What type of equipment do large ammo manufactures use?

What type of equipment do Winchester, Federal, Remington, etc. use when manufacturing ammunition? I'm guessing it's some sort of fully automated assembly line (manufacture and box) process. Anyone ever witness ammo being made at one of the large manufacturers?

They even have old pics of the WWII production line. Its custom made automated machinery unlike anything you could put in your garage. Most commercial and military ammunition factories start with brass stock and punch out and form the cases, machines form and jacket bullets, and machines charge and assemble the ammunition. To crank out that many rounds with the highest accuracy, everything is automated and almost everything is done under one roof or in one complex.

If you check Youtube, you'll see several vids for different manufacturers.

A lot of ammo manufacturers use camdex machines. There are actually some on gunbroker right now.

when I worked at LCAAP, they (Olin-Winchester) still maintained and ran the original production lines from when the plant opened in 1941, except for the 5.56x45mm SCAMP lines which were brought online, I believe, during the Vietnam War era; when I left that job and moved on after a few years, they were in the process of standing up a new caliber (25x137mm) for production, which I believe ATK eventually brought online since then

When I toured Hornady in February, they didn't show the ammo making portion of the facility (housed separately from everything else). However I did see where they hand inspect the loaded ammo and then put it into the plastic trays before boxing it. Not sure I could do an 8 hour day looking for defects in loaded ammo.

Pretty neat operation for making bullets. Did you know they go through 100,000 lbs of lead a week to make bullets, bullet cores and lead balls?

I was shown some video of what I believe were SCAMP machines for 5.56 x 45 rounds by Gulf and Western in the late 70's. These units were circular, about 6 ft. in diameter, and turned on a vertical axis. The output was just a blur at full speed. These units were assembly machines for the case, primer, powder and bullet. There were scores of stations in the rotating column, including check powder, check weighing, etc. I did not see any automated packing.

The G&W machine had a projected rate of 62,000,000 units per year. Rates of 27,000,000 units per year were achieved. The complexity and cost of tooling and low availability time (approx 50%) soon made the G&W machines uncompetitive compared to "conventional" assembly methods.[source ADI Australia].

I was once told me that Double Tap loads them on single-stage presses.

When I was at the new Lapua facility in Phoenix a couple of years back, they were loading .338 Lapua on a single Camdex. There were two other (old) machines that had been imported by the parent company for 5.56X45 and 7.61X51 ammunition, one was made by Manhurin, the other a custom machine designed and built in Sweden. Both of these machines were long, 10 or 12 feet or so, with individual station for each operation, working on 5 cases at a time. The Manhurin machine was extremely complex with pneumatic controls and lines running everywhere. I doubt they every got either machine running correctly. The other machine used wood case blocks that carried the cartridges through each operation. The edge of each block had crennelations for the dog on the press to engage to move the cases past each operation. A worker sat at the finish line to dump the cases, then put the block on a conveyor that transported it back to the start where it was loaded with empty cases. Interesting, but the Camdex sat on the next bench; compact and competent, turning out 10000 rounds per day.

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