I have been struggling for a while with shaving lead from the side of boolits when seating them. Not all the time, not all molds, but almost all molds. I have done some experiments with chamfering the case mouth, increasing the flare, changing boolit size, tried a Lyman M-die, etc, and I finally determined the reason I've been having trouble: even when adjusted so that it doesn't apply any crimp, my Redding seating die just squishes the case back in. If I perform the seating operation with an improvised tool which doesn't push the case mouth back in, everything works perfectly, and a separate crimping operation with my Lee Collet die is just the ticket. Perfect cartridge every time with no shaving.
My question is, what is a good solution to my problem with the Redding die? I absolutely adore the micrometer seating stem I have for it, so I would really love to have similar convenience for whatever I replace it with. Should I just buy a different seating die by a different manufacturer and get the micrometer for that die too? Should I just get a similar Redding die for 44mag or 45 Colt and use that? What about the Hornady Cowboy seating die? How about modifying the ID of the Redding die I already have (somehow... It's carbide...)? Is there a universal seating die with a flat-faced seating stem I should use? I'm not super concerned about cost here since this problem impacts the vast majority of cartridges that I load, but I don't want to waste money on whack-a-mole purchases if it's not necessary. Help!
EDIT: Ah, I should have said! One of the things that I already tried (and have continued to use this way, since it did help a little bit) is that I backed off the body of the Redding seating die so that it no longer applies any sort of crimp to the brass. It's so far out that the micrometer stem has to be almost all the way in to do my shortest OAL boolit, an Accurate 36-159S (almost a wadcutter)... this means that the brass never gets anywhere near the crimping point in the die. In fact, what I have found is that the ID of the die is tightly consistent all the way down, so that almost as soon as the brass enters the body of the die at all it is squished back in. If I examine brass which has been through only a partial stroke where the boolit isn't seated at all, you can see that much of the mouth flare is gone.