BROADALBIN – Although Frank’s Gun & Tackle Shop has long been a supporter of local tourism events, such as hunting and fishing tournaments, the store’s biggest contribution to local tourism might be its reloading room.
A few years ago, Frank’s Gun & Tackle Shop decided to focus on the growing popularity among some hunters for reloading ammunition. The store, which is owned by John Havlick, with Frank Havlick acting as one of the store’s key sales personnel, decided to take a large space it had been using for selling kyaks and canoes and use it to expand their reloading room.
“We had a small room of reloading stuff and we noticed it was getting more and more popular, and we were running out of room where we had it, and so we built this room and expanded it and it took off from there,” Frank said.
Frank’s Gun Shop’s reloading room is 400-square-feet of ammunition creating options.
“It’s the largest one in the area, the variety and the size of the things we carry,” Frank said. “We carry about five different kinds of primers in all different sizes. We have four or five different types of brass, [a name for shell casings], five different brands of bullets.”
Ammunition reloading involves a gun owner choosing his or her own primer, gun powder, shell casing and bullet to create ammunition that will perform consistently to the shooter’s expectations. In addition to quality control, it also provides cost savings compared to factory-made ammunition.
“Some of the ammunition is a little bit costly and if you shoot a lot, reloading brings the cost down and a lot of guys like to reload because some of the factory ammo, you might get a good group, but its not quite tight enough of what you want,” Frank said. “In reloading your ammo you can create a nice tight group. People do it because they want to strive to shoot hole for hole is what they are trying to do. Put one bullet into one hole, right after another. If a guy goes out hunting and he has a small window to take his game animal, he wants to make sure his bullet is dead-on, right where he wants it to go. If he has a very tight group [of ammunition], he knows he’s going to be able to place his shot right where he wants it.”?
On Friday, Frank’s Gun & Tackle Shop received the Barbara V. Spraker Tourism Partner Award from the Fulton Montgomery Regional Chamber of Commerce at the chamber’s 3rd Annual Celebration and Cocktail Party.
In its presentation of the award, chamber officials wrote that the chamber’s tourism department is “forever grateful” to Frank’s Gun & Tackle Shop for promoting tourism events. Chamber officials also sited the reloading room as a tourism draw.
“We do get people from all over. We have customers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, we’ve had people come down from Buffalo or Syracuse just to get stuff, because they know we got it,” Frank said. “[Most gun stores] carry a smaller amount and just the standard and basic stuff. We try to carry a variety of just about everything,”?
