Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

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mhampel
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu May 11, 2017 4:34 pm

Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by mhampel »

It looks to me like Eley replaced Edge with Team. I bought some from Good Shooting Inc., but have not had a chance to test it.
Does anyone have more information bout Eley Team ammo? I used to have good luck with the older Team that was discontinued.
Hemmers
Posts: 380
Joined: Mon Jun 25, 2007 5:06 pm
Location: UK

Re: Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by Hemmers »

Team/Edge are a product of Eley's quality control and the order volumes they have coming in. They occupy about the same price point so Eley tend to sell one or the other, not both.

Long story short:

* Team is Tenex that didn't make the grade to get a Tenex or Match label. It's the same as the "old" Team.
* Edge is manufactured as Edge, and is graded to around the Team/Match standard.

They occupy around the same price/quality point and basically, if they have a small number of orders for that price-point they will fill it with Team, which is a by-product of Tenex production (and would otherwise go to waste). If they have a lot of orders at the price-point, they will manufacture Edge on-demand and fill the price-point with Edge.

Long story long:

As above, Eley don't manufacture Team as such (nor Match). They only manufacture Tenex, which is then graded on the Proof Range as Tenex/Match/Team and anything not making the Tenex standard gets sold off "cheap" instead of going for recycling.

In manufacturing this is known as "binning" - batches are binned according to how good they turn out (because manufacturing is an imperfect science). It's also how computer processors are made - they're all basically made the same and chips are dropped onto a test socket. They ramp up the power until they start glitching. The better it performs, the better label it gets. If a chip is unstable above a certain frequency they'll label it as a lower clocked part. If whole cores are unstable they'll disable them and sell it as a dual-core chip (e.g. Intel i3) instead of a quad-core (Intel i5/7).

The problem with binning is that you don't actually control your production yields - they're trying to produce 100% Tenex because they can sell it for a premium. If your QC is bang-on and you keep your tolerances controlled, you'll never yield any Match or Team - it will all be graded as Tenex, leaving you unable to fulfil orders for Match and Team. Occasionally you will get Match with a "10" at the start of the batch number - 10 is the product code for Tenex, 11 is for Match. So Match coded as "10" is product that was actually graded as Tenex but sold as Match because they needed to fill an order and they didn't have any Match-graded product available, so they substituted in Tenex.

Edge came about when the US was panic-buying ammunition (thanks Obama! Scaring the right without actually banning anything led to some very good years for ammo makers) and there were very large orders for "cheap" Team - more than they were yielding. They could have re-badged Match or Tenex as Team, but they were selling that as fast as it was coming off the line and in any case it's obviously not sensible to sell premium product off cheap and undercut your own margins. Edge was developed as a black-bullet product (albeit using the EPS bullet design) manufactured on the autoloaders - i.e. it could be made to order. Edge basically replaced Team when the demand for Team was so high they couldn't keep up. Also, marketing thought the black casings would be popular in the US - which they were.

Once 45 got in, everyone stopped buying ammo and Eley stopped making Edge. They were still getting their small amounts of Team-graded product yielding from Tenex production, so reintroduced that line - better to sell what would otherwise be a waste product than to manufacture a dedicated product at that price/quality point.


As with any ammo, whether it suits your rifle is entirely down to your rifle!
Black_Talon
Posts: 53
Joined: Fri May 08, 2009 9:03 pm
Location: SoCal

Re: Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by Black_Talon »

More importantly: OP, how did you buy Team from Good Shooting? It's (and all other Eley) shown as "out of stock".
mhampel
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu May 11, 2017 4:34 pm

Re: Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by mhampel »

Obviously, I got lucky with timing on the purchase. I just happened to check in to Good Shooting, saw some lots were available and ordered. I sent some friends an email later in the day and one of them said the sight was completely locked up. He could not even get it to open! Clean living I guess.
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Observer
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Jan 29, 2021 9:17 am
Location: Germany

Re: Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by Observer »

That's right, Eley Team is Eley Tenex depending on how well the machine runs.
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1845greyhounds
Posts: 100
Joined: Wed Sep 25, 2019 11:25 am
Location: Fishers, Indiana

Re: Eley Team (2021) Ammuniton

Post by 1845greyhounds »

Great videos. Disturbing, but great.
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