Reloaded another 200 rounds of .38 Special this morning.

It was anything but routine.

I broke the decapping pin on the sizing die. *sigh*  I’m not 100% sure how it happened, but here’s my guess. Earlier in the session I guess I didn’t get an empty case set in the shell plate correctly. I pulled the lever and it felt and sounded strange. I look at the shell plate and notice the old case was on its side and had been smashed flat against the bottom of the resizing die. Furthermore, the decapping pin had punched through the brass walls. Oops. I removed the damaged case and kept going. There were some hard to resize cases. I figure the pin had a crack or at least was stressed from the punch-through, and now with the difficult cases probably had more stress. Then on one pull of the handle I heard a strange noise and the pull felt weird. I looked, no more pin… it was in crumbled pieces inside the case I was attempting to resize and decap. *sigh*

Fortunately, I had an old set of Lee dies that I bought off Karl for cheap some time ago. I was able to put that sizing/decapping die in and finish the session.

So now I need to buy a new decapping pin. Thing is, I’m sure the cost of shipping it is going to be more than the pin itself (it’s about $3 for a pack of 5 pins). So, I need to find a way to make this worth my while. I am probably going to need to go to Cabela’s to get more bullets and probably some deer-hunting stuff, so if they have pins, great. If not well… I guess I’ll hope the Lee dies hold out until I’m done with .38 and then I’ll pick up pins whenever I next do an online order.

I’m just glad I had the spare dies and didn’t really have to break my stride. I’m itching to get .38 done with so I can get to working on 6.8 SPC loads with those Barnes .277″ 95 grain TTSX bullets. They won’t get used for hunting this season, but maybe hogs afterwards and into the future.

(Thanx to Ralph Wiggum for the title).