Mike, it's likely to be near a year or more before goex resumes operations and even then perhaps not at peak production. Their efforts may lean toward building supply for military use so who knows how long goex will be irrelevant to us shooters.
We can blame it on hodgdon (because it was their fault) but the goex plant was clearly run poorly or suffering from some production line issues for all the incidents it has had in recent years.
I spoke to a distributor in VA and his sales contact with goex stated they were at 8 million lbs annually at peak but had been around 3 million for a few years.
I suspect whoever bought Goex has more work than just staffing to keep their hair thin.
I would question the comment out of the distributor in VA regarding those production figures. The maxium production capacity of the Minden plant was determined by the number and size of the wheel mills in operation. When GOEX abandoned the Moosic plant they left the three du Pont designed 10-ton mills behind. They could no longer find anybody who could replace the babbit bearing in those big mills. Those 10-ton mills ran a batch size of about 350 pounds of powder in one milling cycle. Some powders were run for 2 hours. Other powders, such as our rifle type powder spent 3 hours in a wheel mill. It was strictly a one shift a day operation. When they set up the Minden plant they set it up with 3 wheel mills brought over from a defunct plant in South Africa. These are Krupp built 5-ton wheel mills. GOEX quickly found that if they ran the normal batch size of a 5-ton mill they would quickly go broke. They found max batch size in the 5-ton mills to be around 300 pounds. No way could they have put out 8 million pounds a year out of that plant and to get 3 million pounds they would have had to run the mills 24 hours a day 7 days a week.
If just finding a maintenance person with experience in replacing Babbit bearings in those "antique" mills was their sole issue, Goex/Hogdon wasn't putting enough thought or effort into their recruiting: although there's a well-recognized shortage of qualified candidates nowadays, they do exist, particularly out here in gold/silver mining country, where a 10-ton mill would be a sampling mill, and not any part of the main raw-ore circuit. Off the top of my head, I could have given them 5-6 names and phone numbers as starting points in their employee search; these guys likely wouldn't be interested in rejoining the work force on any long-term basis, but they'd all sure be interested in a short-term training/consulting gig, teaching another generation of millwrights.
MM, as you say, there's more going on there. It just remains to be seen how this all shakes out.
