I am considering getting into swaging my own bullets. Many reasons, but foremost is me desire not to have to rely on retailers for my bullets. 
I have been reading up on the process, but mostly this info comes from places trying to sell me the equipment, so I am aware that they have a interest in painting it in as good a light as possible.

I am wonder what the thoughts are from people who have done this/do this who have no skin in the game.

I have been casting for years but have no experience with swaging.

Thanks!

Swaging is labor intensive because lead bullet need some way of caring lube.

The only person that I ever knew or knew of, that could make a die that provided lube grooves, swaged bullet in a 3 piece die. They were excellent bullets, too. His name was Bill Bieber and sadly he is no longer with us but, he was a great innovator. If you can do a search in the ASSRA archives, there is a articule about how he did it. But, it would be extremely expensive to have made. I believe the articule was in the 90's sometime.

A close friend of mine, that I got interested in our game, came from High Power and swaged his jacketed bullet. He was Richard Corbins best friend and had them make a 32 die. He tried two ways to get lube into the bullet. First was swage, neural, lube, re-swage. Second was swage, then use a cannalure tool to put grooves in the bullet, lube, re-swage.

I've never hear of a easy way to do it

Frank

With a cast, lubed bullet, you can swage the bullet into any size or shape you desire. They are nice for expanding or reducing the diameter of the bullet a few thousand of an inch. The down side of swaging is, if you can't make the dies needed " lathe" the project is very expensive. I buy a mould of the weight needed and then swage the lubed bullet into the size or shape I want.  Swaging is another doo-dad to play with, lots of fun.  Ledball

Consider a 'bump' die - minimal swagging - just enough to make the bullet match the throat.

Lube IN the grooves keeps the form of the grooves consistent as the lube will not compress when the bullet is swagged.

We have a fellow in our group who swages / makes his own plainbase bullets from lead wire and they are indeed lubed but without using lube grooves but they are knurled to hold the lube. I know he has well over $2000.00 invested in all of his equipment and he is still limited to about a 1/30 lead wire alloy but the bullets he makes do indeed shoot extremely well for him. If you want slick sided bullets you just don't knurl them and I beleive he bought / had his dies made by Blackburn if I recall correctly and at a lesser cost than others who also specialize in this area of bullet making. He had to go this route due to hand casting no longer being doable due to health reasons so I find it contradictive to being a feat of excessive labor.

I believe this was what the OP was asking about and not just re-forming bullets and unfortunatly the gentleman I am referring too does not visit this forum.

JLouis

I swage for my .450s but as mentioned above, at 200yds you would be hard pressed to see a difference between cast and swaged.
The beauty of swaging a smooth PP bullet is the ability to make any weight (sort of depending on the ogive length) and you can also make different base pins to make deep cups, shallow cups, flat based, whatever you want which is nice if you are thinking of using these bullets in a smokeless load.
You can cut cores from wire but I bet most guys shooting big bores cast their cores.
I use an adjustable core mold which is actually pretty crappy but the core die bleeds off excess lead to produce a very consistant core.
Swaging does produce a nice lookin bullet, even if I can't make them shoot any better than cast...

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First of all, Huvius, those are some good looking patches!
Thanks for all the info all of you posted. All of this helps with my decision making with regard to investing in swaging equipment.