anymore, as long as the yearly financial meeting goes well, the world is rosey.

Yes I am a pesimistic skeptic.

quote:

1. If non-reloadable ammo was available at $5-6 for a box of 20, would you be interested in buying a somewhat inexpensive Deer rifle that would shoot it into 1.5"-2" at 100yds?

No. "Only accurate rifles are interesting." T. Whelen

"Only rifles (and ammo) that can be fooled with and tweaked are intersting." El Deguello

quote:

Originally posted by schromf:
...I have little faith that corportate board rooms even care what they build anymore, as long as the yearly financial meeting goes well, the world is rosey.

Yes I am a pesimistic skeptic.

Hey Schromf, I hear you and completely understand.

You sure you aren't a "Realist"?

Originally posted by Hot Core:

quote:

Do you think if the ammo was "Cheap enough" that more people would begin actually shooting during the Off-Season?

I think that price is certainly an issue, but the real issue is the lack of purpose. Cheap ammo can be found right now, the big domestic ammo companies are missing the boat, but it can be had now.

quote:

And I really like your idea of a "Game" for rifle shooters that does not involve the Bench.

I wouldn't take away the bench entirely but I would fashion the game so that it had bench AND field position shooting. It should be set up so that all a club needs for a range is 100 yards. All targets should have multiple scoring rings so that the less experienced people don't get too discouraged but the targets should also have a small enough 10 ring so that it seperates shooters for the purpose of trophies. A time consideration could be added, but isn't neccessary. Finally, ten shots per week should be enough but not be too much of a financial concern.

quote:

Do you remember the "Timber Wolf" Pump which was made maybe 18-20 years ago?

Yes I do, and that model is close to what I had in mind here. My only problem with the Timberwolf was the calibers. I have hunted with pistol caliber rifles before and sooner or later wished I had a no compromise rifle in my hands. The spc cartridge on the other hand would be an honest 300 yard deer killer.

The parameter I didn't mention last time is that the rifle needs to be set up for AR15 mags.

Gabe