My apologies for a longish post but it's in order. In a fit of temporary sanity, I decided to forgo the round ball cartridges and again go for BP cartridges with conical bullets. In the past, I've had good results with conical bullets but the fouling has been an issue since the bullets didn't have appropriate lubing. I don't like putting grease cookies under the bullets because if I don't shoot them all right away, there is the possibility that the lube will migrate into the powder and cause misfires.
I got ahold of a friend of mine.
Mark Whyte, aka Springfield Slim, who I have shot a lot of CAS with and who, in addition to doing leather working, casts bullets. He casts big lube bullets in both 260 grain and 200 grain. His price for 'as cast' bullets is good so I ordered some.
Meanwhile I started getting my Lyman 450 lube sizer ready to go with some BP lube. I first had to get the nasty black Lyman lube out of the thing. I disassembled it and cleaned all the pieces with a little solvent. I was able to get the plug of lube out of the main housing but that still left all the little passageways and such to clean out. I went online to find out how to clean that out. Most people were talking about submersing the whole thing in boiling water and waiting for all the lube to melt out. That sounded like a total mess to clean up afterwards, not to mention that all the exposed internal metal would be subject to rusting.
One guy said he used a hairdryer to melt the stuff out. So I put the main casting on a piece of cardboard and heated it with a heat gun. In fairly short order, I had bullet lube running all over the place. It's amazing how much lube the thing had in it. I cleaned up the outside and tossed the cardboard.
Also in my search online I read about guys complaining about bullet lube migrating out the bottom of the unit, oozing out onto the workbench. Some said they were loosing a bullet's worth of lube for every 4 or 5 bullets. One guy's solution was to bond a thin sheet of steel onto the bottom of the unit with JB Weld. The drawback to that was that when he wanted to take it apart, he would have to break the JB Weld and remove the plate. I assume that meant making a new plate every time you changed lube. Not for me.
I cut a plate the shape of the base out of 1/8" steel. Then I ground and draw filed the base flat. I needed new O-rings so I got them at the local parts store along with a sheet of gasket material. I drilled 1/8" holes through the plate and the base Then I tapped them to 10-32 and drilled the plate out to fit the flat head machine screws. After that was done, I installed the plate with Permatex gasket sealer on the top side only. Now it's ready to go and If I want to change the lube in the future, I will only need to make a new gasket, which I have plenty of now.
Now when the bullets arrive, I will be able to size and lube them with my lamb tallow/beeswax lube.
