Hornady Manufacturing

You're listening to the Sportsman's Empire Podcast Network. You're home for real, relatable outdoor podcasts. Go Wild is a free social community created for and by hunters. This means that unlike mainstream social media, your trophy pictures won't be censored. They're encouraged. As you spend time on Go Wild, you will earn awesome rewards such as gift cards, free swag, and big discounts on brands like Garmin and Vortex. You will even earn $10 just for signing up. Visit downloadgowild.com and sign up today. Happy Friday everyone and welcome to this edition of the Honey Gear Podcast. I'm your host Dan Johnson. Today we are going to be talking with Judd and Preston from Hornady manufacturer. These guys are a bullet manufacturer. Now, self-admittedly, I know nothing about guns. I know nothing about bullets, how bullets are made, drop, distance, whatever, like all the buzzwords, and you'll hear in this episode that these guys actually have to correct some of the verbiage that I use when talking about ammunition and bullets and whatnot. And so, I don't know anything about it. These guys are the experts, but I felt like it was important to get a company like Hornady on the podcast because several of you, you know, were not all just archers at some point throughout the year. Even myself, you know, for turkey season, I use a shotgun. And I felt like it was important to step into the firearm side of things for a day and talk with someone who's a lot smarter than me about all of this stuff. And that's what today's podcast is about. Now, on this episode, we talk about, you know, manufacturing process. We talk about casings. We talk about powder. We talk about design innovation. And so, it's a really cool episode. I definitely walked away from this episode learning a lot. Hopefully you guys do too. And that's really it, man. I'm going to keep this intro short. We got to thank the partners of the Hunting Gear podcast right now. And that's tethered. If you are looking for a saddle, then we definitely need to go check out tethered. Saddle hunting accessories, platforms, saddles themselves, climbing sticks, you name it, they have it. And on top of that, they have a huge community surrounding their product line. They have some new products that have just come out. You need to go check that out, tetherednation.com. So if you want to learn how to become a better saddle hunter, go check out tethered hunt stand. Again, just a place. The functionality with hunt stand, there's a lot of it. So the first thing that I always recommend to people is, don't take my word for it. Go to huntstand.com, read up on all the functionality, and see how this app can benefit you. See if it fits your needs as a hunting app. And it does a really good job, man. I'm talking about the ability to just journal everything that you see, the ability to document and organize trail cam pictures. It's just the playbook for your season. And especially if you're interested in specific caliber of animals, hunt stand allows you to document all of that, journal all of that. So when it comes time to get out in the woods, you have this playbook right in front of you. So go check out all the functionality and all the availability of information on huntstand.com. And I think you guys would be surprised. Last but not least, tactic cam. Tactic cam is one of those companies that allows you to document your hunt. Now if you don't know what tactic cam is, it is an action cam that can mount to your gun or your bow, and they have several other mounting brackets that you can put in the tree over your shoulder and really document your hunt. So you can type a guy who likes to make YouTube videos, or if you're the type of guy who likes to just hit the record button so you can go home, show your wife, your kids, your brother, sister, whatever, and just show them on, show them what you've seen. It's fun to do. And so the new 6.0 version has the ability to, what is it, the new 6.0 has an LCD screen on it. It has the ability to record in 4K. It has, so it has the playback function, and it has an image stabilization. So no more shaky videos. If you want to find out more, go visit tactic cam's website and read up on the 6.0. That's it for commercials. I really appreciate you guys taking time out of your day to hop on and listen. Huge shout out to the guys from Hornady for taking time to do this episode. And you know, on the 9 finger chronicles, I always talk about good vibes, right? So we're going to have good vibes today, good vibes in, good vibes out, and we'll talk to you after this show. All right, on the hunting gear podcast with me today, we're talking with Judd and Preston from Hornady, gentlemen. Welcome to the hunting gear podcast. Hey, thank you, Dan. It's pretty cool to be chatting with you here. I've been actually a long time listener, so it's kind of neat to be on this side for once. Oh, perfect. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I will be completely honest. I'm a bow hunter, okay? And so I felt like the hunting gear podcast always leans towards archery. But I know all of my listeners participate in some type of firearm, whether that's turkeys or, you know, many states have rifle seasons, you know, or go out west or even just sport shooting, okay? And so I feel like at times I'm doing them a disservice when I don't talk about firearms. And today, obviously with you guys, we're going to focus on ammunition. And so it's awesome to get you guys on and kind of break the cycle of my ignorance, so to speak. And so I'm relying on you guys a lot for, to be the experts today. And I'm just going to ask a whole bunch of dumb questions. Yeah, right off. Yeah, heck, yeah, we're ready for it. You know, I mean, I'm going to jump in and say some stuff right here, you know, all of us around the office, we do specialize on the ammunition firearm side of things, but we are hunters. So in Nebraska, where we're at, we've got a four month archery season. Yeah. So I would say the majority of us here take advantage of that, you know, along with the rifle, rifle seasons and the muzzle or season. Yeah. You know, we do it all. Yeah. I'll tell you, I'll tell you this, man. One thing I like about companies, and if you are watching this on YouTube, I'm wearing a vortex optics shirt. And the reason I like working with vortex and several other, several other companies that I, that I work with is the simple fact that they are participants in the activity in which their product sells, right? So vortex, a lot of their guys are outdoorsmen or sport shooters. Sounds like you guys are the same. And it's awesome because it makes a company relatable to the end user, whereas other companies that I dealt with, you call them up and they're just like, Oh, I'm sorry. I've never been in a tree stand before, or I don't know what a turkey gobble sounds like. Or, you know, whatever the, whatever you want to throw out there. So it's refreshing to hear, I don't know, for me anyway, it's refreshing to hear that a company like yourself has a bunch of participants working for it. Yeah. Well, it's like any new product development, it's because we want it. Yeah. It's not because we think that end user wants it. Right. You know, we're all working on stuff and if we think there's a better mouse trap that we can use, we're going to have the engineers do it. Yeah. Well, the perk to impress on eyes position on the marketing team, you know, when we do videos and things for products or how to use, none of that is scripted. We are fortunate that we can throw our cameras on engineers, ask them a question, and they will rattle off, you know, most times it's an answer that you can understand. Yeah. But from our side on the video, it makes our job easy a lot of the time. We've got some, some pretty good folks over here. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Right off the bat, engineering. Okay. And I'm looking at this behind you. I'm looking at these designs of these, the same initiative, these bullets and whatnot. So I'm green, right? I look at a bullet and I go, hey, this is a bullet, right? I put it in a gun that matches this and I pull the trigger and it goes off. How, how much R and D is done these days on new designs of ammunition? Is this something that is, is this a category that has plateaued or is this. Continue, like, is there continued innovation in this category? Oh, it's continued innovation for sure. Brass has been used to make cartridge cases for eons at this point. And, and there's some experimental stuff, you know, going on with, with other folks in the industry for cartridge case material, but brass has been pretty static for a very long time. Now, on the other hand, powder, that does nothing but innovate these days. You know, the amount of new powders that have come out in the last seven years since I've started here, I can't put on two hands. Bullet design is always getting better. I mean, that, and that's what Hornady is. First and foremost, we're a bullet manufacturer. Yes, we make ammo. Yes, we make reloading tools, but the bullets make the H is what they like to say, the Hornady. So, and I couldn't agree more. We make just an insane amount of bullets and we're always innovating with them because if we can get a bullet to the target faster or with less wind or with less drop or with more efficiency, we're going to do it. So, the ballasticians are always working on new bullets designed. The powder companies are always doing new powder designs as well and coming up with new stuff there. So, we have not plateaued at all, I would say, in the ammunition world. Well, I would even add on to that as far as, you know, the tools that our engineering staff have available that, you know, now compared to what it used to be, you know, as long as they get the okay from down the hall, which is pretty easy process. You know, if we can use a tool, Doppler radar for say, you know, we've done so much with that thing. And the fact that Doppler radar is being used to track bullets, it just blows my mind. So, yeah, it's just, it's never ending. Okay, so now you have to explain that. You can't just go, hey, we use Doppler radar. You got to, you got to explain to me how you guys use Doppler radar in your R&D. Sure, sure. So, in prior years, you would use acoustic microphones or shoot through chronographs and things like that and you'd set them up down range, right? Okay. For an archery example, let's say you'd set one up at 20, you'd set one up at 60. Like if you were going to do this with archery, which, you know, you can use a chronograph but typically it's at the bow right? But we want to know what the bullets doing downrange because we need to calculate a ballistic coefficient for it and now we're actually using a drag curve for it. But in the old days, a ballistic coefficient you plug that into your ballistics calculator with a muzzle velocity and some weather conditions and it would spit out, you know, I need to hold this high or I need to, you know, come up this much in my scope to hit a target downrange. It's not just put the crosshairs on it and pull the trigger. We're shooting a long distance, right? The Doppler can actually track the bullet the entire length of its flight. I believe it's like, I can't remember the number, but it's like, well every couple feet, two to three feet, like every, every less than a yard it can track a bullet for a couple thousand yards. So what we can find out with that is a number one of the entire drag curve for a bullet. So we know what it's going to do the whole time. We're in the past, you'd only know where it's going to, what it's going to do at two different distances. Okay, so essentially we can get much, much more accurate things out of it. So you're not just seeing like 2000 yards, you're seeing the potential mile it could travel if you had the space. Yeah, and then essentially kind of gave us the ability to make our ballistics program, which we call Ford off. So if you go right now to the app store, Google Play Store, you can go and download the Hornady Ballistics app with Ford off. And if you have a bullet that you're using that's in our Ford off library and you put accurate inputs in it, it'll give you accurate outputs to as far as you can imagine shooting for the most part. Okay, and that's free. Yeah, for free. Okay, awesome. All right, so kind of taking a backwards step there now, and I want to talk a little bit about the components of a bullet. Okay, obviously you have the casing, the powder, the like both ends of it or whatever. So what is it about the materials that make up the component that make it quality ammunition? Well, like I said, powder technology has gotten so much better over the last few years. So essentially we can, we there's appropriate burn rates for our all cartridges of powders, right? So we want to use an appropriate burn rate powder in the cartridge that gives it good accuracy. And then number two, I think for the most part, we're looking for temperature stability, right? Back in the day, you go get some surplus powder and you'd shoot it at 30 degrees. And it would be, let's for an example, say 3000 feet per second. But then you go shoot it at 100 degrees and it's 3150. So temperature swings via just powder itself can actually cause some some issues. So temperature stable powders, you know, you might be seeing point two to point seven feet per second, increase or decrease per degree of external, you know, temperature. So you got to use temperature stable powders, a good bullet. We hand inspect all of our cartridges here still to this day, which is kind of crazy in today's age. But right out there, if we walked outside of the studio and walked down the stairs, there's a whole mess of people hand inspecting ammunition that looks like jewelry. Yeah. You know, we're also testing bullets as we make them start a run. We have accuracy expectations or accuracy goals or not goals, but yeah, what's the word I'm looking for crying out loud? Just a criteria that accuracy criteria that the bullet has to make in order for the press to go off and run. Okay. And then if something happens on the press, we send it back down to the lab and it gets shot again. It's got to meet accuracy. Then we do the same thing with ammunition as well. Okay. And so how walk us through kind of how you measure that, you know, I envision a guy with a gun on the factory line, pulling a trigger and testing, you know, testing the the end, the bullet to see if it goes off and does what it's supposed to do. And then throughout the day, you have the same amount. So you see the accuracy or the consistency in the manufacturing process. Is that how it's done? Or how do you how do you actually test quality? So for down in the lab, in our main facility, we've got a 200 yard indoor underground tunnel. So free of any exterior factors, the guys will actually load up the bullets in cartridge cases. And then we've got an accuracy fixture that takes 1.2 or 1.25 straight contour barrel dactions. And they'll put it in the accuracy fixture. So that thing's not moving. And then it's got it actually a pneumatic trigger. So they can close the door, fire it off behind closed doors, and they'll shoot it for accuracy in an indoor tunnel. Yeah. So it's not quite as fun as one may think. Yeah. We give give tours back a few years back. And everybody would go down to the tunnel on the tours. And you guys got the best job in the world shooting guns all day. And it's like, well, we're really just pushing this button right here. Yeah. Do it for eight hours and then tell me how you how you like it. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Now, kind of going back to the components. What makes a quality powder? As far as powder goes, I mean, we're probably not the experts on that. But to me, I've always had good luck as a hand loader with extruded base or extruded single base powders. Single base seems to be a little bit more temperature stable, maybe a little less temperamental. But essentially, there's there's certain powders that are historically accurate powders and cartridges. One, for example, being age 4350. I'm sure you probably heard of the six five Creed more is, if you'd like to say it's the overnight success that took 10 years. That was actually introduced in 2007 for 2008 and until I got to Horny, I hadn't heard of it. But it's obviously hugely popular now, but age 4350 works really well in that particular cartridge case. Reloader 16 works extremely well. I am our 4350. It just a certain burn rate seems to work really well for a certain sized cartridge pushing a certain way to bullet. Okay. Go ahead. And on the bullet side of things, we could probably talk about that just a little bit. Just like anything, I would say, consistency is king. So as far as accuracy goes, if you got a little something wonky on a jacket on one bullet versus the other, they're definitely not going to fly the same. So consistency. And I mean, that goes out to, I'm not exactly sure how often it is that we change our tooling on the press. But if there's accuracy issues going on, they'll either fix the tooling or it'll be all new tooling because that'll wear on the press as it goes. But overall, in my opinion, looking at it from layman's terms, consistency. And that goes for the bullet's actual weight as well. Right. Okay. You mentioned earlier, now, just so I'm clear here, you guys use another company's powder to put in your bullets. And you guys do that at your factory and then ship them out. Correct. Okay. All right. So before that, you mentioned something about, you know, brass was, you know, brass has been kind of king for several years or, you know, for eons or whatever. And talk to us about why that is. And then also talk to us about some of the new materials that are being used in bullet creation these days. Well, brass is a number one, it's, it's the right hardness essentially for what we needed to do. We needed to be strong, yet slightly elastic. Right. Because when we fire that cartridge in the chamber, it swells to the cart to the chamber walls. And then it has to be able to shrink back just a little bit. Right. So it's got that a little bit of elasticity. Copper would be too soft. You can use steel, although it doesn't shrink as much. With thinner walled cartridge cases, maybe like a 223 or 762 or 39 stuff you typically see steel cases with, you can get by with it. But brass is just the right material for what we need to do. Hard enough yet mount, you know, has the right amount of springiness to it. Okay. New materials, we haven't really got into that. There's some other companies out there talking like, I want to say polymer. I mean, we haven't got into it, but the other companies have, they're on a very small scale. Gotcha. So your guys main focus is brass then still. Gotcha. What is it about the design? Because obviously pulling a trigger, you know, causes an explosion. All right. A controlled explosion. What is it about your guys's design or just designs of bullets in general, get that that keeps that explosion controlled and consistent, firing the projectile and not just blowing the gun up? Well, let's just let's just fix the well, the terminology there. It's not an explosion. Okay. A primer is an explosive, right? Okay. But what it does is it ignites a burn of powder. Gotcha. Now all that's happening very quickly, right? Sometimes it's 65,000 pounds of pressure, but it is a burn rather than an explosion. Good to know. And the pressure, I mean, that's set by Sammy's standard. So, you know, there's a standard out there that all ammo manufacturers have to stick to to be within Sammy's. Sammy is a sporting arms and ammunition manufacturers Institute. So Remington, Winchester, federal, Hornady, Browning, you know, anybody that makes a gun or ammunition on a large scale for the most part are members of Sammy. And so Sammy has a set stack of tolerances for cartridge case and chamber dimensions. And then also pressure limits that they have to be upheld to. And we all share like reference ammunition stuff. So if federal wants to make one of our case designs, they can. And we have reference ammunition so that they can set their pressure barrels to the appropriate level, you know, make sure everybody's operating the same way. Gotcha. All right. So there's the composition of a bullet. You know, there's so many different variations of, you know, different bullets out there. What, what seems to be, and I know there's, I mean, this is, this is just like Pandora's box at this point, right? We can talk about it can go any direction. And so I'm just going to ask a very high level question. How do you guys determine what type of ammunition you're going to design and manufacture every year in order to kind of meet the needs of Hornetty's customers? Yeah, and that's a great question because we're spread out across the world, right? Worldwide company. So what people need in Europe is different than what guys in Utah need, you know, wildly different. What guys in Iowa need is wildly different than what Western hunters need for the most part. Right. So yeah, we have to play a balancing game. Obviously we don't have a press for every ammo skew that we make. That would be really neat and an operator to run it, but it's just not the reality. So obviously we've seen what's selling, what the demand is for, what is on order. So we're able to keep track of that. But, you know, we have to have 243 for guys East and West and we have to have 300 BRC for guys out West. I don't know. I think our sales team does a really good job of allocating that stuff, you know, when it does get made and putting it out all over the different places that way. Everybody has a chance to do it. But over the last few years, we've been behind just like everybody else as far as not being able to get enough stuff made. So we've always got heavy hitters, you know, six arc, six creed more, six five PRC, six five creed more, 300 PRC. Those are constantly being run. 308 still huge, you know, but everything gets its turn. Right. Except for, I'd say in times like we've had in the last few years, some of the almost obsolete cartridges that we like to keep around, you know, those might get run every couple of years. Okay. All right. I mean, and then that's a that's a tough job on the ammo manufacturing side of things. And then even our sales crew allocating to certain customers and whatnot. And I don't want I don't know that, you know, some of the phone calls, I'm sure that they've had and it's it's tough. But you know, it seems to be getting a little better here now that we're a couple of years out of the craze. Yeah. What was it? Because I know there was a crazy ammunition shortage on a variety of different ammunitions. My dad was complaining that he couldn't get some bullets. I know I believe it was like nine millimeter was hard to find for a while. What what caused that? And is it rebounding? Well, there's several factors that caused it, I would say. But a number one, you know, COVID-19 came about. People were freaking out. There's riots and all this stuff. Right. So I believe in 2019 or 2020, whatever the year was, there were 7 million new gun owners. Yeah. Yeah. And so those people all need ammo too. And typically, you know, that you get a new gun, you might get a couple boxes. Well, talk at the gun stores like, well, I am as hard to get. So let's get as much as we can. And then that happened with the already existing gun owners, you know, people that would buy a couple boxes or buy in a case. Right. It's just compounding. Change of the political office. You know, that's what's going on on the side of the other. So there was a little bit of bump in purchases there just because of the scarcity. You know, you don't know when you're going to lose it. So, you know, people were buying because of that. Yeah. But the gun owners was a huge part of it too. Yeah. And just when things get weird like that, I mean, you guys like us. Yeah. Well, yeah. But guys like us that that love to shoot, we're worried about getting it in the future. So we get as much as we can. It just it gets bad. But yeah, I would definitely say it's rebounding some, I think 9,000, 223, you know, those commodity type amos or, you know, I walk into sports ones, I see a whole frickin' rack of them at this point. I think those are are are caught up on. That's allowing everybody to get the other stuff made. Okay. You brought up a good point there, Jad, about like the the political climate and how that can sometimes control ammunition or gun sales and things like that. What is it? What do you guys ever have to when it comes down to like your design and you know, saying, okay, well, hey, we got this great idea. Are there any laws in place or steps that you have to go through politically or regulation wise before you sell ammunition to make sure it meets, I don't know, like the the rules and regulations set for ammunition. Uh, maybe Preston could say something, but on the actual manufacturing or design of a product, you know, we hit on Sammy earlier, you know, as long as it's a safe product. Yeah. But I would say the issues that we're running into are almost more on the marketing side now. Okay. You know, targeted marketing and there's a lot of stuff going on in California. You know, we're always having meetings about things we can and can't do in California. So I would say the marketing side is more restricted, you know, whether that be, you know, marketing to a certain age limit, you know, we can't go under whatever age. You can't target kids, you know, you can't do so much tactical type, you know, photography and video stuff. So yeah, there's, I'd say on the marketing side, we run into more issues on, you know, that side of things, but. Yeah, it's literally just a political thing. It seems like at this point, just to make it hard for us, essentially, is what they're doing. Yeah. Um, as far as like, like designing a new cartridge, for example, like 7 PRC was done, I don't know, two and a half years ago, three years ago, and we only released it in October, just because the timing wasn't right. You know, there's way too much demand for all the other existing stuff. So stuff like that does happen. But as long as it's approved by Sammy, you know, which is collectively, you know, all of them on gun makers, we can go ahead and do our own designs. Okay. All right. And then, let's talk a little bit, let's kind of jump into the hunting side of space right now. And let's talk about some popular, you know, because, because obviously, if you're going to be, if you're going to shoot a rifle in the east, you may not have as far to shoot, you know, you're restricted by trees and other houses and smaller parcels. And out west, man, there's, it seems like there's guys who are shooting. I just watched an elk, a guy shoot an elk at like 1900 yards, which was blew my mind. And I was just like, holy cow, you can see the vapor trail and everything go. And so that, I mean, it was, it was a cool shot. But talk to us a little bit about some of your most popular ammunition for let's say guys east of the Mississippi, who are hunting whitetails. Yeah, I would say 450 bushmaster is, is our most, you know, it's in the top five of rifle cartridges every year. Yeah, ever since all the straight wall stuff started happening in all the individual states of, so I believe you guys are in as well. Yep, we're a straight wall. We now have a straight wall cartridge that's allowed during our, well, I guess you would call it the shotgun season, but so during our fire season. So yeah, yeah. And so Michigan was one of those as well, I believe Illinois was as well. But yeah, 450 bushmaster seems to be hugely popular. And you're right, you know, you're not, it's hard to find a longer shot in those heavily wooded areas. So you don't really need a long ball, you know, 300 PRC, seven PRC, something that, you know, and you say 1900 yard shot, and then my mind was just automatically thinking how much energy is left out of all the cartridges that are out there. And I'm like, that's a long shot. Yeah. I might have to look at that one. Yeah, tell me off camera, whatever it was. So what is it about that round that makes it so popular? I would say it was the first, it was the first straight wall cartridge that was really out there that was modern that would fit in an AR 15. That's probably the big thing. It was designed around the AR 15 post band. You know, you can just go get them, they're ready to hunt. You can put an upper on an existing AR 15 and there's stupid accurate somehow. Well, I don't understand it. It's a straight wall cartridge with the big old hole, but it just makes one big ragged hole most times. And there's a lot of them out there now. We just did that podcast the other day. I can't remember what year 2006. 2007. So yeah, since 2007, there's how many 450 bush master platforms out there. So right, you know, if people already got them, you know, that's the struggle with, you know, new cartridges. Well, you got to have the rifle too. So it's kind of a whole system where, you know, if people already have them out there, yeah, it's going to be popular for that fact right there. Yeah, and there's some new guys on the scene, 350 legend and the 400 legend, I think there's a bunch of them out there. Now they're a little bit smaller and attempt to take a little bit of the recoil out. Although the 450 is not bad. If you just hunt with it, I don't think gotcha. All right. Now let's shift west of the Mississippi, you know, maybe maybe past Iowa and we go into some of the open country in Nebraska and out west, you know, for for bigger game, you know, mule deer, elk, things like that, maybe pronghorn. What seems to be the most popular round in that environment? If I had to pick this one, I'd say 65 PRC. Yeah. I mean, if, and, you know, if I'm going elk hunting, I'm taking a seven or a 300 PRC, but I wouldn't hesitate to take my 65 PRC if that's all that I had, but it shoots a super high ballistic coefficient bullet, 200 feet per second faster than a 65 PRC. More still in a short action rifle, you know, so a long action cartridge, 3.340 or than a 300 PRC's case, 3.7 inches in length. This guy's down at 2.950 and it packs a punch and it's fast and it's flat and it bucks the wind really well. Okay. Well, I would say to you, it depends. I mean, if you're elk hunting, you know, you're probably using something else. If you're deer or antelope hunting, you know, I'd throw a 65 creed more in there. It's got to be one of the more popular ones too. But then yeah, as you get up, I mean, we've got our line of the precision rifle cartridges starting at the 65, the 7 and the 300. So those have been super popular. And, you know, just the technology has changed. You know, I was going to mention a little bit when you started this question here and, you know, just like we said at the start, the tools that we have, the engineers have, and even the consumers, the shooters have now in the last 10 years, 15 years has just blown, you know, the from, you know, measuring the weather, measuring the wind speed to the ballistic apps that we have using Doppler radar. My first rangefinder was something I could barely afford in high school, right? And it would range out to like maybe 400 yards on a reflective target. Now, you know, vortex has got the crossfire rangefinder, which is super affordable, same price, but it will range out to what? A thousand yards? Yeah. It's getting so much better the technology. Well, yeah, and the cartridges, you know, every cartridge has its place as far as, you know, past cartridges go, and then even on the new side, you know, the bullets that the PRCs are shooting now and the Creedmoor are shooting now, you know, the twist rates that are specked for those rifles, you know, the past cartridges from a Sammy speck, you know, or for a twist rate speck, they couldn't shoot these bullets. So stabilizing. Yeah, they're just too big, too heavy, but the BC goes up with that. So that's why, like, you talked about the 1900 yard shot. Yeah, that's a that's a crazy poke, but the technology that people have at their fingertips now is it to calculate that shot is just mind blowing for free for the most part. Yeah. For each finder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there is there a round, you know, so there's obviously there's a whole bunch of guys, you got your experts who, you know, they're going to use different rounds in different scenarios. And then you have guys probably like me, if I was going to buy a rifle, I would buy one rifle and I would teach myself one round, like educate myself on one round that would do the most work. Is there a workhorse round that a guy could, you know, use on white tails on the east and then take a trip out west and be successful with that round doing any Western type hunt. There's several of them, but I mean, I think the king of them right now is the 7 millimeter PRC. Okay. Yeah. I will say though, I mean, it's a lot of just preference though, too. It is. It is. It said 7 millimeter. I said there's a lot of them. The thing that hits me for the last 10, nine years, six, five Creedmoor. I've done almost everything with six, five Creedmoor. Yeah, my wife's shot enough with a six, five Creedmoor. So yeah, I mean, killed at Stone Dead, you know, yeah, it's a lot of just just preference. I mean, there's so, so you guys ever get in fights at the office, I disagreeing all the time like, uh-uh, you're wrong, six, five is better. That's always good. Well, and I mean, I'd go to, you know, shooters, we go to shows and we see YouTube comments and social media comments, you know, everybody has their preference, you know, there may not be one right answer. So, you know, yeah, everybody's different and a lot of the cartridges that are out there will work just fine. Yeah. I think that's not wrong. Yeah. But I would say 7 PRC. That's what I would do. Okay. Getting on another tangent here, too, though, you know, depending on that cartridge. So you say 7, I say 6, 5, if I was going on a deer hunt, I'm going to choose a different bullet, most likely what I would use if I was going on an elk hunt. I would shoot a solid monolithic or CX bullet out of 6, 5 for an elk, whereas if I'm going on a deer hunt, I'd either shoot the 100 grain interlock or the ELDX. So, you know, there's things you can do with a cartridge to kind of push you one way or another on what kind of game you're going after. Okay. And I disagree. Because I just shoot the 175 ELDX on everything. It's all personal preference. Right. I tell you, in archery, they have it. I'm sure in firearms, they have it. But I can remember going to a wine tasting with my wife. And we sat next to this lady who was the biggest snob. Like, oh, this is, yeah, this is disgusting. I will never drink a ball of wine under $40. Well, and I'm just like, who are you? You know what I mean? Does the ammunition world have ammo snobs? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Ammo snobs and bullet snobs. Bullet snobs. Okay. Yeah. All right. And we see them in the comments. We see you. We see you. No, no, no. But obviously, we run the YouTube channel. Right. So we'll put out a video. It's funny. What makes a person think that they'll put a comment on a video that could potentially live in the world forever. It's just astonishing. Right. But we'll put out a video, like a sweet video, something nice. And then totally irrespective or unrelated subject, somebody will throw it a dig at us. Something else is better. It's like, come on. Like nice shirt, buddy. Yeah, this nice old band came to see us. Burgers better than you know, figure it out, guys. That's funny. One buzzword that I hear when talking about ammunition is stopping power. What is stopping power? And and how does that, how do you connect that buzzword into hunting different species of animals? Well, I would say please go to the Hornady podcast on any platform or YouTube and check out episode, I believe 64 is terminal ballistics with our head lead Balestation Jaden Quinlan. Now I will say there's essentially three systems that you need in order to kill an animal or one of them. And you have the nervous system and that's going to that's the electric system within the animal. And that may be disrupted but not necessarily always lethal. There's a circulatory system, which is blood, right? And then there's the respiratory system, which is air, right? So I would encourage you to watch that podcast. But I would say as far as stopping power, well, any any any ammo can have stopping power depending on shop placement. But a lot of times you'll see somebody shoot something on the internet and it drops, right? Well, that's because it's central nervous system was disrupted somehow. Pretty rare from what I've seen that something gets hit and is dead before it hits the ground. Yes, it may hit the ground, but it's not quite dead yet. It's lungs have to fill up with blood and essentially you have to prevent the brain from getting oxygenated blood and that's what expires in animal. And on the game side, yeah, Preston's right, it is very dependent with any bullet with any cartridge, any manufacturer, shop placement is extremely important, just like in our tree side. To break this down, maybe a little a little bit easier to understand. We do high speed video shots of all expanding bullets. So we're looking at a nice two foot long by probably 10 inches block of ballistics gelatin. So from my perspective, when I'm running the camera, the engineers are doing their thing. But from my perspective, there's a balance depending on let's talk for a white tail type projectile. It's dumping energy as far as the expansion goes and then penetration. So you're kind of balancing maybe even three things, throwing weight retention in there. You're balancing how much penetration you're getting with the weight retention of the projectile to get that penetration. And then as it's expanding, it's dumping energy to create the wider wound channel. So you're kind of balancing all that from the ballistic gelatin side of things, from what I see, that's kind of what the juggling act is. And just to go on a little tangent here about how we may do that, Preston may be able to talk on this. But as far as the bullet design goes, a bigger cavity in the front and the tip of the bullet with a polymer tip that pushes back into that cavity, well, that promotes more expansion that pushes the jacket and some of the core out to promote expansion. There's interlock rings that we put in the bullet jacket into the lead core to kind of to stop as much as we can the expansion process for higher weight retention. And then there's solid monolithic projectiles that will have 95% weight retention that won't shed much energy. So there's a juggling act of all sorts of things to promote expansion, penetration, weight retention. So it's a no brainer. You shoot a animal in the heart or the lungs, and it hits both lungs more than likely it's going to die. You hit them in the heart more than likely it's going to die. You spine them and they shut off more than likely you're going to die. But what's the most important thing when it comes to bullet performance on marginal shots? Let's say like guts or into a heavy bone like front shoulder in front of the invitals or even back in the ham? Well, I would say front shoulder shot versus a gut shot are opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Right. Depending on depending on the critter, you know, if you say it's on an elk, right, that scapula is actually pretty darn thick and tough. Yep. So as long as you get penetration through that scapula and into some lungs and have adequate, I would say adequate temporary wound cavity made after it goes through, depending on bullet design, it's going to be a lethal hit, right? Like you said, if you get into that second lung, chances are it's done, right? But if it goes through and just blows up and maybe gets one lung or zero lungs, that's not a dead animal. It's not a dead critter. Whereas if you were shooting a monolithic bullet that Jett is talking about, gets 100% weight retention for the most part and penetrates through 36 inches of gelatin, it's going to go through that shoulder, still create a temporary wound cavity that's quite impressive and a permanent wound cavity that causes, you know, lungs fill up and respiratory system to be done, right? So that's a dead critter. Gut shots are a little bit tricky, right? If you don't get a massive amount of blood loss or disrupt anything in the central nervous system, there's a chance that you're not going to find that critter and maybe it'll die days later, but it'll have lost you by then. Okay. And so is there, you know, the hard part here is breaking like if I knew that I was going to shoot an animal in the gut, I would want this bullet versus if I knew I was going to shoot him in the gun or excuse me in the lungs, I would want this bullet. Is there a performance difference or as far as hunters are concerned, do we just go, hey, this is the best for a vital shot? Well, obviously vital shots what we want, but I would say, yeah, if you get a lead core bullet, that's actually going to lose a little bit of its weight and dump energy. If you shoot it in the guts and maybe a piece of that bullet travels outside of the wound cavity and hits the spine, that's obviously ideal or a piece of it goes off into a lung. That's going to help. Whereas a monolithic's just going to go right through it. So the way I was right when you said that, Dan, what crossed my mind, let's compare it to archery, fixed blades and expandable. What do you do in here, Dan? You're starting something. Well, I'm saying, you know, because I've, you know, toyed with each one, what do I shoot this and that? And as far as fixed blade and expandables, the way I'm going to compare the bullet side of things, I actually lean the same way fixed blade expandable. So I would compare again, layman's terms here, but I would compare a fixed blade broad head to similar to a monolithic one of the solid projectiles. So I mean, that's going to get you the penetration. It's going to get you a nice wound cavity also, but it's going to get you the penetration. So then on the expandable broadhead side, I would go with more of a traditional cup and core lead core projectile that is designed to dump energy to expand rapidly. You know, you may not have that high weight retention on the back end, you know, still be 50 percent. And you may not get the penetration that you would. But that is going to dump energy and shock and trauma, you know, a bit more than what that solid projectile will do. So to compare a little bit, you could maybe make those comparisons. And for just me, I'm, I like the shock, the expansion, you know, so I tend to go with the more traditional style lead core bullets. And on our tree side, I go with an expandable broadhead. So, you know, again, it's just, it's just preference. But I think you could make that comparison. I think that's a fair analogy. Yeah, I do. Well, it actually makes sense to me. So thank you for that. I don't feel so dumb right now. And so Preston, I saw you smiling there. It sounds like, do you again disagree? And do you like the monolithic ground? So when I'm rifle hunting, I like a lead core bullet. Oh, okay. I really do the expandable type. When I'm bow hunting, I'm a fixed blade guy. Okay. Well, now you're gonna have to rethink that. No, okay, stick to fix blades. Gotcha. All right, so let's talk about Hornady overall, then, as far as a guy who's listening to this, and they may be shooting another brand right now, but they're listening to us talk and they're like, well, you know, I'm interested in Hornady. What is it about Hornady that makes what you feel guys makes you so special or might set you apart from the rest of the companies out there who do the same thing you do? I know. I think you have started the history a little bit. You know, we're started in 1949 by Joyce Hornady, who wanted a better bullet for himself, just like we were talking. If we in the office want something, we'll just make it and a lot of times it becomes a product. Well, that's what he was doing. Post World War II, right? He unfortunately died in a plane crash on the way to Shot Show in 1981. Okay. And family was faced with some difficult times and probably some decisions to sell the company or not. And we're still here and we're family owned, right? With the largest privately owned bullet maker, I believe in the world. And we take great pride in everything that we do. Like we said, all the animals hand inspected. And then at the same time, I would say we're users of the product. Yeah. Yeah. Family owned and operated. Stephen Jason Hornady are in weekly for sure. You know, they travel and they have sales meetings and they're doing a lot. But as far as their involvement in the company, 100%. So they still partake. And then on the hunting side, Jason is better than Steve. Steve's to a point now where he's got a little more freedom where he has gone all fall. He's not all fall. I shouldn't say that. That's probably going to come back to bite me. But you know, they live and breathe hunting and shooting. And I would just build on that from our from the employees here, from all of us, you know, it's awesome to come to work and be able to talk. There's days before a rational season where nothing gets done. Well, hey, hey, hey, well, so I was going to take that a different way. I was going to turn into a positive. I mean, it's a positive. Well, we come to work and talk about our passion. But yet that's work. So it's like, man, in that drives, you know, so I would say from the from the employee side, you know, the the personnel that gets hired at Hornady are users. They are that person with passion. You know, they have on the engineering side, especially on our marketing side to sales, you know, everybody, you know, has the education that they need. But if you don't have exactly that, but you have the passion and you're the right fit, you know, the passion just drives you. So, you know, if you've got all the schooling on engineering in the world, but this isn't your passion, it's a little tricky to, you know, get excited about bullets. And you know, with everybody participating in the sport for for a primary good chunk, you know, everybody wants to make good, better products for themselves, which translates to, you know, putting a better product out there for the shooters and hunters out there. So, yeah, I keep from my perspective, I keep saying the passion, you know, everybody, for the most part lives in breeza here. Yeah, and you said you don't do a whole lot of rifle shooting, right? Right. But like, for an example, you've heard it's 6.5 Creedmoor, we created the 6.5 Creedmoor, the 6.R, the 6. Creedmoor, the 6.5 PRC, the 300 PRC, the 7 PRC all over the last 10 years, right? And those are probably what I would call the most popular rifle cartridges out there right now. And they are because they work. You can only market something, you can only prop something up for so long and tell people realize that it doesn't work. But these things stand for themselves and we're making products that people want to use and enjoy using and are better than what we had available before. Yeah, yeah, it's awesome just listening to this conversation, man, because I feel like if you can be as big as you want, but if you start, if you start detaching away from what made the company great in the first place, there's in my opinion, there's always some kind of loss that happens, right? And it sounds like Hornady is not only growing, but has kept what has made it great. And so that's what I, that's even though I don't use your products, even though I don't know anything about guns, I can tell you that just the brand itself stands out because of that reason. Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate you noticing. That's awesome. And the opposite is true with some of the other brands. I mean, especially in the archery world, once you get sold and you go to like a big giant conglomerate and it just, some of my favorite products over the years have just been lost from a technical standpoint and it pissed me off, but that's again personal. So I first off, I just want to say thank you guys for taking time out of your day. I really appreciate it. You've already mentioned the app that's free, you can go and download that. If are there any other resources available for people to go investigate your guys' products and be, I guess become better educated on Hornady? Sure. Well, the app, we also have a reloading guide app, which essentially are our loading manual, all thick reloading manual. If you're into that, there's some information in there about the bullets themselves, but then also just Hornady.com, right? And you can see a lot of stuff on Hornady.com, but if you're technical, like I think your listeners are and like we are, we have a podcast as well and we've done a lot of deep dives on cartridge specifics, bullet specifics, ballistics in general, you can kind of get yourself overwhelmed with that if you really want to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, give us a call, talk to the guys upstairs, we go to quite a few shows in our world, in our industry, we go to a lot of different shooting competitions, you know, there's a lot of us around. So, the biggest thing in Jason preaches that day in and day out, you know, Hornady as a whole, Jason's perspective is number one, we need to be easy to do business with. You know, you need to make it as easy as possible. If that's communication, if that's, you know, getting a message across to a customer, if that's whatever, just number one, Hornady needs to be easy to do business with. Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Judd Preston, really appreciate your guys' time today. So thank you very much and you guys are welcome back anytime. Hey, just let us know. ♪♪♪♪