Really cool experience to say the least. Got to go in Steve Hornady's office where he has a Browning 50 bmg and a rug of his dad's first lion. Then moved to their conference room that is loaded with ruger guns and a 2000lb conference table. Saw their smelting room, they mainly use pure lead in handgun bullets and other calibers are either a mix of 3% antimony or 5% antimony. Nobody I talked to knew the brinell of their lead, the guy in the smelting room didn't even know what brinell ratings were... Anyways, we also saw the making of dies and press parts on a ton of CNC machines. Moved onto the packaging and one of the quality control measures, when they find loaded bullets that don't meet their specifications but are deemed shootable the employees get to take them home and shoot for free. The tour guide then showed the lead spools, copper punching machines, and then how the jacket is actually put over the lead. Even got to hold some 240 grain .452" XTP bullets that were fresh off the press and still warm. From here was the trip to the underground shooting range and ballistics lab. We were chatting it up with one of the ballisticians down there and he let us into their gun storage room, he told me that few people get to see it but we seemed more interested than most people at the whole process. (And it was the lunch break for most of the guys down there and they were gone so that probably helped) And lets just say that room was probably 20' by 6' and was stocked with almost as many guns as the La Vista Cabela's. When we were in the shooting range I noticed a test barrel with a caliber I didn't recognize, I didn't want to ask the guide any questions on it since I wasn't sure if we were supposed to see it since it was just kind of laying there. Let's just say it started with a 515 and ended with a Ruger(I'm excited to see if it comes on the market). And that was the tour in a nutshell. We then bought some factory seconds, I can't find anything wrong with the 168gr AMax bullets I got, and when we were paying Jason Hornady (99% sure it was him after we googled pictures of him lol) gave us some complimentary hats. Needless to say it was worth the trip from Columbus and I am going to be a more avid customer for them now, everybody there was nice and had a smile, even people doing tedious jobs on assembly lines. I highly recommend anybody get a tour with them if you have a chance.
