In May 2024, ELEY were pleased to announce the opening of Whidden Gunworks as an official ELEY Test Centre in the USA.
The facility currently has capabilities for testing up to 50m, with a 100m test tunnel coming in the near future, all within a controlled indoor environment.
Using the exacting formula developed at the UK test centre, all ELEY batch testing begins with a minimum of 15 LOTS.
Owner and Founder, John Whidden is a lifelong shooter and firearms enthusiast. This passion led to his enthusiasm for competitive shooting. By high school / college, he was competing with shotguns, rifles, as well as pistols. After college, he became particularly interested in Long Range Prone shooting and has gone on to win 5 National Championships in the US, representing the USA in 3 Long Range World Championships: He also co holds a national record in the sport. His interest in Long Range Prone, later spurred an interest in Smallbore Prone, and after taking this more seriously and competitively, won the CMP Smallbore Prone National Championships in 2022 and 2024!
Whidden Gunworks started in 2007. Originally, John Whidden was building rifles in the evening after his day job. Later, he was able to quit his day to day routine to build rifles full time. Around 2014, they started making dies for reloading centerfire ammunition and added a line of other reloading accessories as well as components. Whidden Gunworks now have 14 members of staff working at their shop in Nashville, Georgia.
Their presence in .22LR ammunition industry had grown significantly and it became clear Whidden would be an excellent partner for our USA testing facility.
“Our relationship with ELEY is unparalleled. ELEY’s supports our test range by backing us with quality ammunition and technical knowledge not found anywhere else” – John Whidden
John mentioned that an incredible “36,000 rounds of ammunition were shot on the test range in its first month! We all knew the learning curve would be steep once we started testing and indeed it has been. As a team, we have learned a whole lot of information about a number of topics, including – ammunition accuracy for rifle/pistol, tuners, and predicting long range accuracy to name a few. We’re on track to shoot approximately 500 tests this year. For the vast majority of shooters, we find ammunition that noticeably exceeds the performance of their current ammunition.”
Future aspirations for Whidden include “complementing our shop’s previous capabilities by adding a focus on .22 Long Rifle performance has been excellent for us. We fully plan to support shooters of the .22 cartridge with ammunition testing and sales as well as rifles and associated products. Very soon, our website will feature a Rimfire Performance page specifically planned to fulfil the needs of .22LR shooters everywhere. We look forward to having available new parts and accessories. We also have some exciting developments coming in our test range that will be of high interest to the growing Long Range .22LR community.
You can contact Whidden Gunworks directly via :
📧 info@whiddengunworks.com 📞 229-686-1911 💻 www.whiddengunworks.com
