Jim Taylor
RELOADING - Years Ago
Saturday, October 18, 2025, 07:50

When my Dad started teaching me to reload nearly 70 years ago, there were no such thing as carbide sizing dies. No matter the cartridge, they all had to be lubed before driving them into the die. If you didn't and if you forced it too hard you may have ended up buying a new die. Some cases (I've heard) were impossible to remove once driven into the die.

So we tried all kinds of lube. When I was reloading .38 Specials and .357 Magnums I had a Lyman "drive-in" die that you hammered the case into and then drove it back out. If you did not use a plastic mallet you soon beat the case head so badly the lettering disappeared. The higher pressure .357's were much more work than the .38's. Most of the time with the .38's my loads were light enough that all I had to do was size the neck of the case. Firing them in the one sixgun I owned, they refit the chamber acceptably. But the .357's were another story.

Before sizing I normally rubbed each cartridge on an old candle and got the wax all over it. After the cases were sized and deprimed I cleaned them by dumping them all into a #10 can, pouring in some gasoline, sloshing it around and pouring it out on an ant hill. Then I would lay the cartridges in the Arizona sun for awhile and all the gasoline was gone.

My cartridges were burnt and blackened and not pretty but they shot just fine.

When STP came on the market it was soon discovered to be THE ideal case lube for resizing! I never used it in my car but I used a lot of it resizing cartridges. By then I was reloading .38 Special - .357 Magnum - .303 British and .44-40. Later in 1969 I added .45 ACP, .45 Colt and .30 Carbine to the mix.

I loaded most all of them with the Lyman 310 Tool and the Lyman "drive in" sizing die.

I bought one of the first Lee Loaders that came on the market to reload the .30 Carbine. The hardest part was re-priming the cases, especially military cases with the crimped primer pocket. It was quite unsettling to put the primer on the die, set the case on top of it in the die holding it, whack it with the leather mallet and have the primer go off!

I think it was 1969 when I finally quit using the drive-in dies and began loading using an RCBS Rock Chucker. Not long afterwards I discovered carbide sizing dies. Life has never been the same since.