Lee Load Master vs. Lee Pro 1000

ranbur

ranbur

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Hi all, I'm getting back into reloading after a decade and a half off ... looking to buy a good starter press without breaking the bank.

I'll be loading .223 to start ... then eventually pistol ... 45, 40, 9mm ... not tons of each but 200-300 a week so I want a progressive press.

I think I have it narrowed down to the Lee Load Master or the Lee Pro 100.

Any of you that have had both I would appreciate your comments and opinions of each ... which you prefer and why.

All other comments and testimonials welcome as well.

Thanks
 
I have both. I use my 1000 for 45 ACP only and the load master for 9mm, 38spl and 357. Once you get them set up properly, they work ok. If you want to get real serious down the road, I hear Dillon is the way to go.
 
Had a load master, other than the priming system never working properly and constantly causing spilled powder and frustration it was a decent value... If they built a priming system all out of metal instead of plastic and it worked as it should is probably buy one again.... I have a Dillon now, never had a problem with it EVER.
 
I have a loadmaster that i load 9mm on...I have never had any problems with the primer system on my press. It is the latest generation though with the upgrades to the primer system...i was told you can tell this by the color of the priming system...mine is gray. I have loaded 5000rnds of 9mm with no problems.
 
I've had both - JUNK. You spend as much time "tuning" them as you do outputting ammo. I never knew how horrible they were until I got something decent. Ignorant bliss.

Spend a little more on a Dillon - 550 or square deal. No one ever posts on here saying they regret getting a Dillon.
 
I have two Loadmasters (one set up for small primer & one for large primer). Both work quite well & I've loaded I don't know how many thousands of rounds on each. I would go for the Loadmaster just for the two extra die stations. Both of mine have the old primer system and as long as you keep them clean (very important) and don't let the primer level drop too low it works fine.

I use mainly flake powders and Bullseye have virtually no powder leakage, either. For the small difference in price the Loadmaster is by far the better press. Until you're ready to drop twice to three times the price on a Dillon it will give you good service. Also check out the many good videos online for tips on how to keep it running well.
 
Recently aquired loadmaster.
Ive loaded 2000 9mm without a glitch.
Do some reading, set it up properly and it works great.
 
Lee: tosses a product into the market and when enough people complain they revamp plastic junk with a slightly better grade of plastic

Dillon: They designed there presses and tooling for people who shoot belt fed machine guns, tested them for hundreds of thousands of rounds and put them on the market

Lee: fight with them for several weeks to replace a broken press linkage

Dillon: buy a spare parts kit for my XL650 "just in case", lady behind counter dumps a second spare parts kit in the package for free "just in case" no charge

Lee: has entire forum of pics and videos how to tune and tweak a load master to "make it better"

Dillon: has thousands of happy customers laughing at Lee users who have forums devoted to keeping there junk runnin...


Choose... But choose wisely my friend...

Dillon = proven, tested, adored by many

Lee = 50/50 love/hate but nobody sells a Dillon to go back to a Lee.
 
Of the two you ask for: PRO1000.
It's cheaper and the priming system isn't as bad as the loadmaster's (note: do not take this as an endorsement of either priming system).
I would find a few more bucks and buy the Hornady L-N-L.
 
WOW! Most such threads I've seen are flooded by folks that love their Lee presses. This one has started off strongly the other way. And I'm afraid I'm going to rain on the parade a little more.

This is a comment on the Pro1000. Because it's a 3 position head there's no room for a separate crimping die. And for hand gun ammo I've found that separating the seating and crimping operations is quite important. In particular if you plan on any cast lead bullets. And even with the lower cost plated bullets the plating is delicate enough that it's worth separating the seating and crimping.

The Pro1000 a buddy and I shared for a while ended up needing a total of 6 fixes to get it to work well from where I was sitting with my hand on the lever;

  • The main mod was to remove the auto indexing. "Stuff" happens when you're reloading. In particular with small primers that sometimes hang up on the ejector pin and get pulled part way back into the casing. Auto indexing this mess around makes things far more complicated to sort out and clear the jam. And the screw secured leaf springs used for cartridge retention at each station makes it that much tougher to clear such a bad casing which means you need to index the problem around to the ejection rail. At least with a manual indexing you can do this without jamming the casings on the shell plate into the dies. So it ends up being a manually indexed progressive to allow for easier problem clearing.
  • Next was the primer ski slope feeder not seating correctly in the base. I ended up drilling and tapping for a sharp ended set screw to lock it in place and stop rising up out of position.
  • Next was the die plate holder not allowing the dies to line up fully with the casings on the shell plate. I ended up drilling the holes in the carrier out quite a lot bigger so it could "float" into position with the screws a touch loose then tightened them down with all three dies full with cases to force a good line up.
  • The spring that pushes the shell plate carrier base back up isn't strong enough so it was constantly locking the carrier unless I held the lever "just so". I fixed that with a stronger external spring loaded plunger.
  • And lastly I found that the lever ratios are poorly set so it takes quite a strong pull and push to run the Pro1000 if the casings are a bit sticky at all. This actually reduced the ability to feel the cases and any issues and for seating the primers due to the need for such a strong effort. I fixed this by drilling a new hole for the middle pin in the link arm which the arm lever mounts onto so the mechanical effort was increased. But the die cast alloy broke on me after a few thousand rounds of loading. So that ended up being replaced with a new all steel custom made arm. This is a little over the top but this last mod was the one that really made the press work and feel far better than it had up to that point. Not only was my new arm set up to have a better mechanical advantage but it was also smoother to operate than the old stock arm for some reason.

Of course when all is right the press works just like it should. But with the Pro1000 in its stock form it seemed to take very little to make it go bad. And when it did go bad it was a real pain to clear it out. All my mods were in response to noticing these problems.

The highly modified and finally reasonably good operating Lee was then handed over to my buddy so he could have his own press. I was happy to see the last of it and mounted my Dillon which had come out of storage finally. The Dillon has none of the issues that plagued the Lee Pro1000. Yes it's manually indexed but that is not as big a time issue as one might think. Also thanks to the retention buttons that are easily removed and replaced it's easy to clear any position on the shell plate without having to index at all. So problems can be removed and normal operation continued with little to no grief.

Thanks to these same buttons the press can also be used where you want to run some operations then remove the cases before continuing. For example precision rifle ammo requires weighing each charge. You can either run the press progressively but with a funnel at the charging station instead of a powder measure or you can leave the powder measure empty and remove the cases from position 2 or 3 before you pull the lever supposedly for seating. You'd then fill with the weighed charges and return the cases to the press for seating and crimping. All without having to change any dies around like with a single stage press.

Yes a selectable turret press can also do this just fine. But the Dillon can do it AND run progressively all in one press.

And best of all if you get a 550b or 650 you also have 4 or 5 die positions so you've got room for the separate seating and crimping dies.


At one point I was looking at the Lee Loadmaster. But if you search You Tube for "lee loadmaster" I think you'll agree that there are far too many videos that are about fixing bugs or the right method for tuning the systems that Lee uses to make them work. For me it was the kiss of death and I went for the Dillon 550b.

I feel that a 650 would be that much nicer but I don't feel "under gunned" with the 550b. I'm pretty sure I won't be upgrading it since it does everything I can think of that I need it to do. And it does it all smoothly and easily.
 
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not tons of each but 200-300 a week so I want a progressive press
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By the way, you can easily pull the lever to reload 300 in under an hour. Add on another 20 minutes to allow for putting powder into the hopper, checking with some number of drops to ensure the proper charge is being dispensed and loading up primers and staging bullets and casings. Then another 10 minutes or less for cleanup. So 300 to 350 rounds in around 1.5 hours from starting from clean to putting things away and cleaning.
 
Hotwheels81 said:
Lee: tosses a product into the market and when enough people complain they revamp plastic junk with a slightly better grade of plastic

Dillon: They designed there presses and tooling for people who shoot belt fed machine guns, tested them for hundreds of thousands of rounds and put them on the market

Lee: fight with them for several weeks to replace a broken press linkage

Dillon: buy a spare parts kit for my XL650 "just in case", lady behind counter dumps a second spare parts kit in the package for free "just in case" no charge

Lee: has entire forum of pics and videos how to tune and tweak a load master to "make it better"

Dillon: has thousands of happy customers laughing at Lee users who have forums devoted to keeping there junk runnin...


Choose... But choose wisely my friend...

Dillon = proven, tested, adored by many

Lee = 50/50 love/hate but nobody sells a Dillon to go back to a Lee.
Click to expand...

I'm not disputing that Dillons are excellent machines but I find it amusing that people will drop $1000 or more on a Dillon 650 and then criticize a $350 Loadmaster. Do you really expect to get the same quality for $350 as you get for $1000? If that were the case would anyone buy a Dillon? I think not. And a lot of people don't have an extra $600-$700 to drop on a 650. In my experience I can tell you that while the Loadmaster may have its quirks the vast majority of problems people have with them are caused by operator error and lack of maintenance. For example, mine will prime 600-800 cases flawlessly. When primers start to flip I spend 10 minutes cleaning the priming system and the problem goes away. If you don't clean it of course the problem will persist. Some people apparently just aren't smart enough to figure that out. I've had my two Loadmasters for at least 15 years and haven't spent $100 in parts replacement. Seems like pretty decent service life to me. Would I like two Dillons? Sure, who wouldn't. Just like I'd like a Ferrari. But the $1200-$1400 I've saved not buying them gets me a nice quality 1911. Seems like a decent trade off to me.
 
ted_dent said:
I'm not disputing that Dillons are excellent machines but I find it amusing that people will drop $1000 or more on a Dillon 650 and then criticize a $350 Loadmaster. Do you really expect to get the same quality for $350 as you get for $1000? If that were the case would anyone buy a Dillon? I think not. And a lot of people don't have an extra $600-$700 to drop on a 650. In my experience I can tell you that while the Loadmaster may have its quirks the vast majority of problems people have with them are caused by operator error and lack of maintenance. For example, mine will prime 600-800 cases flawlessly. When primers start to flip I spend 10 minutes cleaning the priming system and the problem goes away. If you don't clean it of course the problem will persist. Some people apparently just aren't smart enough to figure that out. I've had my two Loadmasters for at least 15 years and haven't spent $100 in parts replacement. Seems like pretty decent service life to me. Would I like two Dillons? Sure, who wouldn't. Just like I'd like a Ferrari. But the $1200-$1400 I've saved not buying them gets me a nice quality 1911. Seems like a decent trade off to me.
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Exactly. I would love a Dillion. And hopefully one day will have some but for the time being my lee presses work just fine after some tuning. Your a moron to think your going to get the same experience from a press that costs $250 vs $900.
 
Ted, you do make a good point on the pricing. As long as the buyer is someone that is savvy enough to tune and react to the needs of the press then I think you're right about it being a valid option.

I also suspect that it's not fair to compare the Loadmaster to the 650 for cost reasons. A better cost comparison would be to compare the Loadmaster to a 550b. The 550b gains in reliability and lack of need for fussy tuning or mods to fix some small issues against the extra $150 to $200 for the cost of a 550b.

EDIT; By the way one of my big beefs with the Pro1000 was the lack of any way to remove the cases outside of indexing them around to the ejector. The Loadmaster gets around that neatly with the retainer spring band. A rather slick method.

I do find that Lee does a lot of things well. It's just that there's enough mickey mouse stuff that frustrates the user that I'd rather spend a bit more and get something else.

Ted mentioned cleaning the primer delivery. That's another place where I had some issues. When spent primers got pulled back into the cases and messed things up the good primers get kicked out of the way. I made the mistake of picking these up with my fingers and setting them aside to use again. The case lube was transferred to the primers and then into the ski slope track of the feeder. This seems to be the primary cause of primers sticking in the Lee ski slope style feeder.

Some brake cleaner and a little brush made from a pipe cleaner does a great job of cleaning the track out. I folded over the last couple of inches of the pipe cleaner and spray it with the brake cleaner. The pipe cleaner gets into the sides of the track nicely. Then before the solvent can evaporate I run a second bent dry pipe cleaner. Repeat with a couple of new pipe cleaners and the track is once again ready for primers.

Once I recognized the issue I switched to picking up those stray good primers with a set of tweezers and that cured the problem of getting case lube or oil into the primer feeding system.
 
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ted_dent said:
I'm not disputing that Dillons are excellent machines but I find it amusing that people will drop $1000 or more on a Dillon 650 and then criticize a $350 Loadmaster. Do you really expect to get the same quality for $350 as you get for $1000? If that were the case would anyone buy a Dillon? I think not. And a lot of people don't have an extra $600-$700 to drop on a 650. In my experience I can tell you that while the Loadmaster may have its quirks the vast majority of problems people have with them are caused by operator error and lack of maintenance. For example, mine will prime 600-800 cases flawlessly. When primers start to flip I spend 10 minutes cleaning the priming system and the problem goes away. If you don't clean it of course the problem will persist. Some people apparently just aren't smart enough to figure that out. I've had my two Loadmasters for at least 15 years and haven't spent $100 in parts replacement. Seems like pretty decent service life to me. Would I like two Dillons? Sure, who wouldn't. Just like I'd like a Ferrari. But the $1200-$1400 I've saved not buying them gets me a nice quality 1911. Seems like a decent trade off to me.
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I paid $500-$550 for my XL650 brand new from TSE several years ago setup for 1 caliber

I paid $350 for my Loadmaster setup for 1 caliber... I lost $150 when I sold the load master...

I'm glad your experiance with the product has been so star spangled awsome :)
Mine and hundreds of others will go well out of our way to inform the general population just how big of a stinking turd the LM really is tho :)
I'm a mechanic by trade, have been an inventor and fabricator most of my life as well, when I say something is built like crap most people take my advice and either go another direction or invest a lot of time beating the pervibial "dead horse"... I bought the LM thinking "hey you can keep it going" and "look at what I'm going to save!"... In the end I lost $150+ and many hours of my time plus dollars spent on small parts...


Funny how guys on the forum will blow hundreds of dollars on micrometer seating dies for reloading AR ammo, collet neck dies and neck turning tools for there Savage 110BA and pounds and pounds of Varget for loading ammo for a 2MOA rifle but freak out when they look at what a quality progressive press costs... Go ahead, cheap out, buy junk, but remember my words when your loading up a few hundred rounds after work on a Friday for a range trip and you break something, drive to the local shops on Saturday to find parts and come up empty so you buy a few boxes of factory ammo at twice what your supposed to be saving by having a broken hunk of crap on the bench at home... Been there, done that, several times.

Your not saving a dime by purchasing a LM unless your one of the very elite select few (you won't be) that never has an issue with the LM.

Bitter? Yup
Dillon fan? You betcha...

Your get what you pay for... Read on this forum how Dillon has treated folk who had any issues, guys with presses that are pushing a million rounds sent back to Dillon and get a new machine at no charge, guys who broke things by sheer negligence and the parts are in the mail before the phone is hung up... That kinda service is priceless.
 
Hotwheels81 said:
I paid $500-$550 for my XL650 brand new from TSE several years ago setup for 1 caliber

I paid $350 for my Loadmaster setup for 1 caliber... I lost $150 when I sold the load master...

I'm glad your experiance with the product has been so star spangled awsome :)
Mine and hundreds of others will go well out of our way to inform the general population just how big of a stinking turd the LM really is tho :)
I'm a mechanic by trade, have been an inventor and fabricator most of my life as well, when I say something is built like crap most people take my advice and either go another direction or invest a lot of time beating the pervibial "dead horse"... I bought the LM thinking "hey you can keep it going" and "look at what I'm going to save!"... In the end I lost $150+ and many hours of my time plus dollars spent on small parts...


Funny how guys on the forum will blow hundreds of dollars on micrometer seating dies for reloading AR ammo, collet neck dies and neck turning tools for there Savage 110BA and pounds and pounds of Varget for loading ammo for a 2MOA rifle but freak out when they look at what a quality progressive press costs... Go ahead, cheap out, buy junk, but remember my words when your loading up a few hundred rounds after work on a Friday for a range trip and you break something, drive to the local shops on Saturday to find parts and come up empty so you buy a few boxes of factory ammo at twice what your supposed to be saving by having a broken hunk of crap on the bench at home... Been there, done that, several times.

Your not saving a dime by purchasing a LM unless your one of the very elite select few (you won't be) that never has an issue with the LM.

Bitter? Yup
Dillon fan? You betcha...

Your get what you pay for... Read on this forum how Dillon has treated folk who had any issues, guys with presses that are pushing a million rounds sent back to Dillon and get a new machine at no charge, guys who broke things by sheer negligence and the parts are in the mail before the phone is hung up... That kinda service is priceless.
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You're comparing apples to oranges. You say you bought your 650 for $500-550. How long ago, 20 years? If that's the case when I bought my Loadmasters I paid $160 so we're still talking $300-$400 difference (in 1995 dollars). You're a "...mechanic by trade, have been an inventor and fabricator most of my life as well..." and you couldn't get your LM to work? It's not a nuclear reactor you know. Meanwhile I'm off to shoot the gun the difference in price paid for. :d

BTW it's 'proverbial' , not 'pervibial'.
 
ted_dent said:
You're comparing apples to oranges. You say you bought your 650 for $500-550. How long ago, 20 years? If that's the case when I bought my Loadmasters I paid $160 so we're still talking $300-$400 difference (in 1995 dollars). You're a "...mechanic by trade, have been an inventor and fabricator most of my life as well..." and you couldn't get your LM to work? It's not a nuclear reactor you know. Meanwhile I'm off to shoot the gun the difference in price paid for. :d

BTW it's 'proverbial' , not 'pervibial'.
Click to expand...


3 or 4 looooong years ago I bought both within 6 months of each other is that "apples to apples" enough for you?

Vaguely insulting my workmanship will get you nowhere neither will trying to correct my grammar.
 
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