wonderwolf
07-19-2007, 06:26 PM
I have been gearing up to have my own reload set up this month so I'm all set when I move out when school starts back up. I've been using my dads equip for a long time now and though I have my own dies for most of the guns in calibers I only own I do not have dies for the more common things I have. 45LC and 44mag carbide dies from RCBS were on the list and I got those out of the way this month. I was getting tired of using 4 dies to reload .44 mag so I was excited to have a 3 die set that would make things go alot faster and smoother.
I set the dies up in my dads lyman turret press and started to FL size and decap. Right out of the gate I realized something was not right. The carbide ring was sizing them down more than they needed to be. I have a wilson case gauge in .44 mag and I dropped the pcs of brass I sized in there and they went in. This was a tight gauge as brass sized from my dads dies and even factory ammo did not want to seat all the way in the gauge. ANYWAYS the brass is being sized .005 smaller than the brass sized by my dads set. If you run your fingers from the case head to mouth you can feel the "drop" or "step" or whatever you want to call it. The inside of the case mouth is then .420 before being expanded and the other cases run through my dads sizer are .010 bigger in most cases (no pun intended). So even though I like the idea of having rounds that would feed very smoothly into my revolvers I don't want to be OVERWORKING my brass and shorten case life.....I found a lee carbide sizer and ran some cases through there for a 3rd comparison and they seem to be on the same level as my dads die set. You can feel that transition but its not as extreme in those cases as they would be in mine. You can see it to the point I would take a picture and post it if I thought it would come out well. sigh....I really don't want to have to buy another .44 mag die set cause I still need to get 45ACP & 357mag
I set the dies up in my dads lyman turret press and started to FL size and decap. Right out of the gate I realized something was not right. The carbide ring was sizing them down more than they needed to be. I have a wilson case gauge in .44 mag and I dropped the pcs of brass I sized in there and they went in. This was a tight gauge as brass sized from my dads dies and even factory ammo did not want to seat all the way in the gauge. ANYWAYS the brass is being sized .005 smaller than the brass sized by my dads set. If you run your fingers from the case head to mouth you can feel the "drop" or "step" or whatever you want to call it. The inside of the case mouth is then .420 before being expanded and the other cases run through my dads sizer are .010 bigger in most cases (no pun intended). So even though I like the idea of having rounds that would feed very smoothly into my revolvers I don't want to be OVERWORKING my brass and shorten case life.....I found a lee carbide sizer and ran some cases through there for a 3rd comparison and they seem to be on the same level as my dads die set. You can feel that transition but its not as extreme in those cases as they would be in mine. You can see it to the point I would take a picture and post it if I thought it would come out well. sigh....I really don't want to have to buy another .44 mag die set cause I still need to get 45ACP & 357mag