That’s funny…I can imagine on a Monday morning the teacher asking the class of 8 year olds what they did over the weekend. Your Little Johnny says I helped my dad load ammunition. Here in the People’s Republic of Fairfax, that’d get you a visit from child protective services pronto.
Here, when my son happens to find a piece of empty 30-06 brass in the pocket of his jacket while he’s at recess in school, he sticks it in his jeans pocket so he can show it to his Principal at lunch, because he knows his Principal is a big .30-06 fan, because they’ve talked about hunting, fishing, and shooting sports together for a few years already…
No live ammo, no guns, no threatening language, no violence - the rest is still largely common sense. A high school teacher might ask to borrow a kid’s pocket knife during a school day if the need arose to cut some string or open a package…
I’ve wondered if one of these hand operated swagers could damage the web to the point where the case is no longer safe to load? And if so, how could one tell?
Setting up your decapping rod in your sizing or decapping die incorrectly CAN damage your case web. But it’s pretty difficult to set up the gear so incorrectly that this
actually happens.
I do go back and forth about swaging versus reaming. In principle, I like that swaging retains material, but also in principle, I dislike that it puts so much force on the case to do such a minimally important operation. But then again, in principle, I’m largely against swaging or reaming at all in their broadest application, because it’s not a value-add step for case performance, it’s simply undoing something which shouldn’t have been done in the first place. I can appreciate uniforming for EXTREME control on ignition consistency, but just to recover Mil-crimped brass for reloading, I abhor it… so I try to not overthink it, and just devise the fastest, least labor intensive method to accomplish the task as feasible…