“Kneading In” Case Lube

By Duane Thomas

It will greatly decrease the amount of force necessary to resize casings (thus produce less wear and tear on your reloading machine, and your joints, over time) if you can spread a thin film of case lube over the exterior of the cartridge casing before resizing. At the same time, however, we don’t want to get a lot of lube (ideally none) inside the cartridge casings since this could possibly contaminate our powder. “Keep your powder dry” isn’t a cliché, it’s good advice.

There are numerous ways to accomplish this. Here’s mine:

Buy yourself some plastic freezer bags. I don’t like the super-large freezer bags, nor the teeny little sandwich bags, for this job; medium-sized is the way to go.

Squirt a pump or two (I like the plastic “pump bottles” of lube) into the interior of the bag. This will coat the interior of the bag with a thin film of lube.

Fill the bag about halfway up with casings.

Seal the Ziploc® on the bag.

Then “knead” the bag in your hands. This will distribute a thin film of lube over the exterior of the casings, however, none of that will get into the interior of the casings.

If you have a casefeeder, at this point you can dump the casings into the hopper. Since my favorite loading machine is the Dillon Square Deal B which doesn’t have a casefeeder, instead I roll back the top of the bag to make it shorter overall, and sit it on my loading bench, to the right of the machine, next to Station 1 (the resizing/depriming die) where it’s quick and easy to grab a casing to feed into the machine. As I continue extracting casings and the number left in the bag progressively decreases, I roll the mouth down further and further until finally all the casings are gone.

This is the best way I know to apply a thin film of lube to all your cartridge casings, quickly and easily, while simultaneously avoiding getting any inside the casings, as well.