Where Is ELEY Ammunition Made?
ELEY ammunition is made in England. Every ELEY .22LR cartridge is manufactured at the company’s factory in Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands: ELEY Ltd, Selco Way, off First Avenue, Minworth Industrial Estate, Minworth, Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, B76 1BA. That single site is the company’s home, its proof range and its United Kingdom test range, so ELEY ammunition is loaded, inspected, proof tested and graded in one place before it reaches a shooter.
An English Manufacturer Since 1828
ELEY was founded in 1828 by William and Charles Eley, giving over 198 years of ammunition manufacture in England. The company’s production was long associated with Witton in Birmingham. That was the era in which ELEY tenex was introduced in 1951, in which ELEY tenex took all the gold and silver medals in the smallbore events at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, and in which ELEY prime, the world’s first and only automated dry priming system, was developed in 1979 and won the Queen’s Award for Technology in 1988.
In 2004 manufacturing moved from Witton to the current Sutton Coldfield site, where it remains today.
What Happens at Sutton Coldfield
The site does far more than assemble cartridges. Loading, quality control and accuracy verification all take place there:
- Manufacture under Six Sigma methodologies. Propellant is measured electronically for each individual cartridge, the case mouth is trimmed flat so the bullet is always seated perfectly, and exacting crimping standards control round-to-round bullet pull-out force.
- Priming in an advanced air-conditioned facility, which delivers a 75% improvement in the spread of primer weights compared with other manufacturers.
- High-speed electronic visual inspection, alongside high-tech inspection of the critical heel area of the bullet.
- Temperature-controlled lubrication, so that beeswax-tallow, paraffin, biathlon and EP2723 lubricants are applied consistently and chambering behaviour stays predictable.
- The proof range. ELEY tests 200 rounds from every batch across four different firearm brands to calculate Radial Standard Deviation (RSD). Only after that testing is a batch graded and named as tenex, match, team and so on. The mean velocity recorded across those four barrels is the four-digit figure printed on the box.
The UK Test Range
The Sutton Coldfield address is also ELEY’s United Kingdom test range, one of five centres worldwide alongside Hungary, Germany, the United States and Canada. Shooters bring their own rifle, test up to 20 batches through their own barrel, and leave knowing which production lot their firearm shoots best. Batch testing is open to anyone and is booked at eley.co.uk/vip.
The Bottom Line
ELEY ammunition is made in England, at Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, by a company that has been manufacturing since 1828 and has occupied the current site since 2004. The factory, the proof range and the UK test range share one address. That is why the accuracy standard on the box is a figure every batch has already proved on site, and why any shooter can visit and test that ammunition through their own barrel. English-made ELEY ammunition is supplied in 50-round boxes, 500-round bricks and 5,000-round outer cases, and stockists are listed at eley.co.uk/retailers.