viper98 wrote:agreed...Dillon is the way to go....A little more upfront but you will thank yourself later on....a 550 or even better a 650 is the way to go.....
Dillon
is the king of the heap. The 550 probably their best seller. It's what all the others aspire to be.
I went with the Hornady LnL AP. Similar to the Dillon 650 in that it automatically indexes the case with each pull of the handle. Best thing when I ordered it was the 'get loaded' rebate. At the time it was 1000 bullets. Now it's 500 bullets. So, for about $300 I got the press and 1000 jhp .45 acp. (with a retail value of ~ $200). I shopped around to find the place with the best price and saved $50 off the MSRP and they included free shipping too. (another ~ $50)
So I ended up with a fine press for ~ $100 if you include the price of purchasing the 1000 .45's. Or the press and bullets for $300 (and a retail value of $600.)
It's worked very well for me so far with one minor glitch that Hornady fixed at no cost. Just called them up and they sent free replacement parts. I've probably reloaded 15,000 rounds in the last 5 years.
I haven't gone with all the accessories like the case or bullet feeders. Ergonomically I feel the Hornady is better then the Dillon in that one hand stays on the handle while the other hand is used to manually hand feed both the case and bullet. With the Dillon you feed the cases with your right hand, bullets with the left hand. So the right hand comes off the handle each time. Left hand also does the indexing.(with the 550)
But as I said, even with something like the Lee single stage you can make ammo just as well as with any progressive press. It just takes longer.
And with my progressive press I still don't do all the steps all at once for rifle cartridges. With military brass and the need to remove the primer crimp I break it down into more manageable stages. First would be tumbling, Then depriming and sizing. [Then removing the crimp, trimming and deburring. This being the most time consuming, but needed. None of this do I use the press but a Lyman case trimmer and Lyman case prep multi tool.] Finally the actual progressive parts with priming, powder drop, seating and crimping all at the same time at the different stations of the press.
There's also the OCD part of me that sorts the cases by head stamp as well as weight. Bullets also sorted by weight. Thus making batches of ammo as near identical as I possibly can.
By contrast, when reloading brass for a handgun it's all done on the press and all at once in the many different stages of the progressive press. You can knock out quite a bit in a very short time. I'd hate to think of the amount of time to do the 5000 rounds each of .45 and 9mm I did if I were to all that on a single stage press.
But even with handgun ammo I still sort by head stamp and weight. Same for bullet weight, especially with cast boolits. But even with factory bullets there's a range of weights, though they claim a certain weight. Nice thing about cast boollits and weight is the ones really off are just tossed back into the melting pot.
"The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." - Robert A. Heinlein
What a shame that we have the two major political parties that believe the former.