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I was out to day at 50m with the mighty Model 12 and a box of Eley Sport and noticed a phut instead of a bang on one shot, I stopped and checked the bore was clear then checked the target. I had missed the card completely, with the remaining shots all clustered into a reasonable (For me) group.

So my question is, has anyone else come across the occasional duff round from Eley? I know it is cheap crap ammunition however it groups every bit as well as Club in my rifle and I doubt I could put much better ammunition accuracy to any real use.

That is what you pay for, consistency.

Your cheap ammo can group as well as the expensive stuff what you don't get is the quality control that ensures each round perform equally.

If testing ammunition for competion say the 10 shot groups won't do it as over the course of the league say 10 rounds of 20 shots per round you need to test 200 rounds to ensure the consistency against accuracy.

When i use dto shoot leagues my rifles loved the then Eley rifle ammunition, how ever every box or so there would be a squib load, if your were lucky it would miss the target and you could have another pop, more usually 'twould just clip the target and you would loose the points.

What I was told 5 decades ago when I started shooting small bore competition holds true today as it did then

"buy the most expensive rifle you can afford and buy the most expensive ammunition there is". Poor consistency can loose you more points than a brand that perhaps shoots slightly larger groups but does so consistently.

That is what you pay for with Eley Tenex and its peers.

I use Eley match almost exclusively, then I know that any poor shots are solely due to me not velocity variation due to manufacturing inconsistencies.

Top QC costs.

I don't have any experience with Eley Sport, but Eley Action is another case of "buyer beware".

The first few hundred rounds I tried were excellent. Good accuracy, and reliable ignition with no real flyers. The next batch I bought was rubbish. +/- 5 out of 20 would have poor distribution of primer in the case - and in some cases there was no primer at all.

The ones that did actually go 'bang' were OK, but there were far too many FTF's for me to ever buy the stuff again. Perhaps it has improved over the past 12 months?

I made a chart that I used to refer to (shot by me) but is now a year or two old from starting test..so findings could be out of date,but does give a sort of guide. Its based on batches of 500 rounds each type and known faulty rounds (judged by me )..Gun is a Anschutz model 1913-18. You can probably guess I no longer use 'club' or 'sport',but mainly use 'match' .
Tenex 1 faulty round
Match 1 faulty round
Edge (now team) 5 faulty rounds
Club 17 faulty rounds
Sport 37 faulty rounds

Les wrote:I don't have any experience with Eley Sport, but Eley Action is another case of "buyer beware".

The first few hundred rounds I tried were excellent. Good accuracy, and reliable ignition with no real flyers. The next batch I bought was rubbish. +/- 5 out of 20 would have poor distribution of primer in the case - and in some cases there was no primer at all.

The ones that did actually go 'bang' were OK, but there were far too many FTF's for me to ever buy the stuff again. Perhaps it has improved over the past 12 months?

I also had a duff batch that we had quite a few deep indents in the primers, but no bang. It was for mini rifle and a few of us had problems from the same batch.

I have since bought 3000 from another retailer and so far it's gone fine in everything. I had heard there was a bad batch knocking around shortly after the release of Eley Action, and that's possibly where my first lot came from.

I had a duff 1000 rounds of Eley Action.
Cost me money.
Cost me time.
Cost me a decent score in comps.
I'll buy anything else before Eley now.

I bought 3000 rounds of Eley Action and it was bloody excellent! I then started to recommend it as it honestly seemed to offer everything at a very competitive cost. I bought 5000 rounds for the club and another 3000 for me. They were shiote!!!!

Purely out of interest, I bought another 1000 for the club wherein that ran out and it was still utterly rubbish.

Once upon a time I just paid for it and shot it. These days, as an RFD I am required to log not just the ammunition in, but also the lot numbers. This may indirectly give an insight into something, someday!

Well you lot have shamed me into spending a bit more on ammunition next time, so I will try a brick of Eley team next and maybe even grab some match at the same time.

Up until fairly recently you could check how your particular lot of Eley Tenex or Match performed when it was tested as part of the quality control.

You could enter the lot number on the actual box of ammo you were using and find out the date of manufacture, the machine it was made on, how many rounds were made in that particular lot, how that lot performed through four different test barrels at 50 yards etc.

The site was taken down around six months ago and now say "under construction" or some such.

Looking at the groups of some lots of Tenex shot in a tunnel range through fixed match barrels I'm not really impressed. Although the groups are measured outside to outside edge there are a good many lots that are more than 20mm at 50 yards. As that's with Tenex at £22 a hundred in perfect conditions I find it a bit disappointing.
https://eley.co.uk/find-the-perfect-bat ... -analyser/

Ovenpaa wrote:I was out to day at 50m with the mighty Model 12 and a box of Eley Sport and noticed a phut instead of a bang on one shot,
So my question is, has anyone else come across the occasional duff round from Eley?

I had a couple like that - at 25 yards it was clipping the bottom of the paper. I returned what remained of that batch (I think I'd bought 1,000 and used about 150). Haven't had a repeat with the replacement.