Our goal is to provide quality products at the best cost for our customers. As we grow exploring new products and gaining new resources our customers reap the benefit. In our humble beginnings at BOAZ we produced products featuring remanufactured brass. There was a market for new brass and BOAZ decided to accommodate the requests. At the time of writing this blog post, we do offer a selection of both new and remanufactured ammunition. As time passes and we grow, we are forming a stronger opinion on quality vs cost.
We want to share with you what we have learned in our short time. There are lots of pros and cons to using either remanufactured vs new brass. The ultimate buying decision is yours based on price point as a consumer. As for the manufacturing decision, that is based on offering the best quality at the best price to everyone. Let us look at some pros and cons?
Remanufactured Brass
Pros:
- Affordability. You can often glean it from a local range for free or buy it much cheaper than new brass.
- Recyclability
Cons:
- Smaller and limited availability is a manufacturing factor
- Mixed headstamps create loading inconsistencies
- You can encounter cracked brass, damaged brass increases the loss of product
- Encountering primer pockets issues
- Time consumed to clean and process the brass
- Less forgiving with coated bullets
- The shipping weight is the same, new or used.
New Brass
Pros:
- Consist loading multiple types of projectiles
- Clean bright brass
- Can buy in larger quantities
- Personalization of the headstamp available
- Works great with jacketed or coated bullets alike
- The shipping weight is the same, new or used.
Cons:
- Most expensive to buy
- Must buy in larger bulk for best pricing
- May have to slightly resize the bell
As a manufacturer, it's clear that new brass is the most pro - least con for manufacturing. But does it justify the cost difference to our customers? In our opinion Yes, it does. So let's look at a price comparison* based on a product we have both new and reman brass available. It's the same 200 quantity round bags of 147gr TPJ:
Reman $62.20* ($0.31/round)
New $64.00* ($0.32/round)
That's just $1.80 per bag of 200 for the best product.
Loading consistency keeps losses minimal and speeds up the automated process. In small business manufacturing time starts becoming a major player in the factors of cost. The price difference is reasonable enough from a manufacturing perspective to drop reman brass. This minimizes issues that have to be worked out during the process to accommodate different brass attributes. So in the automated process if the reman brass is pausing the system with frequent inconsistencies, the time it takes to figure out issues, make changes, tweak adjustments and document losses just doesn't seem worth the trouble. This is why BOAZ is leaning toward manufacturing products with only new brass. At this point, we are still doing some refurbished brass products but primarily will lean in the future toward new brass products. You will find this reflected in our samples and products as we begin to discontinue our reman line of products.
*Website prices as of JAN 2025 subject to change at any time based market fluctuation and availability of components.