A piece of small arms brass is a bit of copper and tin from a mold. It’s something that is made on massive scales over and over again, and each brass is identical to every other piece for a given typo of ammunition.
I’ve heard about people “reloading” brass picked up off the ground after firing their firearms, or even sweeping it up and sending it back to the factory to be “remanufactured”.
A glass bottle a drink comes in contains a lot more material (so it takes more energy to melt), has to be cleaned to food grade standards, and yet costs about 5 cents. A soda can needs electrolyzed aluminum. Also, a soda can is bigger and requires a complex printing process for the logo, etc. A soda can also costs around the nickle mark.
So there’s no reason at all for small arms brass to cost any more, either. “Reloading” shouldn’t be cost effective : if the brass cost a nickle, and when you reload you need to buy a new bullet and powder and primer, then reloaded rounds should cost just about 5 cents less than newly made factory rounds.
What gives? The only plausible reason I can think of is government regulation is at work here.
I don’t know what goes into production, but it’s not the case (heh) that they are all identical, or else there would be no need to buy case trimmers or case gauges. Brass stretches with firing, and especially with bottleneck cases this can affect the reloaded round unless it is trimmed down and reformed correctly. If a round is out of spec it may not load, eject, and/or fire properly. And brass that is treated well can last a good many reloadings, but some will split at the neck, or worse by the rim area, and must be discarded, or cut down to a shorter caliber if applicable.
Not sure what the penultimate paragraph means - home reloading is cheaper because you are doing the labor yourself, and paying for that cost when buying loaded rounds, like most home solutions. In short, I don’t think the price of brass is artificially inflated, but there are a lot that goes into production besides raw materials.
Whether it’s cost effective depends. For cheaper rounds like 12 gauge, 9mm, or .223 it may just break even, but people reload these instead for accuracy.
Uh, what? You’ll save a ton of money by doing that. The cost of soda from syrup is almost nothing, and the glasses as you mentioned are a few pennies each. In fact, it’s cheaper to replace or repair almost everything yourself. One of the only real exceptions I can think of is when it’s a one-off repair and costly tools are required.
…then reloaded rounds should cost just about 5 cents less than newly made factory rounds.
And how is that a problem? My gun-nut brother in law shoots about 500 rounds every frickin weekend. That’s a savings of $1200/yr and at this point he’s been shooting for about 30 years, so he’s saved something like $36K. I suspect his actual savings are greater.
Federal Excise Tax on ammunition is 11%. Plus whatever taxes are applied to ammunition locally.
There is no tax for the components, just the complete rounds. So of course the finished rounds are more expensive than the components. That is true even if you count labor and manufacturing costs as components.
If the customer furnishes the brass to the reloader, then Federal Excise Tax does not apply. When the reloader sells ammunition to someone who did not provide used brass, then FET must be collected on that sale.
Whereas when you do it in bulk, with the giant bags of syrup and the high-pressure CO2 cylinder - it’s basically a cash cow for the fast food franchises. The $1.49 you pay for a fountain drink is, IIRC, mostly profit.
I agree, the difference is reloading is mainly manual labour. Perhaps a better example would be making your own cup of coffee.
It is not cheaper because you are doing the labor of assembly yourself. I am sure the manufacturers have large machines that can assemble bullets by the thousands a minute (or more) with little labor involved.
Where you are saving money is by not re-buying the brass. Copper is expensive. Not only the raw materials cost but also the cost of shaping it.
If you pay an extra $50 you don’t have to use a proprietary CO2 cartridge. It costs $5 to fill a 24oz CO2 tank at Dick’s Sporting Goods versus $14.99 for a 14.5 oz SodaStream carbonator exchange (plus an initial $25ish for the tank.)
The manufacture of small arms cartridge brass is a seven or eight step process which requires multiple forming, trimming, swaging, and punching/stamping operations. This has a considerable cost not only in the effort and time that goes into this but the tooling and machines required to automate this process. Brass also has to be produced to very tight tolerances in order to function properly and hold pressure; cheap or poorly made brass will cause an autoloading weapon to misfeed and may stick in the chamber of a revolver or even pose a hazard to the shooter.
I drink about a half-liter of soda per day. We got the cheapest model Sodastream, on sale (for $50, I believe). If the math on various websites is correct, I save $0.54 per liter, so I paid for the unit in 30 weeks.
Furthermore, I doubt I’d be happy with 2L bottles; by the last drink it’d be flat. Of course, I could fix that by using a refillable 1L bottle. In reality, the Sodastream replaced 12-oz cans, so we saved even more than the math above.
If you use the flavoring, it’s not particularly economical, and probably not particularly tasty either. I remember trying one of the flavorings and not being impressed. I don’t even know what happened to the rest.
ETA: I might just go for one of the converters, though.