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I bought an older but knew set of dies at Olies and discovered they're a little different;
The first die ONLY sizes the case. The second die de-caps and flares the case. The third die seats and crimps.
I've never seen dies that work in this order, is there any advantage?
It's just RCBS's way of doing things as near as I can tell.Some of their sets are ot that way,it's caliber-related as I recall,but they've never explained why in their instructions.
These are old style dies, no real reason why they did things that way at one time, I imagine maybe it made manufacture simpler... All of RCBS' new die sets are in the standard size/decap, bell, seat/crimp order so they work better on progressive presses. If you look at your dies, you will usually see a two digit number following the type of die, this tells you what year it was made. I would bet your set was sometime in the 1980's.
They were made in '78. They're really beautiful steel dies, real quality made.
Its funny I actually bought the set to get the Flaring die, because the Lee set I bought is really just a 357 specific set and won't flare a .38 . So I bought this set cause it was cheaper than buying one die, now if I want to use just the RCBS flaring die, the case will go through 2 de capping dies in a row.First the Lee Carbide Sixer/decapper then the RCBS de capper/expander die.
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