Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Old Hollywood Gun Shop dies?

Was wandering through a local gunshop this week and picked up a couple goodies. One was a box labelled as Pacific Chrome Plated 250 Savage dies. Grabbed them cuz they was cheap.

But got them home, and found that the dies are stamped Hollywood Gun Shop, and are hand-etched with "250 SAV".

Look several decades old, at least. Anybody know anything? Only thing I can find online is the outfit that bought them out with the name of Hollywood Engineering doesn't have a good rep. I'm sure these predate that, tho.

First dies I've seen where the cartridge was inscribed by hand rather than stamped.

Hollywood's dies were made with the same reamers everyone else uses and they made as good stuff as anyone else. Some of it was the very best of it's time, and that was very good indeed. Original owner died and later management wasn't very good so they went under in the early 70s, IIRC. Typical story; daddy made a business, greedy kids destroyed it. Similar thing with Pacific except Hornady bought their tooling.

My Step Dad had a Hollywood Senior reloading press that he used in the late 1940's. It was THE reloading press of the era.
Don't remeber what dies he used with it. I was relegated to using his Belding and Mull BM-2 press and dies. The Hollywood press was OFF LIMITS for me..

I picked up an old Hollywood press and some dies at a grage sale. It was a pretty good press and I never used the dies because I didn't have a gun for them at the time. It just didn't have the leverage power of the RCBS Rockchucker, so I garaged saled it away too.

It seems to me that some of the old Hollywoods had a linkage adjustment that allowed you to increase leverage. The only one I have been around was a huge turret. They are running north of $500 bucks last time I looked and I think they used larger dies or you had to use an adapter.