INTIMATE SECRETS OF THE LYMAN 450 LUBRISIZER

INTIMATE SECRETS OF THE LYMAN 450 LUBRISIZER

 

            While the Lyman 450 has worked well for me for many years, there are some little known methods to make the machine work better.

            When changing dies and fiddling with the working area of the 450, the handle has frequently fallen down, sometimes causing me to say bad words as the top punch tries to size my finger or thumb down. To keep the handle from falling down, I developed a technique that I call “Flipping the pusher-upper thing over".

            Flip it over when you start to fiddle with the dies and you'll never have your finger or thumb resized again.

 

 

 

            The handle of the 450 breaks when you try to do some heavy sizing or bumping. This can be avoided, (or fixed after breaking), by brazing good sized washers to the outside of each of these holes in the handle. The other holes don't fail. Clayton Prario brazed my handle many years ago and the 450 has done a lot of hard bumping and sizing since, without a whimper.

 

 

 

The Lyman 450 scheme is that you can seat a gas check, size the bullet and lube that bullet; all with one mighty pull on the handle. Sometimes you can do this, many times not.

Lyman sells gas check seaters as accessories for their lubrisizers. I've never understood why these are needed.

Here's a picture of the hollow screw, plunger and nut.

Screw the hollow screw way up, the nut will come off, until the 450 just seats the gas check on the bullet base so that you can't pull the gas check off with your thumb nail. There'll be only a little movement of the bullet down.

John Bischoff adds: “If you move the nut on the hollow screw from the bottom side of the frame to the top side of the frame, you can then lock the hollow screw in place at a high enough s etting to crimp the gas checks without sizing the bullet. It doesn't seem to affect the operation when sizing long bullets. Lyman just assembled it the easy way instead of the correct way.” I moved the nut to the top of the frame, here's the picture. John is right, again!

 

 

 

 

 

The gas check is now seated.  I seat once, turn the bullet ~90 degrees and pull down again.

Seating gas checks in a separate operation allows you to control the seating in a way that we can't if we try to seat gas check, size and lube in one step.

You want the gas check seated all-the-way, and square. To make sure the gas check is all the way on the bullet, get the gas check on a bullet base nicely and put some force on the handle and make sure that the gas check on this sample is on the bullet all the way.

 

 

The groove above the gas check tells all. If the groove is as narrow as the sample you're sure is right, with the gas check seated all the way, then the checks are seated all-the-way.

And, if that groove is the same width all the way around, the gas check is seated square.

So, that bottom groove tells the story. If all is correct, the gas check is seated properly. Adjustment of that hollow screw, way up, allows seating gas checks very precisely.

 

Now, lubricating the bullet. There are reports that too much lube on the bullet affects accuracy. It is possible to lubricate some or all of the grease grooves on a bullet with the 450.

 

Here's a bullet with only one of the two grease grooves filled with lube. The bottom groove, just above the gas check, is sometimes the only groove filled with lube.

The problem with this is that if you set the hollow screw, plunger, nut so the bullet only goes in far enough to lube the bottom grease groove-or worse, the groove above the gas check; then there's a good chance that you won't size the forward  band. With my 450 and dies, I can fill the bottom grease groove, and the front band, in a .309” sizing die, is at .311” or so. It doesn't size down. If I re-set the hollow screw, plunger, nut to size the first or top band correctly, then all grooves are filled with lube.

So, I have to size and lube in two separate steps.

But wait, there's more.

This bullet is a 314299 that casts .3145” or so on the bands. It has a big .303” nose, and likes to be sized .3095” on the bands.

If you size a hard bullet from .3145” to .3095” in one step, you've got to really tug on the 450 handle. And sometimes the nose bumps up .001” or so, making it harder to get the cartridge into the gun.

If you size a soft bullet from .3145” to .3095” in one pull, the tugging is noticeably easier but the nose may bump up as much as .0025", varying a lot, and making some cartridges quite hard to get into the chamber.

You don't want the cartridges hard to chamber, because sometimes the bullet gets pushed into the case, affecting accuracy.

What to do? First I size the .3145” bullets to .3120". Then I size the .3120” bullets to .3095". This 2-step sizing keeps the noses from bumping up (much), and is a lot easier on my arm and the 450.

For both sizing steps I set the hollow screw, plunger, nut so that the bullets go way down and are sized on all the bands.

Then I re-set the hollow screw, plunger, nut to lubricate the bottom grease groove.

So, my process is to

Seat the gas checks

Size to .3120"

Size to .3095"

Lube

 

I oil the ram and all rubbing joints on the 450, (and all machines, including guns), with Marvel Mystery Oil. Oiling makes machines work easier and smoother and wear less.

 

Some claim that holding the top punch in the ram with a dab of bullet lube allows the top punch to center itself and not contribute to “off-center sizing” I don't know about the off center business, but I do know that putting a dab of bullet lube on the top punch holds it in the ram, and I don't have to search for the elusive allen wrench..

 

            There's some thought that nose-first sizing is “better". The Lyman 450 can be used for nose-first sizing by flipping the pusher-upper thing over, removing the ejector pin from the sizing die, and using a specially-made nose punch that pushes the bullet through the die point down and out the bottom of the die. Lubing CAN be done as the sizing goes on, but it's tricky.

 

            The force required on the handle varies as the hardness of the bullet. It would seem simple to hang a spring scale on the handle and record the force required to size a given bullet with different alloys. We could then call the 450 the “BHN tester". A clever person could find a way to finagle a torque wrench onto the machine and have a more precise hardness measure.