Sizing Straight Walled Cartridges

The majority of my reloading experience has been with bottle-necked rifle cartridges, but I recently processed some straight-walled 38 Special brass, had issues getting cases started in the resizing die, and crushed one case mouth. It has easily been 40 years since I last loaded any straight-walled cartridges, so what problems I had then or other steps I took have been lost to time. I'm using a single stage RCBS RC-2 press with RCBS dies, where the sizing die only sizes and the de-priming is done in the expander die.

I'm wondering what steps folks take to make make sizing of straight-walled cases easier? Or, is just being careful to get the case started the name of the game? Would outside chamfering the fired cases help?

lightman said:

You may just have to go slow and guide them into the die with your fingers. Many older dies did not have as much radius around the mouth of the die as the newer dies have.

This was a real pain for me when I bought my Dillon and I traded all of my older dies for newer ones.

Click to expand...

My dies are probably 50 years old, and just standard steel. All the cases were well cleaned, no apparent mouth deformations, and well lubed. Thus, being an older set of dies with less radius at the opening probably explains the reason for my difficulty in getting the cases started. I'll just have to go slow.