Got a used lube sizer

[10x]

I finally got around to cleaning up a used lyman 45 lube sizer I purchased last summer.
I tried the usual tricks to get the lube to flow, hair dryer, then a heat gun, then I put the darn thing in a pot of boiling soapy water on my turkey cooker.
I got about a cup of wax out and to the surface, and the hi die came out with a great deal of resistance, Skim the crud off the surface and back into the hot water for a couple of minutes.

The previous owner must have been using homemade lube with wax, grease, and graphite in it. The graphite was almost a solid in the nooks crannies and corners in side the sizer. It was a royal pain to get everything out with tooth brushes, brake clean, and small bottle brushes. The wax was a similar consistancy to old melted crayons.

Now the autopsy. The graphite seemed to settle to the bottom, the grease was in the middle and the wax seemed to have migrated to the top of the pressure cylinder. Heat melted the wax, the grease had to be desolved in brake klean and the the graphite/wax mixture at the bottom had turned solid and had to be scrubbed out with brushes. The "lube" left in the hi die would not melt or be desolved but had to be scrubbed out.

Any Lube sizer I have ever cleaned up before this just took about 15 minutes with a hair dryer, pour the hot lube out into a tin cup, and a wipe down with a paper towel and bit of mineral spirits.

Has anyone else ever run into this problem?

[powderburnerr]

no not really ...I just add lube and continnue on oblivious of the previous crud in the sizer . if it sticks on the bullet and dont feel gritty I just shoot it .....
in loaner guns.........Dean

[Shepherd2]

I bought an Lyman 45 a couple years ago that had some well harden lube in it. It took about 10 minutes with a heat gun to clean it out. That was some nasty homemade lube you ran into. If it's you first 45 you'll find out that they are nice machines.

[10x]

It is my first 45, I have a couple of RCBS lubamatics but the lyman just seems nicer. And it is orange too!

[JBMauser]

My first SAECO lubra sizer came stuffed with a hard blue lube that was more like plastic. I had to boil it out and dig it out. Bright navy blue color and not sticky to the touch. JB

[montana_charlie]

Has anyone else ever run into this problem?
Maybe...
I bought my #45 in an eBay sale, and it came in the original box with some dies and punches. It was half-full of lube, and there was a stick of 'new stuff' in it's own original Lyman packaging.

The material in the press and the new stick were both black, hard, and old.

I disassembled the press as far as I could go, (never managed to get the reservoir tube out of the cast iron) and put the parts in a 200 degree oven for forty minutes.

Even with that...I had to dig the stuff out with a sharp stick.

I don't know what Lyman's lube formula was like, back in the days when the #45 was the cutting-edge whiz-bang, but I think it became part of the mix when they decided to pave the nation's highways.
CM

[Bent Ramrod]

I still have a stick left of the old Ideal lube that I doubt I will ever use. Used another stick one time previously, and it was basically, as far as I could see, made of melted black Crayolas. Not very good as a lube, utterly incompatible with other lubes and the remainders streaked the later Alox/beeswax lubes for months until I boiled the machine out and started over.

The oldtimers who made up lubes with "Oildag" or other graphite preparations always warned that their formulations needed a stir once in a while to keep the solid particles of graphite from settling out. If I recall, they were mostly used to pan lube bullets. Your previous owner evidently boiled up a mess of this stuff and poured it, molten, into your lubrisizer instead of stirring it in a shallow pan as it was cooling and breaking up the pieces and putting them in after it had hardened.

[grumpy one]

My 45 came with quite a bit of stuff like stiff black clay in it. About the same time I bought I think 9 sticks of traditional Lyman lube still in its original packets. It seems like pretty much the same stuff, but it hadn't gone hard at all. I got all I could out of the lubesizer and started to use 50-50 beeswax-alox. About six hundred bullets later I'm still getting black stripes up the side of my bullets, across the lube grooves. Each time I swap a sizing die I laboriously remove as much of the black stuff from its exterior and lube holes as I can, but I never run out of black stripes. Maybe a pinch of that black stuff acts like a bread dough starter, and converts real lube into black crud in between uses. It'll just keep breeding black stuff in there until I get old and die.


Geoff