selecting a Progressive press
The Dillon guys (Blue Press) are religious and the Dillon press has too many idiosyncrasies to my liking. The Hornady Lock N Load progressive press is the best on the market and the equipped with the Hornady Case feeder and bullet feeder it’s a regular ammo factory. But, at $1,300 it’s a little expensive for us regular guys.
I like the Lee Loadmaster press, simply as a press; it is well built and very solid. It has a good strong shell plate that is easy to remove and caliber changing is a snap with removable die heads loaded with pre-adjusted dies. However, the rest of the Lee components on the Loadmaster are cheaply built, potentially dangerous, and somewhat unreliable. The only exception is the case feeder, which is still chintzy but works well. The negative on the case feeder is that it has a limited capacity and you must hand-rotate the tubes to continue feeding the cases. However, for the price (about $30 dollars) it does the job.
There are a couple things you can do to augment the Lee Loadmaster and make it more precise and reliable. One is to use the Hornady or RCBS motorized bullet feeder. Check out www.ultimatereloader.com for instructions on using the RCBS bullet feeder with the Lee Loadmaster. The feed tube fits right into the Lee removable die station and is easy to adjust. It loads bullets all day long without incident.
The second modification is to use a Hornady case activated powder measure instead of the Lee disk-type powder measure. The Hornady case activated powder measure is solid, well built, and smooth. It’s a little expensive but the cost is worth it. It fits right into the aluminum Lee die station. It’s easy to adjust using the optional micrometer powder adjustment. Now you don’t have to fool around with the little chain, inaccurate disks, powder leakage, or any other Lee mechanism they use to dispense powder.
The worst offender of the Lee Loadmaster progressive reloading system is the priming system. It is a multi-piece, cheap plastic, poorly designed mechanism. There are numerous reports of primers getting loaded sideways and exploding with nearly disastrous results. Lee even sells a primer explosion deflector so they are clearly aware of the problem. I haven’t found a fix for this yet so you just need to be careful, make sure any burrs are removed from the plastic primer guide tubes, and check to see that a primer has been properly loaded. When it is set up correctly it works well but it still makes me nervous.
One way around the Lee Loadmaster Auto-primer is to prime your brass in a separate step using a single-stage press. De-prime the brass and place it into an ultrasonic brass cleaner. Once it is clean and dry use your single stage press to resize the brass and re-prime. I believe this is the preferred method even though it is tedious for a 500 case run. If you use an ultrasonic brass cleaner you don’t have to worry about bits of tumbler media getting lodged in the primer pocket.
Since the brass is already deprimed, resized, and a new primer installed you don’t need a resizing die. Just fill the Lee case feeder tubes with clean, resized, and primed brass. In station one the pistol brass is flared and charged using the case activated Hornady powder measure. Station two feeds the bullets using the Hornady or RCBS bullet feeder. Station three uses the Hornady Powder Cop to test for proper powder level. Station four seats the bullet. Finally in Station 5 use the Lee factory crimp die. Then the finished cartridge is pushed into the collection bin.
For a little less than $600 you can have a sturdy progressive press with an automated bullet feeder, case feeder, and super-reliable powder measure that will enable you to reload 800 to 900 rounds per hour. It would be great if the Ultimate Reloader guys would build a ergo-roller handle for the Lee Loadmaster but the factory one from Lee works OK albeit a bit ergonomically deficient.
