Shooting Stuff

I've been cleaning, resizing and recleaning fired brass today, catching up on a backlog. The "recleaning" comes from the fact that even for carbide resizing dies I use lube. I find myself - again - greatly appreciating that modern resizing lubes are far superior to those available when I first started reloading. The modern stuff actually wipes or washes off. :-)

Man, that old stuff was nasty. The most common method of application was to squeeze some onto a for-purpose rubber pad and roll the cases on the pad. You pretty much *had* to get it on your hands. The pad was in a plastic case with a lid which supposedly kept the lube clean and moist, but even when it did the case would always have sticky, half-dried lube on the outside. Also, the stuff was designed to wet and coat evenly. So, even though it was slow, it was persistent, and spread everywhere.

Cleanup occasionally involved solvents. Scrubbing with soap and hot water would usually suffice. Laundry detergent would get it out of fabric, eventually.

I tell ya', you modern handloaders don't know how easy you got it! :-)