800X is discontinued. Go to their web site and look. Dropped last year and now getting hard to find. Worse with all the panic buying people will buy it because it is all they can get and then find out that it does not meet their needs. It will sit on their wall until later when they either find a use or resell it. I bought over 40 pounds of PB in this way. In a year or two I hope to buy the same amount of 800X which will run me for the rest of my lifetime.
I understand why it was discontinued. Slow sales, very slow sales in dollar amounts. When a powder falls below one percent of your sales volume there has to be a real question of do we still need it or can we just drop it and shift those sales over to another number and by in large, that is exactly what has happened. I just wish they would do a limited product run every two or three years. Announce that there will be a special run of 10,000-50,000 pounds of powder X, available on a certain date. Let us stock up in bulk, on slow numbers, but keep them available. If they can do knock off Red, Green, Blue, Clay ... Dot, Unique, why not do a limited run of older powders? It is all volume and turn overs.
Sometimes there are no great replacement choices. We are working against the basic powder company goals. A powder must generate pressure at a certain minimum pressure level and curve so that it can work a semi automatic action. We want a powder to reach a peak pressure load, as low as possible, for a given performance. We want 5,000--7,000psi loads and they need 8,500- 10,000 psi just to keep semi autos running. It is getting worse because we are happy with 1100-1200 fps loads and all the new data seems to be 1300-1550 fps and the pressures for new stuff are all high to my needs. Most of the loads we are after are failures or at best very marginal loads for semi autos. I always wonder how many unpublished loads they have worked up that never met their minimum levels and we will never know about.
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