When you get old, your capabilities decrease, your memory goes and your temper gets short. You tend to screw up more & more often.
Why shouldn't it piss you off? You have done this stuff a thousand times, now it is screwing up on you .... it is enough to make anybody mad.
I stuck a case last night while resizing primed 30-06 brass. I had had to cobble up a center spud from a 7.62x39 die set so it wouldn't push out the installed primer since I had primed small number of unsized (but they were deprimed) brass left over from an old experiment.
Why did I presume it was all sized? Because I
always buy a large lot of milsurp brass when it is really cheap, wash it in the sink to get the dirt off of it, dry it in the oven, bulk lube it all with a little cooking oil, then deprime and full length size it, chamfer the primer crimp off, bevel the mouth some then wash it again to get shavings off, dry it then store it in sealed bags for when I need it.
Except for some of these particular cases .... deprimed but not sized because they were going to become straight walled wildcat .444 cases I guess.
Like I said, the memory is the first thing to go.
Anyhow, I was struggling to get the die set up right and I hit a machine gun fired piece of brass that simply cycled in hard and STUCK tight. I pulled the recessed rim right off the back side of the case when I tried to extract it.
I tried several stuck case tricks but this one was stuck too too good for any of them to work. All you have to work with is the little flimsy 3/16 steel neck resizing spud and whatever is left of the torn up head.
I was down to the big hammer stage of things, was going to have to order a new resizing die .... and I was frustrated and I was mad.
Prime ingredients for mauling and breaking things.
Instead, I went to bed and slept on it.
Got up the next morning, lubed the stuck case/die from both sides with light oil and then put the stuck mess on the eye of the stove on low to warm up some.
Clipped a little quarter inch piece of clear plastic hose as a thread protector to go around the 3/16 spud, got my can of Brake Parts Cleaner and my big 5 pound sledge hammer.
Threaded the piping hot die down into the press, sprayed a good bit of brake parts cleaner down inside the hot brass case (where it did a good Mount Vesuvius impersonation) immediately stuck the piece of plastic on the protruding spud and thumped the little protruding spud and the little tiny bit of clear plastic tubing hard with the big assed hammer.
Hammer blow forced the plastic down inside the threads centralizing the 3/16 spud, drove the spud down to the inside base of the stuck case where the pool of rapidly boiling/evaporating Brake Parts Cleaner had cooled the brass case down inside the still hot steel die body creating a size differential of a thousandth or so (brass expands/contracts more than steel does).
Out she comes .... pretty as you please.
The die was not damaged at all.
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The point of all of this is that as you get older things are going to frustrate you more. Getting old sucks in a lot of ways but having stuff foul up on your more often is the one that makes me get angry more than all the rest of them.
Gotta cultivate that calm stuff in your head -- the angry stuff just makes it worse.
Don't hurry .... you hurry more you screw up more.
Putting it up for the night and sleeping on it is the better path to take to a good outcome.
This applies to working on your bike, too.
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