What is your Lube and Size Routine?

[usnret]

You stated that having lube on a magnum rifle or pistol case is bad juju. You never said that it needed to be removed before firing. You just stated that you should never get or put lube on those two types of cases!

[Rip Van Winkle]

As I mentioned, I use Imperial Die wax exclusively, and one of those little tins will last you thousands of cases. After that, I wash the cases in the sink with dish soap in a collander, then rinse with another sinkful of hot water, and put the cases in a glass Pyrex cake pan and let them dry im my oven with a gas pilot light over night.

I have NEVER considered using my tumbler to get the lube off, because that begs the question of how many times you can do this before your media gets enough lube on it to start adding lube to cases you have resized dry with a carbide die. I can't think of a good way to figure this out, and considering the consequences of shooting ammo with lube on it, how would you know when you have gone too far, apart from something really drastic happening? I'm not about to use a technique that has foreseeable questions that don't have answers to them, and it's clear that at some point you're going to have to throw your media away and start with fresh stuff.

Imperial wax works great, unfortunately it's slow and putzy to apply. When I do 1000 cases, I can divide them into 100 round bags and by the time I have the last one prepared the first is ready to resize.

As to tumbling off the lube, I've come to the conclusion the media will be worn out before it's absorbed enough lube. The biggest problem I'm running into is making sure the flash holes are clear.

[crbutler]

For me, I use Imperial on anything I load in a single stage press. Works great, and I am not after speed here.

I will use either dillon or hornady one shot on the stuff in a progressive machine. I'm pretty lazy about it and just dump the cases in the case feeder bowl, spray some on, agitate by hand for 10 seconds, then fill up the rest of the stuff (bullet tray, top off the powder measure, etc.) and go from there. You do need to develop a feel as to how much is enough.

One shot supposedly is good to go at that point, but the dillon stuff stays pretty tacky, so I will usually run them over a shop cloth as I box them, but I have dumped them in the vibratory cleaner for 10 minutes to clean it off, even though supposedly you should not do that with loaded ammo- but it never made any difference as far as I could tell with the chronograph, as long as it was a short run.