I'm slowly honing my reloading skills with a few breakthroughs... started using the k&m flash hole deburrer instead of the crappy rcbs one, it's incredible. Figured out the forster 3-in-1 trimmer is way more consistent than hand tools. Started neck turning to take down high spots in the neck and reduce runout.
But the thing that causes me the most stress is the most basic step, full length resizing. I'm actually kind of scared of it.
I started with a lee FLS, within less than 100 cases it was galling and leaving "stretch marks" on all sides of my 308 cases. I took it apart, used a .50 bronze brush with butch's to clean it. Polished the inside with flitz's on a shotgun mop to a mirror shine. My cases were spotless, deprimed and ultrasonic cleaned before resizing. Lubed with one-shot on all sides, 45 degree down spray to hit neck etc.
I heard about imperial, tried using that for a while. Dry lube with application media to get the inside of the necks, wiped the outside off so I wouldn't be getting graphite powder in the die sticking on the sizing wax. After wiping the outside I applied a light coat of wax. Extremely tedious. This worked but the die sometimes took a lot of force and crushed a lot of my necks down.
Took out the expander rod, fine sanding and polishing to try to reduce it by .001 or so and smooth it out.
Had a bunch of brass to do and didn't feel like spending 30 seconds on each one with the 2-step imperial application so I went back to the one shot spray. Got a case stuck in there. The shell holder was on the bottom of the die and would not come down. The rod would not come back up out of the neck. I had to hammer it out with the expander rod (the lee rod is very tough by the way). The rod was stuck in the case when it came out. This happened a couple times, I had to cut the case off the rod each time.
I used a lot of spray to get the next batch through, it seemed to work better but the cases started galling again, stretch marks. I was worried I had too much lube, the cases were pretty wet so I went lighter but still hit all 4 sides with a half-second shot of the spray. Then one got so stuck I gave up and threw the whole thing in the trash.
Tried an rcbs. This one didn't take nearly the same amount of force but again, after about 100 cases I got one stuck and I bent the threaded rod trying to get it out. 2nd die ruined.
Now I just bought a forster FLS but I'm scared to use it. I also bought the forster high pressure lube, the yellow oil. I've got no confidence that I'm going to be able to get more than 100 rds through this thing before I ruin it.
I see from the forum that some guys just don't use the expander rod when they FLS. Is this the secret? How do you get consistent neck tension without anything going down into it before the bullet?
I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong but this is driving me nuts. I know there are thousands of people who don't even clean their brass before they FLS and they aren't having these issues.
Any advice? Thanks
But the thing that causes me the most stress is the most basic step, full length resizing. I'm actually kind of scared of it.
I started with a lee FLS, within less than 100 cases it was galling and leaving "stretch marks" on all sides of my 308 cases. I took it apart, used a .50 bronze brush with butch's to clean it. Polished the inside with flitz's on a shotgun mop to a mirror shine. My cases were spotless, deprimed and ultrasonic cleaned before resizing. Lubed with one-shot on all sides, 45 degree down spray to hit neck etc.
I heard about imperial, tried using that for a while. Dry lube with application media to get the inside of the necks, wiped the outside off so I wouldn't be getting graphite powder in the die sticking on the sizing wax. After wiping the outside I applied a light coat of wax. Extremely tedious. This worked but the die sometimes took a lot of force and crushed a lot of my necks down.
Took out the expander rod, fine sanding and polishing to try to reduce it by .001 or so and smooth it out.
Had a bunch of brass to do and didn't feel like spending 30 seconds on each one with the 2-step imperial application so I went back to the one shot spray. Got a case stuck in there. The shell holder was on the bottom of the die and would not come down. The rod would not come back up out of the neck. I had to hammer it out with the expander rod (the lee rod is very tough by the way). The rod was stuck in the case when it came out. This happened a couple times, I had to cut the case off the rod each time.
I used a lot of spray to get the next batch through, it seemed to work better but the cases started galling again, stretch marks. I was worried I had too much lube, the cases were pretty wet so I went lighter but still hit all 4 sides with a half-second shot of the spray. Then one got so stuck I gave up and threw the whole thing in the trash.
Tried an rcbs. This one didn't take nearly the same amount of force but again, after about 100 cases I got one stuck and I bent the threaded rod trying to get it out. 2nd die ruined.
Now I just bought a forster FLS but I'm scared to use it. I also bought the forster high pressure lube, the yellow oil. I've got no confidence that I'm going to be able to get more than 100 rds through this thing before I ruin it.
I see from the forum that some guys just don't use the expander rod when they FLS. Is this the secret? How do you get consistent neck tension without anything going down into it before the bullet?
I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong but this is driving me nuts. I know there are thousands of people who don't even clean their brass before they FLS and they aren't having these issues.
Any advice? Thanks