New press ordered

[Tomme boy]

Ordered a new press Thursday. It is the Lee Breech Lock Pro. I am going to set it up for 9mm for now. Money has been really tight lately. I was going to go with the Hornady LNL auto press but just could not justify the extra cost.

I already have the dies and powder measure and the safety primer and the case feeder tube setup for it so that was one of my main points for getting what I did. It is supposed to be here Monday. I am just going to run it with 3 dies for now.

Now what to do with my Pro1000?

 

[RBHarter]

Set it up for your other production cartridge .

 

[Ian]

What Harter said.

 

[fiver]

I could tell you what I done with my LEE progressive, but that wouldn't be very helpful to the conversation.

 

[Tomme boy]

Well I must have the worst luck at buying stuff! They did not put a shell ejector in with the press. AND! The carrier is not in time. I tried to loosen the bolts on the top plate to see if I could spin it a little to get it to align.

NOPE!

It does not move anywhere near enough to make it work. The shells are hitting the bottom of the dies at an angle. Some will smash and ruin the brass.

I'm giving Lee a call in the AM. I might just send this thing back to Midsouth. Last time I called Lee I talked to Andy the owners son. We did not end on a nice friendly last words. We will see if he thinks there is nothing wrong with the stuff they put out.

 

[Ian]

I load .308 on mine after notching the bottom of the seat and crimp dies, I can't imagine how yours won't clear 9mm.

The timing is pretty much fixed on this one, not sure how it got out of time except the shellplate can get halfway in-between stations if you short-stroke it. If that happens, just advance the shellplate by hand until the stake on the base lines up with the next hole in the shellplate. You'll likely find that the shellplate doesn't line up perfectly with all the holes in the die plate due to ram wobble, it kinfmd of relies on a case in the sizing die to tighten up and guide the rest of the operations. It was almost a brilliant press but they missed the mark by not using a fixed turret insert and fully-supported index/gide rod like the Pro-1000 has. I planned to put a 4-hole turret head on mine, but it would require too many modifications to the shellplate carrier to make the square indexing rod work.

If Lee would take the Classic Turret with the big ram, make a different ram top to fit their 1" shellplate carrier, and use the traditional 4-hole turret head and square rod arrangement and just make a bigger shellplate carrier to work with the 4-station shellplates, they'd have something really nice that would sell for $200.

 

[Tomme boy]

Well I messed around with it for about an hour more. I had to take the carrier off and bend the guide rod. Once I twisted the carrier it would not go all the way down. So I carefully bent the rod and now it is a lot better but not perfect.

You would not believe how tight they had that carrier. I actually twisted the allen wrench they gave you in the press. So I grabbed my 3/8 socket allen
set and broke it loose with that.

 

[Ian]

I would twist the flat bar index rod a little with two crescent wrenches long before I would bend the guide rod/stake thingy, unless it was bent in the first place. That rod exists primarily to create a positive alignment and lockdown of the shellplate so the primer seating punch is lined up dead-nutz with the primer pocket on the downstroke.

 

[fiver]

I'd already have it back at the post office.
if it don't work out of the box with nothing but a minor adjustment it probably ain't ever gonna work, or stay working for long.
twisting a nut or two with a wrench and sliding a stop over to make something line up is one thing, having to bend and twist the actual parts just leads to fatigue and failure.

 

[Rick]

Not to mention voiding the factory warranty. I'm with fiver on this, straight back to the P.O.

 

[Tomme boy]

The flat bar won't help it align. As the guide rod is what controls the alignment. When I said I bent it, you can not even tell it is bent at all. I'm talking less than a 1/32" I think it was bent to start with. As the carrier came down the last 1" you could feel it scraping or dragging real bad. Now it is really smooth.

I'm thinking it might have got bent when they tightened the carrier down. There was no reason for it to be as tight as they had it. They must have used the guide rod as a stop to tighten the carrier.

I talked to Andy at Lee today. They are sending the missing parts. He was saying there is another bolt to adjust on the ram. I will have to try to find this??????? It is on the linkage I guess????

 

[Hawk]

Just my opinion, but seems like your having to jump thru waaaay too many hoops for a brand new machine.

 

[Tomme boy]

Looking on Youtube it seems to be a common issue