In doing a little trading I came to be the owner of a brand new Lee 1000 Progressive press. I figured I would give a review of what I thought about it to any one that wanted to read it. The Lee 1000 is a pistol press and will also do .223. I will be using it for .45acp, 9mm and .223. As I got all the parts out of the box I realized that this is not a press for any beginner. If you have never reloaded before, get a single stage press and a scale and learn how it all works before you try and pay attantion to 3 dies, a powder dispenser, a primer dispenser a case dispenser and all the little workings of a progressive press. I would say that this would go for any progressive press and not just this one.

Set up of this press isn't too bad if you take your time. I would suggest that if you plan to do more then one caliber on this press that you not only buy the dies, but also buy a turret to go with each set of dies you have. This would mean you have to set up the dies one time and leave them alone. When you want to change calibers, twist the turret out with dies and all and put another one in it's place. It took about 10 minutes to put it all together and start running brass through it to set all the dies correctly. There are no primers or powder in the press at this time. After the dies are all set up I added primers and powder and ran a single case through to check to see if the primers were going to seat correctly and how close the powder charge was. They give you 4 or 5 disks with all different size holes in them for the powder charge. There is a chart with several powders on it and you just look up your powder and charge you want and pick the disk with a certain size hole in it. It was alot closer than I expected it to be. I wanted 5.5gr of unique and I ended up with 5.2gr. I can live with that. It was also extreamly consistant with the charge. I did 10 cases and then dumped them one at a time on my chargemaster scale and they were all 5.2gr.

After all the setup was done it was time to load some rounds. The first 50 took me about three and a half minutes. Not bad for the first rounds loaded. The OAL on every round is just as accurate as my single stage press.

There was only one thing I didn't really like about the entire press. There is no way to stop the flow of primers. It would have cost about 5 cents to add another small piece of plastic that would have blocked the primer tube. Other than that I think the press is just another Lee product that probabaly isn't the nicest ever made but just like all there other stuff, it will get the job done. I will also be investing in the case hopper to go on top of the 4 case tubes to make it a little easier.