Consolidation in the ammo business.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 Filed in: Shooting industry, Ammunition

From The Firearm Blog comes the news that Sellier & Bellot (aka 'S&B'), the Czech ammo maker, has been acquired by the Brazilian firm of CBC (makers of MagTech ammo, amongst others.) In the comments to that article, you'll note some discordance with regard to the quality of S&B products. Let me tell you my experience...

A few years back I was assisting Georges Rahbani ("The Best Rifle Instructor You've Never Heard Of") teach a rifle course. In these classes there is always time for an instructor to briefly join students on the firing line during a string of fire, and the other assistant instructor (who is also a good friend) was doing just that. He was using his AR-15 loaded from a freshly opened case of S&B 5.56mm ammo.

During on of the strings, his trigger locked in the forward position - it wouldn't travel at all. Keep in mind that this is a gun through which he's fired tens of thousands of rounds, with nary a malfunction. We pulled the lower off, and stuck under the trigger was a spent primer! We managed to find his fired casings, and one of them had shed its primer right into his trigger group.

We fixed the problem, and one the second day of class he decided to shoot some more. Suddenly his bolt wouldn't close all the way, even using the forward assist. We took the gun apart, but couldn't find a cause. Everything was clean and perfect. The gun was assembled, but the problem persisted.

A search of the just-fired brass produced yet another S&B case without a primer. We took the gun apart again, and after extensive searching we found, buried in the bolt carrier key (the extension on the bolt which mates up with the gas tube), was the missing primer! It had managed to lodge in the key so that the carrier couldn't go fully forward onto the gas tube, which meant that the bolt itself couldn't go into battery. It was like putting your foot into a door to keep it from closing, and it put the gun out of commission until we found the thing.

He retired that case of ammo, and swore off S&B products. I hope CBC is able to do a little better with the company.


-=[ Grant ]=-

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