Swage press

grabcad

For years, many hand loaders have been under the impression that swaging was too expensive or complicated for them. The myth has been repeated over and over, sometimes by those who would prefer that you do NOT know the truth (since then, you would know that you could make the same product that you now feel you must pay them to produce for you!). In the years just after the Second World War, right up until the mid-1970's, there was in fact some truth to this. Bullet swaging equipment was, at one time, only built for the benchrest shooter by a few dedicated die-makers, who had to charge the equivalent of several thousand of today's dollars for their painstaking work. World records were set by bullets swaged in these dies. A few firms tried to offer low cost versions but the result was typically very poor, and nearly all of them went out of business eventually. Partly because of the people who tried to cut corners and make cheap swaging tools, swaging got an undeserved bad reputation among shooters who had never tried it, or had only tried the cheaper tools. (The same is true today: a handful of low-end producers do in fact make cheaper versions of Corbin tools, even copying the nomenclature and catalog numbering system. But it has always been easier to copy terminology than quality.)