OK, I FINALLY got enough time to sit down and get the new press set up on the reloading bench. It took only one trip to Home Depot to get new bolts.
Set up is very easy. It comes largely pre-assembled except for the handle, so entire set up time was less than 20 minutes from when I unpacked it to having it ready to load.
All I can say is that this is the press that Lee should have brought out 20 years ago. It needs a little oil on the ram and linkage right out of the box, but once that is done, it is VERY smooth. It's built like a tank, and feels like quality.
Lee finally developed relatively workable way of handling spent primers, as well. They drop through the ram and into a plastic tube. With my old turret press, no matter what, primers were going to be flying.
One thing, though, is that you have to have a primer arm in place to make sure that the spent primers are going to go into the tube. If the arm is out, spent primers can bounce out.
The priming system that comes with the press (I didn't get the primer feed assembly, I'll do that later) looks a lot like the traditional tip arms that many presses have, but this one is different in that it is semi-automatic.
You put a primer in the head, and on the downstroke an extension on the arm cams against the base of the press, pushing the primer arm into the ram and aligning it for primer seating. No more tipping the arm in and out by hand. Once you get a rhythm going, it's very easy to get the primer into the priming arm while the ram is going up (I did get my finger caught once early in the loading session. OUCH!) It's so simple, and so effective, that it may very well retire my Lee hand primer for most applications, especially now that I have arthritis in my hands.
The turrets are 4-hole, so if you only have a 3-die set you'll have to pump the handle twice to get past the empty hole. I am sort of bummed that all of my 3-hole turrets just became obsolete. Maybe Lee will offer a retrofit kit.
I was going slowly at first, but once I got more comfortable with how I had everything set up I started picking up speed. It's very easy to get, and maintain, a steady rhythm with this press. I loaded 150 rounds in less than an hour, and I wasn't pushing it at all. I have no doubt that I could get that up to 250 rounds an hour without too much effort.
All in all, I think Lee has a REAL winner on their hands.
I've not spent enough time with it to figure out if there are any sneaky problematic issues, but so far I think it's money VERY well spent, and that this press really moves Lee's reputation forward.
