Miscellaneous Lyman History Questions

[PBSmith]

1.) When did the black-and-white barber pole mold box first appear? These were still cardboard boxes. The factory instructions that came with one of mine has a zipcode, so it must have been around 1964 or later.

2.) Do molds from the black-and-white era generally meet or exceed specs in so far as size is concerned? Put another way, are the black-and-whites of the same quality as the Ideal Generation (most seem to agree that Ideal molds are great, and that has been my experience as well - no undersize problems).

3.) One of my black-and-whites has on the box "Group A," "Group B", or "Group C." One of these will be checked. What do the Group designations mean?

4.) When did the factory start adding a "0" to mold numbers with only five digits? Example: 31141 became 311041.

5.) When did the quality of Lyman molds start to go South? This in regards to undersize and erratically sized cavities. Unfortunately my junker Lymans did not come with boxes so I can't connect the dots.

6.) Did the orange plastic boxes immediately follow the B-W barber pole boxes? If so, when? If not, what came in between?

I've read the Ideal sticky and several subsequent threads on Ideal/Lyman, Thought I'd get some consolidation here from those who know the company's molds well. Called Lyman this morning and started to ask questions. They're apparently OTL on product history.

Please feel free to add any further details that might enable a potential Lyman mold buyer to make better informed purchases.

Thanks.

[John Boy]

4. Old IDEAL not Lyman molds (example 3118) - no cavity vent lines was updated to become “xxx008” (example 311008) when vent lines were adopted.

[Pressman]

The black and white boxes are from the era of Leisure Products, 1969-1979. There is an orange pasteboard box before the orange plastic. Mould vent lines goes way back, Lyman bought Ideal in 1926.
Don't ask Lyman about company history, they don't track it, never have.

[Bazoo]

Vent lines did not coincide with the 6 digit cherry number. I have a lyman 31141 that's vented. The Lyman 46th handbook has some of the information you seek.

[Guesser]

I have an Ideal 3118 with vent lines, so not all changes coincided with each other.

[PBSmith]

The black and white boxes are from the era of Leisure Products, 1969-1979. There is an orange pasteboard box before the orange plastic. Mould vent lines goes way back, Lyman bought Ideal in 1926.
Don't ask Lyman about company history, they don't track it, never have.

How was mould quality during the Leisure Products period?

[OS OK]

Might find some information here...

http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/Cast_...ml#45_452_mold

more info at the last page bottom too.

[PBSmith]

Might find some information here...

http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/Cast_...ml#45_452_mold

more info at the last page bottom too.

Thanks for that link.

[Bent Ramrod]

This is not “official history,” just what seems to me to be the general overview, bolstered by my reading and artifact accumulation experience.

Some time in the mid-to-late Fifties, going into the early Sixties, the Lyman family, now into the retirement-age grandchildren and adult great-grandchildren of founder William Lyman, wanted to get out of the business. The postwar developments of loading and sighting equipment, and the startup companies developing and marketing them, had made a lot of the Lyman/Ideal tools faulty or obsolete by comparison.

Bullet casting was somewhere between unfashionable and a lost art, except for pistol shooters. Even then, they were considered cheap practice; serious matches would be with swaged wadcutters and premium factory ammunition. Cast rifle bullets were regarded as inaccurate and unexciting, since the velocity developments of the Thirties, using jacketed bullets, were still the cutting edge. Swaging was all the rage, and sales of cheap dies with half jackets and zinc washers were going strong.

Lyman made a few halfhearted attempts to keep up with market developments, but obviously didn’t want to pay license fees on patents, or do a lot of expensive in-house RTD&E, so a lot of these appeared to be based on the stuff they were doing already, tweaked cosmetically and cheapened down to the max. The most notorious of these was the EZY-Loader, but that wretched shell trim tool, under discussion in another thread, was right in there, too.

The obvious way to economize on the moulds was to extend the working life of the tooling. A gun writer of the time, in an unusual moment of candor that the Editor didn’t catch, advised his readers that mould cherries started out at whatever maximum the market would bear, and were used, worn and resharpened to “the irreducible minimum.” The old Ideal design numbers of (for instance) 308XXX had already been expanded to 311XXX to this end before the War, but now, some of the 311 cavities could start as high as 0.315” or so. Not Lyman’s problem (they thought), just size them down to whatever. A new designation of (mould number) “U” came about, where the discerning customer could order a special “undersized” version for the allegedly oddball bore of his rifle (and Lyman, of course, could eke out a few more moulds from the worn-to-a-nubbin cherrie). Ironically, all the “U” moulds I’ve come across were actually spot-on for normal bores, needing little or no sizing; a better value for the money (if there was nothing else wrong with the cherrie) than the regular issue.

The cherries’ starting dimensions also got sloppier, too, and rounded grooves started replacing the earlier square ones. The moulds didn’t have the two-letter suffixes at this time, so presumably, the cherries were still made in-house. Whoever the toolmaker was, “there or thereabouts” was apparently good enough. I found a 311 number that was 0.316” on the shank, with a 0.297” or so nose. For a normal .30 caliber, this would have been a mess to size, and would have lolloped down the bore and hit the ground eventually, but “cast bullets weren’t accurate” anyway, so no harm, no foul. I cast a bunch of them, turned the driving bands off, charged the nose with Clover compound, and lapped it to 0.303”, which made it a perfect fit for my Dad’s Japanese rifle. Most people weren’t willing or able to do such modifications, but since all these aberrations did was to further the idea that “cast bullets aren’t much good,” nobody was particularly concerned. (Subject to correction, I think the Cast Bullet Association didn’t start till the mid-70’s. That was when people really started trying to find out what they would do. They basically had to relearn what was common knowledge among shooters before WWI.)

One thing that Lyman did address at the time was the fact that these oversized boolits, particularly when cast from the (then) easily-obtainable spent Linotype and other cheap hard alloys, were breaking the No. 45 sizer-lubricators. I think (subject to correction) that it was Lyman at this time that replaced the 45 with the 450, which has enough beef to not wreck itself doing “sizing” jobs that were actually swaging jobs. A writer in one of the Handloader’s Digests of the time said he was glad the 45 was gone; sizing large boolits or taking more than a few thou of any boolit was more than it could handle. (I wouldn’t trade a 45 for three 450s myself, but no doubt that’s because I’m a relic of an Unenlightened Age.)

But, of course, nobody in the Company’s management or ownership really cared that much, as long as the complaints weren’t too troublesome; they were just treading water until they could unload the works and retire. A shame, really. They had a renegade Product Engineer named George Huebner at this time, who seemed to come up with a lot of out-of-the-box ideas, which the reloading reporter for Gunsport “The Practical Gun Magazine,” used to write about. None of them, alas, ever came to market. I always wondered what happened to old George; some smart innovative company should have snapped him up.

If memory serves, the Leisure Group bought the Company in the early mid Seventies, and started upgrading the product line. I remember buying a few moulds that they advertised as “rejects” in Shotgun News; offered for cheep, no returns, no complaints. They had a big “R” stamped on the sides, so nobody would confuse them with the regular moulds. I bought them for the blocks, but cast a few just to see, and found to my amazement that they cast and shot just as good as anything from most other Lyman moulds.

The Leisure Group appeared to be one of those whatever-you-got, we’ll-run-it holding companies that were snapping up and consolidating a lot of smaller shooting supply companies at the time. Management was strictly in accordance with the latest tenets of the Biz Schools; so some losses and damage were inevitable. (Some gun writer pointed out that the reason Ruger stuff sold so well was that Bill Ruger was a shooter, and didn’t need “market research.”) The Leisure Group (obviously not shooters) looked over all the bullet cherries in Lyman’s inventory, and trashed everything that wasn’t earning its 7-1/2% per annum, or whatever. This purge happened just before the interest in “Loading the Old Ones” really started ramping up. (At the time, I was finding old wrecks at Gun Shows and scrounging for components to see how the original calibers shot, rather than modernizing them, so I was right in the midst of the trend.). I bet old George Huebner would have picked up on this sea-change (if anybody had asked him); Ken Waters and P. O. Ackley’s columns were getting a lot of questions on the subject by then. But the tooling was gone; a marketing decision right up there with “The New Coke” (gaahhhkkk!). Most of those classic old designs would have to wait for the small-shop mould makers that we all patronize today to take up the slack.

I have to say, though, that I don’t see all that many absolutely unusable moulds from Lyman, of any period. I guess my standards aren’t as high as some, but, with a few exceptions, I can make the castings shoot, in something, anyway.

If anybody has corrections to timelines, deductions, assumptions or anything else in here, I’d be glad to hear them. It’s a shame that these companies don’t realize that they are making history, as well as their products. Everybody’s too busy putting out the daily fires to step back and look. Being able to rummage through the old files and records would be fascinating.

[Pressman]

Dave, excellent write-up. Thanks.

[OS OK]

Bent Ramrod...thank you for the History Lesson...I really enjoyed the read.

[PBSmith]

Bent,
Thanks so much for that interesting and well-written chronicle. You should send it to Lyman. If I were trying to run the company, I'd certainly want to read it very carefully.

Makes me doubly sad to learn all of this because during the time Lyman was going through its limp-in (or limp-out?) mode, both my late father and I as well as friends and neighbors became close-out relics from Pittsburgh's faltering steel industry. The disease in that situation had different causes and symptoms. And of course the carnage was many times worse.

It makes me wonder how much longer Lyman will attempt to hang in there.

[rintinglen]

One other reason for the reduction in cavity size was that that was what shooters were being told by “the experts” we needed. “Experience has shown that each .001 inch of sizing results in about an extra inch of group dispersion at 100 yards.” “The bullets that shoot best are the ones that have been modified least after casting.” Says so right in theRCBS Manual.
Some of the gun rag writers ran this same malarkey. “Ideally, the mold should drop bullets at most .002 over the diameter of the bore.” Back in the 70’s that was the prevailing opinion, so that was what Lyman did. Boolits got smaller. Then, Lyman more or less turned their backs on their roots as the bean counters took over, dumping scores of designs to concentrate on the most profitable.

Now in fairness, I cannot fault them for that. American rifle shooters were still basking in the joys of “magnum-itis” and bullet molds for odd ball calibers could not be economically made and sold. Stacks of inventory sitting unmoving on warehouse shelves were and are unprofitable. They made what folks were buying.

Unfortunately, thanks to the CBA and this board, casters have become more knowledgeable and preferences change. Lyman has not kept up.

[Pressman]

During the 10 years Leisure Products owned the company a lot of crap happened that was not good for the product line, only the bottom line. Lots of old records were tossed along with moulds and other tooling. Anything that cost an extra penny and didn't make pennies went. In my opinion the MBA is one of the worst things to happen to American industry.
Thankfully Lyman is back in private ownership and making a slow comeback.

[John Boy]

Vent lines did not coincide with the 6 digit cherry number.

Sorry gents, read this somewhere.
A better answer ... When Lyman got computerized they padded out the low design numbers with zeros, so an old 3118 is the same as a new 311008.
When? Probably in the era with the 1st Lyman catalog with xxxxxx molds

[jrmartin1964]

3.) One of my black-and-whites has on the box "Group A," "Group B", or "Group C." One of these will be checked. What do the Group designations mean?

4.) When did the factory start adding a "0" to mold numbers with only five digits? Example: 31141 became 311041.

OP's question No.3:
From Lyman's 1975 catalog:
Group A: Our most popular group of designs.

Group B: Regularly produced designs that require only a brief wait. Four cavity blocks not available in Group B.

Group C: Our list of special-order, custom-made designs available only from factory. Wholesale discounts not available.

OP's question No.4:
Not a precise answer, but the old numbering system of four, five, and six digits was still in use in 1980 when the Cast Bullet Handbook, 3rd Edition, was published.

Jim

[James Wisner]

This might be of help.

From 1993 to 1995 I bought 5 Lyman 4 cavity molds new.

They are

356632AV
356634AV
358311AV
358429BV
429421AV

The 356632 and 356634 moulds were a short time production, last cataloged in 1995 if I recall
The only reloading info Lyman published for them was in 1994 in the Pistol and Revolver Reloading Handbook
Note the AV sufix letters, so by the belief of the first cherry ( A ) from vendor V the belief would hold true

The 358429BV, and 429421AV moulds I purchased just because LYman had done away with the round lube groove and went to the angled side, flat bottom lube groove.

I am currently going back thru all my Lyman moulds to update my list with the cherry vendor information, and will update this later.

J Wisner

[Zingger]

Bent- I want to add to the crowd that is thanking you for the very well written and informative post. Well done, sir.

[MT Gianni]

I have had a couple of Ideal single cavities that were unvented but no Lymans. From what Floodgate wrote the transition between the Ideal and Lyman names happened about 1958-1960. Strange how even the unvented 4 cavity molds worked well when treated well.

[PBSmith]

Lots of interesting information here. Thanks to all who have responded.

I have only one mould that came in a black-and-white box. In soft lead, tt drops at 0.3575", about right per designation "35863."

IF anyone has a Lyman mould in this type of box, are your bullets dropping close to their intended size?