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American Meet, the silver boxes of ammo were made in Italy. Possibly some were made in 1999, but not before that. The Italian hulls were tough, they lasted many reloads. I have some that I used for load development, that have at least 5 transducer marks on them and I am still reloading them 14 years later. You can use Cheddite data for them, but they are not Cheddite hulls. They are smooth sided hulls.

4setters, the Winchester poly formed loads in the white boxes were cheap promo loads, made in the USA. Those hulls were terrible to reload. They weren't around very long.

The reason the CF hulls went away, was the cost of maintaining the dies. The dies were old and the Compression Forming process was outdated and expensive.

We all need to take off our rose colored glasses......the CF hulls were good, but they had their warts. I have had new ones split, and they didn't last any longer than the Cheddites we have now. You could always get better ballistics out of Federals than Winchester CF's. They were OK, I guess but I never really thought much of them. Kind of funny really, the 20 gauge CF hulls always seemed better than the 12 and 16 gauge versions. I have about 1000 12 gauge CF's left, if I get 5 reloads before the case mouths split I feel lucky.

The great part about CF hulls was that you could have your MEC reloader adjusted any old way and the CF reloads looked great. Those tapered walls were very forgiving.

Member Joined: 31 Aug 2005 Posts: 1257 Location: Nebraska

I feel left out of the rose colored glasses group, feel jealous of the rest of you who apparently own them. Or owned them, now that you're disabused.

I used both 12 and 20 ga. AA hulls for decades w/o any complaints. Then the Remington Premier/STS hulls arrived. After trying several 100 12 ga hulls, I swapped over and have never looked back.

I've still got decent stashes of both the 20 and 28 gauge AA hulls to boot. They are okay in comparison to the 12 gauge AA hulls, but I don't load them much since rediscovering the 16 gauge.

I still have a large stash of once fired AA 2.5 inch .410 hulls all manufactured before 1987 and am willing to defend them w/ my life. They are the older laminated/molded plastic type and are the undisputed best in show .410 target hull ever made in my experience. I've found these .410 hulls to be tougher than the 20 and 28 ga. versions from the same era by a long shot. I can't explain why, but that's how it is.

I bought 5K plus of the .410 hulls from a local retired registered skeet shooter in the mid-90s at an extremely good price for that time. I've been loading them in 250 count lots and normally get at least 5 to 6 reloadings out of them before the crimp folds give out. Needless to say, I'm well into the stash but have more than enough to last me for the rest of my life.

Some folks have told me the new AA polyformed target hulls are very tough. Supposedly, the plastic tubing used to make them is a big upgrade over the promo grade polyformed hulls. Having had none, I can't say anything about that out of experience. Doesn't matter for us 16 gauge folks anyway, since none are made in our favorite gauge. Perhaps Olin will reconsider, but I'd not hold my breath.