Reloading is certainly not dangerous. You have to be inept and inattentive to make it so. As long as you are paying attention, very little can go wrong. The key is in taking your time, and paying attention and checking before/after every step, eg. shining light into your loaded cases to see the powder level is the same in each. How redundant and meticulous you want to be is up to you, but you'd have to be pretty reckless to have problems. The potential for problems may be slightly greater on a progressive press, but loading rifle rounds with a single stage is a pretty slow process, and there's plenty of time to be careful. The steps in a nutshell are:
1.Wipe your cases/clean them in a tumbler.
2.Decap (remove primer, this can be done before or after step 1 depending on preference. I bought a decapping die so I can decap my dirty cases without worrying about dirtying my resizing dies. Downside? Picking corncob bits out of each and every single flash hole in every single *$@ing case. I will probably start tumbling my .223 brass primers-in since the corncob just jams up in the primer pocket and doesn't scrub it as well as the larger pockets on the .30-06 anyway.)
3.Resize
4.(Trim if necessary)
5.Prime
6.Measure powder and pour into case
7.Seat bullet
Step 5 is the slowest part of the process on a beam scale (if you have a chargemaster combo, which will most likely be my next purchase, I envy you) followed by step 1 depending on method. Buying a chargemaster would be the single most time-saving purchase I could make to greatly improve my single-stage reloading speed.
