Help my failing memory ageing stinks

[JBMauser]

Not that long ago I found on one of the cast bullet sites the manual for the swage-o-matic. now that I have found one and it is on the way I can't for the life of me find the site. Any of you have more brain cells working than I appear to have? I thought it was on the old fowling shot board, HELP.... JB

[JBMauser]

Found it at cast pics...... I guess I should have just kept digging... sorry for the false start. Any of you ever work with these critters?

[Char-Gar]

I bought one of the C-H Swage-O-Matics when they first came out around 1961 or so. Jim Harvey of Lakeville Arms was making quite a splash with his "Jugular" handgun bullets for the 357 and 44 magnum sixguns. Soft lead core in a copper half jacked. Blew up like high explosive and made critters DRT.

You must remember that at that time, there wre no JHP bullets for sixguns and these things were quite a change. YOu used cast, FMJ or nothing in your handguns.

The Swage-O-Matic was a rip off of the idea so folks could make them at home. I bought one with 30 cal dies. Worked fine if you kept them short/light. If you had too much lead sticking out of the copper cup, it would not chamber unless you some very serious throating. The notion worked well for sixgun or 30 cal, if you kept the bullet weight in the 30 cal to 100 grains or so.

It was only a couple of years later than Speer offered some simililar bullets (357 and 44) in their lineup for over the counter purchase. This pretty well did the Swage-O-Matic in and those bullets are still in the Speer catalog and are still excellent bullets. The Speer 30 cal plinker, which came out about the same time, was an over the counter version of the 30 cal Swage-O-Matic.

The Speer bullets, killed off the Swage-O-Matic and Harvey's Jugular bullets. I for one didn't and do not mourn the passing of the Swage-O-Matic.

Lakeville Army went belly up shortly after all of this. Harvey had all kinds of problems with the Feds. He did a great conversion on the cheap (then) Colt 1917s (45 ACP) for shotshellf. He smoothed bored the barrel and that made it an illegal sawed off shotgun according to the Feds. I think that is what pulled the plug on Harvey. Darn shame, as allot of very creative and useful things came from the brain of Jim Harvey.

Lord, I can't believe I am old enough to have first hand experience with all of this!!!

[Bullshop]

If any of yall wants one of them swage-o-matic gizmoes I have one FS. Think it comes with two die sets, 357, and 45.
BIC/BS

[JBMauser]

Chargar, thank you for your "history" I just want to cut my teeth on swageing and I have it my mind to swag as long a .45 cal bullet I can and paper patch it up to stuff in my danish rolling block that has a throat of .462. Thanks again for the info. Bullshop, I may email you to see what you need for that unit once I get the one I have enroute to see if it is equal to the job of producing anything. thanks JB