oneatatime wrote on Jan 25^th, 2021 at 9:20am:


And a lot more fun than finding and buying .22 match ammo.

Really you guys are going at it all wrong. The thing to do is have several .22 match rifles and buy just one brand of ammo. One of the rifles will shoot it well.
Problem solved. 

The expensive stuff languished for a long time last year because let's face it, we're a niche market in the world of .22 rimfire shooting. The average Joe views .22's as tin can blasting fodder, small game fodder, and informal paper target shooting - and thinks nothing of ripping through large quantities of the stuff. (Nothing wrong with that, sometimes it's good for the soul.) When the cheap stuff dried up and prices for same skyrocketed, our Eley and RWS ammo started to look affordable for the first time in their lives so it started to be snatched up too. Add to that we target shooters who started getting edgy about the availability of future supplies and bingo, the shelves emptied of Tenex also.

I can get through a season of target shooting at my current rate of consumption and two or three seasons if I throttle back on range sessions, but like a lot of people I got to thinking that maybe I should bite the bullet and lay in some more. By the time I decided to spend money I shouldn't spend, it was too late - just the sound of crickets chirping in the empty store rooms. Oh well, there's still the bucket full of empty primed brass and a bullet mould....

Its all part of the competitive Rimfire game no matter which game it is. If you want to become competitive you are going to have to pay the price and also shoot the same in practice allot and there is just no getting around it. But it is also allot cheaper than some of the other non related shooting hobbies by far. Back in the day I used to by Eley from Bob Collins he would send various lot numbers and the different machines it came off to try. It also came with a list of how many cases of each he had in stock to buy once you figured out which test batch shot the best. So you would end up with the very best prior to having to purchase a case or cases of something that just did not shoot as well and it was a win win way to buy the best.

Sure shot wrote on Jan 26^th, 2021 at 4:33am:


Besides .22 ammo, percussion caps er mighty dear these days. You may have to convert that nice little squirrel rifle to flintlock. Slim pickins these days. Yep.

I was at our local Fleet Farm store last week, they stock quite a few guns, ammo, and reloading supplies, or maybe not! The shelves have been bare for a while, the isle with the pistol ammunition was completely bare except for 2 or 3 boxes of 454 casull. They did have # 10 percussion caps, but zero primers.

Just gave away two medium flat rate boxes of pistol ammo that I didn't need. .44 Spl., .44 mag, and .45 ACP. I don't even own the first two anymore, and have 3,000 rds. of the .45ACP, so didn't need all of it.
Sent it off to a friend who shoots more handguns, and could use it more than me. I needed the space under the loading bench for all the brass I hoard, and do use.

I walked into a farm store last week in the back shelf they had a bunch of sleeves of cci 11 and  cci 11 magnums. They said they haven't sold any of them for the last 3 years so they sold me 7 boxes(7000) for price that I  am embarrassed to admit. once in a while a guy gets lucky!

On the subject of flintlocks it's possible that the supply of flints may dry up as well, ever tried knapping your own flints ?, good luck with that. 
Mike.