Lee Turret Press

blindman

blindman

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I bought a Lee turret press, and was wondering if anyone loads any .223 rifle rounds with theirs, and how do you find it to work?
 
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I have just heard alot of negative feed back from other people about the Lee turret, I needed to find out if people actually are happy with them, and if there are any problems with them breaking etc.
 
The turret press gets really good reviews from handgun reloaders, but quite the opposite for rifle reloaders. It's not perfect, but it's quite a lot of kit for the price.
 
either one fits the 223- possibly one of the finest applications for the turret, but you may want adifferent powder measure - i found the lee doesn't have much capacity when you're throwing 25 plus grains/shot
 
PerversPépère said:
Are you talking about the NEW Lee Classic Turret Press http://www.leeprecision.com/html/catalog/turretpress.html#ClassicTurretPress
or the ancient one?
Because the new one is an entirely different bird designed from ground up.
I just can't wait to see what auto press is going to emerge from that base.:)
PP.
Click to expand...
It is the new Lee as in the picture! I have loaded some pistol rounds with it, and works ok. The only thing I noticed is that it likes to hold the old primers in the primer pocket for seating the new primer, they are supposed to go into the body of the press, but they end up either in the primer seating hole, or on the damn floor!!
 
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t-star said:
either one fits the 223- possibly one of the finest applications for the turret, but you may want adifferent powder measure - i found the lee doesn't have much capacity when you're throwing 25 plus grains/shot
Click to expand...
Have any suggestions as to which is a good powder measure instead of the Lee? I aggree the Lee powder measure does not work all that great even for pistol loads!
 
My experience is that the Lee Powder measure rocks...I even use it for .308, just two pulls of 20g each for IMR4895 does the business, as verified on a scale :)
 
I use the 4 Die Turret press for .45, 9mm, .40S&W, .38spl, .308, .223, 8x57, and .30-30.

On balance, for $ invested, I'm quite pleased. Some things I DON'T do with it - I don't prime nor decap in the press. I found those ops to be more efficient done other ways (manually - I decap with a universal decapper in a a Lee handpress, and autoprime by hand. I see they have an autoprime addon kit now - no idea if that's any good, but frankly, I think it just gets in the way. For safety, I like the cartridge ops to be simple, straight forward).

I remove the decapper pins from the resizer dies, since I decap separately.

9mm gets resized in the hand press. The turret lever is not long enough to get comfortable leverage for that casing because of its taper. I use ONLY carbide dies unless I have no choice - lubing is a pain, and the major downside to rifle cartridges.


I'm not sure I'd buy the 4-turret again (especially since I have a hand press (worth every penny) - most loadings use only three dies even with a separate crimper (recommended), and so I waste time going through a blank extra stage, because I decap separately - I decap before cleaning, so I take one step out of the press.

For pistol the regular auto powder measure on the turret is excellent - its even better with the $10 micro adj charge bar. The Pro model is crap. It dumps powder all over the place. For powder loading on the turret, you are much better off getting the regular auto disk and buying a few adj charge bars, if you need tight tolerances in pwder delivery. If it works out that a disk measure happens to be bang on for a cartridge then fine, but for tweaking a charge, the adj charge bar can't be beat. I now include one each time I buy a pistol die set and then dial it in for the cartridge once I'm worked out the charge. Much faster set up. For rifle, I hand load powder- measuring each, but then, I'm usually reloading rifle for accuracy or special purpose.

If you load a lot of rifle, get a Lee Rifle Charging Die to go with the turret setup - that makes powder loading easier than doing it manually.


Other than producing accuracy cartridges, I'm not convinced reloading semi rifle cartridges is cost effective. .223 AmEagle is $10 or less a box around here - So far, I've got lots of brass, but haven't found general purpose bullets for .223 cheap enough to go to the bother of reload plinker stock. Same for .30-30. CTC coupons and a CTC that still carries 30-30, ammo can't be beat... ;)

The secret to the turret (and any press, I'm sure) is to take the time to get the dies properly set up for the cartridge.

Looking at the New! Classic...:rolleyes: This is the model I would buy today using the turret the way I do. It's beefier in some important areas which will make the process smoother I suspect.
 
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Skip said:
I use the 4 Die Turret press for .45, 9mm, .40S&W, .38spl, .308, .223, 8x57, and .30-30.

On balance, for $ invested, I'm quite pleased. Some things I DON'T do with it - I don't prime nor decap in the press. I found those ops to be more efficient done other ways (manually - I decap with a universal decapper in a a Lee handpress, and autoprime by hand. I see they have an autoprime addon kit now - no idea if that's any good, but frankly, I think it just gets in the way. For safety, I like the cartridge ops to be simple, straight forward).

I remove the decapper pins from the resizer dies, since I decap separately.

9mm gets resized in the hand press. The turret lever is not long enough to get comfortable leverage for that casing because of its taper. I use ONLY carbide dies unless I have no choice - lubing is a pain, and the major downside to rifle cartridges.


I'm not sure I'd buy the 4-turret again (especially since I have a hand press (worth every penny) - most loadings use only three dies even with a separate crimper (recommended), and so I waste time going through a blank extra stage, because I decap separately - I decap before cleaning, so I take one step out of the press.

For pistol the regular auto powder measure on the turret is excellent - its even better with the $10 micro adj charge bar. The Pro model is crap. It dumps powder all over the place. For powder loading on the turret, you are much better off getting the regular auto disk and buying a few adj charge bars, if you need tight tolerances in pwder delivery. If it works out that a disk measure happens to be bang on for a cartridge then fine, but for tweaking a charge, the adj charge bar can't be beat. I now include one each time I buy a pistol die set and then dial it in for the cartridge once I'm worked out the charge. Much faster set up. For rifle, I hand load powder- measuring each, but then, I'm usually reloading rifle for accuracy or special purpose.

If you load a lot of rifle, get a Lee Rifle Charging Die to go with the turret setup - that makes powder loading easier than doing it manually.


Other than producing accuracy cartridges, I'm not convinced reloading semi rifle cartridges is cost effective. .223 AmEagle is $10 or less a box around here - So far, I've got lots of brass, but haven't found general purpose bullets for .223 cheap enough to go to the bother of reload plinker stock. Same for .30-30. CTC coupons and a CTC that still carries 30-30, ammo can't be beat... ;)

The secret to the turret (and any press, I'm sure) is to take the time to get the dies properly set up for the cartridge.

Looking at the New! Classic...:rolleyes: This is the model I would buy today using the turret the way I do. It's beefier in some important areas which will make the process smoother I suspect.
Click to expand...

I use the same method. All my brass is sized and primed before going through the turret press. I just found sizing and priming on the press too time consuming. I can easily rip through 200+ rounds in an hour with primed brass on hand while it would take me an hour to size/prime & load 50 rounds from scratch.
Lebarons has cheap .223, like $6/box if you are anywhere near one.
 
it's not the design of the powder measure, but the LACK OF CAPACITY- i often reload 1000 rifle rounds at a time, and found i was forever refilling the resevoir- put a dillon in beacuse i happened to have one, but almost anything with an auto-trip would do, as long as the RESEVIOR WAS BIGGER- besides, i'm old and probably couldn't remember to trip the powder TWICe
 
I use my Lee Turret (3 stations) to Decap, Resize, Seat and Crimp my .308 with good results so far. THe only negative aspects I found so far is that the priming tool (T-Bar) sucks big time, and there's about 0.75-1mm of play between the head and the turret. Not too good for accuracy loading.
 
I just got mine, a question about the T-bar, are the two primer pockets different sizes or meant to ensure that if you break one pocket, you can continue loading?
 
Colin said:
I just got mine, a question about the T-bar, are the two primer pockets different sizes or meant to ensure that if you break one pocket, you can continue loading?
Click to expand...

I've used turret for quite a while and loaded for both handguns and rifles. Good stuff, that's all I can say.

The primer pockets in different sizeds are actually for large primer and small primer.
 
Colin said:
I just got mine, a question about the T-bar, are the two primer pockets different sizes or meant to ensure that if you break one pocket, you can continue loading?
Click to expand...
two different sizes- one for large primers and 1 for small- what's getting confusing is that some cases that were large are now small( 45 acp winclean)
 
As I am about to reload a bunch of different brass, should I deprime and then check for different sizes? I assumed that all of the brass of one calibre used the same size primer, or was I just being silly.
 
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