Remington ammunition QA issues?

I bought two boxes of .357 Magnum 125 gr Golden Saber ammo packaged under their Ultimate Defense label this morning.

When I started in law enforcement 40 years ago I developed the habit of personally inspecting each round. The Chief of Police wasn’t pro gun and would only allow 12 rounds to be issued, 6 in the revolver and 6 more in the dump pouch. It took a lot of work just to get approval for an extra round for the dump pouch. It’s hard to load from a dump pouch under stress and not drop one.

In any case, the last thing needed was a defective round, so all of them were carefully inspected.

I still carefully inspect my carry ammo, especially factory rounds.

I have not had any problem before with Remington Golden Saber ammo over the years with well over a thousand rounds in .380 Auto, 9mm Luger, .38 Special, .45 ACP or .357 Magnum, until today.

Today one round in one box had a crushed case mouth caused by the bullet during the seating process. It chambered, but barely.

Another round in the second box also displayed some resistance on chambering and upon closer inspection it had a slight bulge in the case mouth below the crimp and a crack in the case mouth about 3/32” long.


That’s 2 flawed rounds out of 40 rounds total, a 5% failure rate, and not just cosmetic “factory second” type defects.

Both boxes were produced in January 2022.

I’ve contacted Remington customer service with a QA/Technical complaint so we’ll see what happens.

Did I miss something about Remington having QA issues with its ammo?

I can only assume you mean QC, Quality Control, they think QA is already covered. That being said I would be surprised in the current state of demand, employee shortages, unskilled new hires, etc, that there would not be more than normal issues especially in high demand calibers. As with everything these days it is a long shot that you will get a viable usable product every time. Good for you inspecting your ammo. Sorry we have come to this but it isn't a Remington issue, it is a USA issue.

BB57 said:

I bought two boxes of .357 Magnum 125 gr Golden Saber ammo packaged under their Ultimate Defense label this morning.

When I started in law enforcement 40 years ago I developed the habit of personally inspecting each round. The Chief of Police wasn’t pro gun and would only allow 12 rounds to be issued, 6 in the revolver and 6 more in the dump pouch. It took a lot of work just to get approval for an extra round for the dump pouch. It’s hard to load from a dump pouch under stress and not drop one.

In any case, the last thing needed was a defective round, so all of them were carefully inspected.

I still carefully inspect my carry ammo, especially factory rounds.

I have not had any problem before with Remington Golden Saber ammo over the years with well over a thousand rounds in .380 Auto, 9mm Luger, .38 Special, .45 ACP or .357 Magnum, until today.

Today one round in one box had a crushed case mouth caused by the bullet during the seating process. It chambered, but barely.

Another round in the second box also displayed some resistance on chambering and upon closer inspection it had a slight bulge in the case mouth below the crimp and a crack in the case mouth about 3/32” long.


That’s 2 flawed rounds out of 40 rounds total, a 5% failure rate, and not just cosmetic “factory second” type defects.

Both boxes were produced in January 2022.

I’ve contacted Remington customer service with a QA/Technical complaint so we’ll see what happens.

Did I miss something about Remington having QA issues with its ammo?

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I do not think you missed anything about QC, other than Remington is by no means the company they once were.

Remember, this is the company that brought you Thunderbolts, and still does.

Personally, I have not knowingly bought any kind of a Big Green product since 1987 when they left Connecticut and did their employees, clay target shooters and sportsmen a grave disservice IMO

Those rounds obviously should never have made it through their QC but they did. I suspect the new Remington ammunition manufacturing plants are still going through some set up issues. You've already done the best thing you can do, by contacting them and being civil, let them know that they have a problem and a costly one for you the customer at probably $1-$2+ per round.
Through 26+ years in LE, the folded case mouth was probably the most common defect we found and we encountered them in EVERY manufacturer we were issued.
Glad to see your excellent habit of checking each and every round you are going to carry for defense has carried over to your civilian life.

Rubone said:

I can only assume you mean QC, Quality Control, they think QA is already covered. That being said I would be surprised in the current state of demand, employee shortages, unskilled new hires, etc, that there would not be more than normal issues especially in high demand calibers. As with everything these days it is a long shot that you will get a viable usable product every time. Good for you inspecting your ammo. Sorry we have come to this but it isn't a Remington issue, it is a USA issue.

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I was initially just going to leave this alone, but it’s drawing some “likes” and most of the posts are following your lead and using the term “QC”. I do in fact mean Quality Assurance (QA).

Remington used to have adequate Quality Control (QC) procedures in place (due to a good QA program). They’ve been around awhile and generally had well developed QC procedures that were effective at catching defects.

QC is for the most part a reactive process that looks for defects (sometimes unavoidable) that result in spite of the larger QA system in place. However, when the defect rate in the final consumer product is 5% that’s not a QC issue, it’s a larger QA issue.

Now, to be fair it’s a sample of just two boxes and by some bizarre fluke of extremely unlikely random chance, I may have gotten the only 2 defective rounds that slipped out that month. But..they are both pretty obvious defects detectable with a simple gravity operated case gauge

There is some over lap between QA and QC processes, but QA processes are more proactive process designed to prevent errors and defects by improving your production processes and or staff proficiency so that you are producing a quality product with less QC required before sending a quality product out the door.

There’s obvious significant QC failures, in either the actual procedures or the proficiency of the staff performing them, but at this level of occurrence it’s likely a failure of the larger QA system that Remington has in place.

My feedback to Remington is exclusively part of QA, not QC. When the final QC inspection *must* be done by the customer, it’s a QA failure.

The fact that they had a fairly easy to use portal to collect customer feedback on quality and technical complaints is one aspect of QA and a positive sign. The response I will (hopefully) get from Remington will provide some measure of their QA program in terms of actually accepting that customer feedback, responding to it and addressing the concerns.

However, they probably won’t be very transparent about what they do (or have done) behind the scenes to improve their QA and QC processes.

mckenney99 said:

Those rounds obviously should never have made it through their QC but they did. I suspect the new Remington ammunition manufacturing plants are still going through some set up issues. You've already done the best thing you can do, by contacting them and being civil, let them know that they have a problem and a costly one for you the customer at probably $1-$2+ per round.
Through 26+ years in LE, the folded case mouth was probably the most common defect we found and we encountered them in EVERY manufacturer we were issued.
Glad to see your excellent habit of checking each and every round you are going to carry for defense has carried over to your civilian life.

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This fits with the reason I asked about QA at Remington. I wasn’t aware they were setting up new production facilities, most likely with mostly new staff in addition to new machines. Those issues can very much drive the need for a more robust QA program as they may no longer have the refinement in processes and procedures they had before and are almost certainly lacking the institutional knowledge and experience that belonged to their former employees.

When businesses start being driven primarily for profit and share value above all other considerations, businesses of all types have a bad habit of assuming staff are replaceable cogs. The managers and leadership of those businesses fail to understand the value experienced, product focused staff bring to a business and its products. Look at Boeing and the 737 Max debacle for a very obvious examples of where that management philosophy leads.

Semantics aside it's the "Q" part that seems to be lacking in so many organizations these days. QA is designing in or processing in quality. QC is culling out defects with controls such as inspection. It's disappointing that QC falls to the end user. But in a case where one's life could depend on it, it's a very wise move.

Interesting to read- I’ve long been a Golden Saber fan but since it doesn’t seem to be as readily available as it used to be, I haven’t bought any for a few years (and I have plenty on hand). If QC/QA has really slipped on their ammo I’ll likely just try and find some of their older stuff when I need it.

Vista Outdoors owns Remington Ammunition along with Federal, CCI, Speer and other brands. It might be reasonable to believe that while each brand has some degree of independence…they each have to answer to the corporate overlord. There must be a priority list of which division gets the most funding for R&D and the best and most efficient equipment for production and quality control.

Remington…being the most recent ammo maker added to Vista’s portfolio…may still be finding its feet again as a quality producer.

It also has to be remembered that Remington’s quality control was known to slipping for some time prior to the bankruptcy and breaking up for sale.

Remington ( and other manufacturers) produces thousands of cartridges in a given time frame and I suspect is a mostly automatic operation. As far as QC; they most likely use a statistical sampling plan where a given number of cartridges are randomly taken for inspection in a given time frame, if those are acceptable, the lot is accepted. The sticker is what their acceptance criteria is. Statistical sampling with an acceptance criteria say, Gather x Number of product, inspect them and Accept is less number than A fails and Reject if quantity A or more fails. Remington knows that there are going to be a given number of bad cartridges in a given lot and they are OK with that; they will replace them if asked as a cost of doing business. Automotive and even Aerospace work the same way on larger tolerances except it is usually Accept on 0 defects and Reject & 100% inspect on 1 defect., Close toleranced characteristics receive 10% inspection in Aerospace; just one of the many reasons aerospace parts cost so much.

You are smart to carefully inspect and chamber check your carry ammo. I have done so for years. Never found a bad one yet, but still, when you are in the middle of an excrement storm is the wrong time to find out you have a problem.

My issue with Remington was 30+ years ago with their rim fire ammo. I always shot the 40 gr. standard velocity for my target work. I had been very happy with the accuracy, and then went with their Green Tag match ammo. Shortly there after, I and several other members of our club began having failure rate issues. Even being inserted back in the gun and making sure the rim was oriented in a different position is seldom ever fire. The failure rate got up to around 5% and greater, and we all quit using Remington. About 10 years ago I thought "Surely Remington has gotten their arms around this problem", and bought a couple boxes of Standard Velocity to try. Out of those two boxes there were 7 rounds that failed to fire.

We proved it wasn't a firearm issue as there were about a dozen different firearms, Mod 41's, H S Victor's, S&W Mod 17's, and Anschutz matcdh rifles.

The only Remington ammo I have fired since is some STS Sporting Clays 12 ga. which I was pleased with.

Wasn't CCI the manufacturer of Green Tag 22 ammo? I remember Remington target ammo in a blue box.

Sam McCord said:

Wasn't CCI the manufacturer of Green Tag 22 ammo? I remember Remington target ammo in a blue box.

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Yes, Green Tag was the CCI brand of target 22LR ammo. I never bought any Remington target 22LR ammo.

Sam McCord said:

Wasn't CCI the manufacturer of Green Tag 22 ammo? I remember Remington target ammo in a blue box.

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I suspect H Richard is talking about this Remington Standard Velocity 40 gr RN “target” ammo. It was marketed along the same lines at CCI’s “green tag” ammo.

Personally, I never saw any significant difference between CCI SV target and CCI Green Tag, other than price. The Remington SV and this Remington Target ammo was the same way.

Which is why I still have a 10 year old box of it sitting around.

I think this goes back to the ammo shortages of the past. Every ammo maker was in such a hurry to catch up, I think QC suffered greatly. Heaven knows .22 ammo certainly ain't what it used to be across the board.

Not surprising to me with the high demand for ammo. Defects have a way of slipping through, been happening for years. I worked as an ammo vendor at gun shows for a long time and ended up with quite an assortment of defective ammo from just about every manufacturer. People were always wanting to "look at" the ammo and inevitably, sooner or later, a bad round would show up. Caught a few myself just looking over ammo when setting up for a show too.

I have come to suspect that a lot of the defects get through as the companies moved away from hand packing to machine filling boxes. I remember old ads (from the 40's up through the 60's) where they touted the packers as the "final line of inspection" to ensure only good rounds made it out the door. Films showing modern ammo production make it clear that most of the inspection is done by machines scanning the product as it moves down the line to be machine packed. If it doesn't jam up the system or isn't sufficiently out of spec to get kicked out? It won't get the attention of those monitoring the machines and it's going to slide right on through to the machine packing it for shipment.

Inspecting any factory ammo before use is always a good idea. Too many bad ones have crossed my path for me to do otherwise ........... Yes, I am a little cynical. High tech mass production can be a great thing for filling demand but it has to have quality control that is up to the task of catching flaws and must be held to a very high standard.

Grayfox said:

I think this goes back to the ammo shortages of the past. Every ammo maker was in such a hurry to catch up, I think QC suffered greatly. Heaven knows .22 ammo certainly ain't what it used to be across the board.

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Maybe. I have two boxes of Remington’s .357 Magnum HTP 125 gr SJHP and all of them were fine. They were made in July 2021.

I can see cutting some corners on range ammo and rimfire ammo. Customers would be happy to get it, and not obsess too much over lower quality.

I used to buy Federal American Eagle and Remington Green and White box 115 gr 9mm when it would show up in Walmart for $8 per box just to restock on new brass. The fact it had bullets and went bang was just a plus as my reloads into fired brass cost me $6 per box.

But…when Remington is marketing ammo in 20 round boxes as self defense ammo, you’d hope they’d put a little more focus and effort into their quality control processes and standards.

I had to look at the date on this thread. At first I thought it was a revived thread from about 1980. That's about when I first resolved to NEVER again buy anything with the name Remington on the box.

Brick after brick of .22s with a 5% "pop" failure, boxes of unprimed centerfire handgun cases that split when a bullet was first loaded, damaged rounds of new ammo in the box.

IMHO, Remington went down the tubes a long time ago.

Talking centerfire only here, I have had bad rounds of Remington ammunition more than once! Hence the reason I will NOT use Remington ammunition for self defense.

I had FTF with both 38 special and 35 Remington. With the .35 Rem I had half the box fail to ignite! Nothing wrong with the rifle either! In the case of 38 spl. I have 3 bad rounds out of 100 rounds. Again, never had any other FTF with that M15 in 50 years - just bad ammo.

Hopefully they've improved it!