Eley Ltd. of Birmingham, England, manufacturers the finest, most accurate rimfire ammunition in the world. Want proof? The Eley TenEx brand entered world competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, where it won all the Gold and Silver medals in all the .22 LR pistol and rifle events. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, every firearm pistol medal was won by Eley TenEx. Of the 60 medals awarded in international smallbore rifle competition worldwide during the 2003 World Cup Competition season, Eley's top-line TenEx Ultimate EPS .22 LR load won 33--three times more than Eley's nearest competitor and seven times more gold medals than any other manufacturer. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, Eley TenEx took nine of the possible 15 medals possible--three times more than its nearest competitor.

Eley has applied its 50-plus years of high-performance rimfire technology to the newly introduced .17 Mach2 cartridge.

In 2004 Eley applied its high-performance rimfire technology to the new .17M2 cartridge and introduced the 2100 fps Eley 17 Mach2, featuring a blue-tipped Hornady 17-grain V-Max bullet and the same patented Eleyprime System Technology as TenEx itself. Is it as good? I bumped into Dieter Anschutz at the 2004 NRA Convention in Pittsburgh.

He pulled a folded target from his suit pocket to show me a tiny, one-hole, five-round, 100-meter group he had personally shot with the new Eley load through a prototype Anschutz 17M2 rifle. His view was that it was the most accurate rimfire ammunition he had ever fired, and Dieter Anschutz knows something about rimfire accuracy. And consider that Remington has contracted Eley to produce Remington-label .17M2 ammunition to the same specifications and has also added an Eley-made/Remington-label .22 LR competition/target line of ammo to its catalog.

So how does Eley do it?

How Eley Does It
Last November Eley and its exclusive U.S. distributor, Zanders Sporting Goods, offered a group of Primedia writers and editors the opportunity to visit the company's just-opened manufacturing facility in England, allowing outsiders, for the first time in Eley's history, to observe its manufacturing techniques. It was an amazing visit. I can't tell you everything we saw because of proprietary considerations, but I can tell you that I will never think quite the same way about how ammunition is engineered and produced.

The company was founded in London by brothers William and Charles Eley in the 1820s and has been in business ever since--albeit under a variety of corporate identities and ownerships. Major ammunition developments that have come from Eley include a joint patent with Samuel Colt for Colt revolver cartridges, in 1855; Britain's first centerfire cartridge, produced in 1857; fundamental patents during the 1860s in the development of the Boxer primer system; development of the first bottleneck rifle cartridges, in 1869; and thin-brass totally waterproof shotshell cartridges, in 1882.

During the American Civil War, Eley was a major supplier of ammunition to the Confederacy. Its first .22 rimfire cartridges were produced in 1860, but the move toward Eley's present world rimfire prominence really didn't begin until 1951 with the introduction of the first generation of TenEx.

Eley's goal behind the initial TenEx development was to provide British-made .22 LR ammunition, built to extreme consistency, that British shooters could use to win British shooting competitions. (American-made Western Supermatch and Winchester EZXS were the dominant competition loads of the time.) It worked. The 1951 British Championship and the Grand Aggregate events at Bisley were won by Eley team shooters using TenEx.