Early in my efforts at bullet casting, I used the old Lee lube tray, cookie cutter sizer punch on .45 Colt in my Blackhawk. Lube built up on the nose of the seating punch, and the rounds became incrementally shorter, but in my youthful enthusiasm to see how my bullets worked in my handloads, I didn't notice.
All was well to start, but I eventually clued in that the recoil was getting increasingly stiff, almost, dare I say, unpleasant. Eventually even young bucks have to notice that the hammer spur is digging into the web of their hand, painfully, so I stopped shooting and examined the remaining loads in my MTM Case-Gard. Sure enough, plain to see, the loaded rounds grew progressively shorter as the lube built up on their nose and the bullets were driven deeper and deeper into the case. Nursing my sore hand, I vaguely remembered reading something in Dean Grennell's ABC's of Reloading about seating depth affecting case volumes, pressures, progressive burn rates, and all that mumbo jumbo.
A kinetic bullet puller got them all back to proper OAL, and I learned to clean my dies when mucking about with bullet lube, and to just clean them anyway if I can't remember the last time I have done so. Can't hurt, takes but a minute, and prevents surprises. I since have fired some of Linebaugh's loads and they felt about the same, but if I had been shooting an original 1873, I might have bent it some!
Oh, and I pay more attention to seating depths now too.
