Anyone know of, or think of building, a business making custom cartridges?

With the various shortages of brass and finished ammo, has no one started up a home business?

Could custom reloading be a valid business model? Customer selects or supplies brass, primers, powder, bullets.

Out of curiosity I Googled "automated custom loading of ammunition cartridges" and was surprised by the number and availability of machines for manufacturing brass cases to match tolerances and loading cartridges at rates up to 250/minute.

A low production capacity U-cell or two could allow customers to experiment with different specifications (How many multiples of 50 would be desired?), a larger capacity U-cell could provide returning customers with their custom ammo of choice (How many multiples of 1000 would be desired?).

A price point somewhere above self-reloading costs, but below ????

Liability avoidance and insurance would probably make it cost prohibitive. It is standard practice to send samples of each load (and possibly each manufacturing lot) to a proof house to be fired and measured for pressure. That can't be cheap. 

Pistols are not that sensitive. In general any well made pistol will shoot the standard target loads well. You might see a slight improvement by adjusting the charge up or down a tenth but it's likely to be small.

All of that combined with the generally frugal (read cheap) bullseye shooters makes me suspect it would not be a good business model.

That said if someone starts this business, I'll give them a try.

SteveT wrote:Liability avoidance and insurance would probably make it cost prohibitive. It is standard practice to send samples of each load (and possibly each manufacturing lot) to a proof house to be fired and measured for pressure. That can't be cheap. 

#1 reason this won't happen.  Insurance is way too cost prohibitive.  One of my clubs just wanted to provide a loader for members to use.  The policy was almost as much as the range policy!!!  You would have to load 100's of thousands of rounds (or 1M) to spread the annual insurance costs out enough, let alone the investment in equipment.

You want ammo go to Zero, Atlanta Arms, ASYM, and now Creedmore Sports, but unless you were going to buy a significant volume, they aren't going to mess with low power short line or custom loads, just accurate loads they've developed.

- Dave

There are currently no shortages I can buy any powder, primer, case or bullet I want, for some bullets I may have to wait a week for the next production run, but that's it.

The best way to make 1 million dollars in the loading business?
Start with 2 million.