I hope I understand your question right?? After dumping your powder charge down the barrel of course.

You match the sabot diameter to the bullet diameter. For instance. A 300 grain .45 caliber Shockwave in .452 diameter would then be placed in a black high pressure sabot which is made to handle the .452 diameter bullet of 300 grains or less. Since your using Shockwaves instead of Hornady SST's, you already have the correct sabot included with the purchase. Some people do change the sabots out....

I use my thumb and push the plastic sabot with the bullet inside it into the throat of the muzzle. Then using a short starter with a special Shockwave tip which will do less damage to the poly cone head, you start the sabot and bullet down the barrel using the longer end of the short starter. Then finish seating the sabot with the ramrod of course.

You do not lube the sabot at all. I will sometimes wet it with spit but that is as far as it goes. This is the reason you keep reading that everyone swabs between shots. That is because many of the bullet sabot combinations are such a tight fit that without swabbing they in some cases can be next to impossible to load.

If the bullet/sabot combination you are loading seems really hard to load. As in break my ramrod hard. Then you need to check some of the different makes of sabots out there. Knight, T/C, MMP, and Harvester among some and they are all different degrees of thickness. I find the best sabot for the CVA and the T/C are the T/C mag express sabots.

The first time I loaded a Hornady SST in my Black Diamond XR, I was using the wrong sabot and broke the head off my short starter. Sabots do make a difference. You might need to experiment.

The sabot should not be real easy to load like a powerbelt, yet you should not have to pound it down the barrel (which I have done) in order to seat it. Good luck they are normally great shooting projectiles.