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Chris McDermott · January 28, 2001, 05:23 PM

As far as strength, the only way you will ever hurt any of the presses is by trying to swage bullets with one - and use too hard of a lead wire. Just reloading you might eventually wear one out, but there are presses out there that are 50 years old and still work as well as they did when new. The
Lee progressive presses have had a bad reputation about trying to get them re-adjusted when changing calibers, but I haven't heard anything bad about the single stage press. Their turret press has fewer stations than the others, which will slow you down and prevent you from using one turret head for two different calibers.

Turret presses have several advantages over single stage
You can buy extra turret's so you don't have to re-adjust your dies when you change calibers.
They are faster to use as you can leave the case in one place while you do all of the operations in series - including loading the powder if you buy a powder measure and Lyman's universal expander/powder die system. If you still load powder by measuring individually and dropping it in the case, then you don't actually save much time as you have to remove the case from the press to use a powder funnel.

The dis-advantages are the cost and inability to do some large cartridges that currently can only be done on SOME (not all) single-stage presses (50 BMG, 577 Nitro etc) that can take the larger diameter dies.

I don't think the advantages really out-weigh the dis-advantages as by the time you buy a powder measure etc to gain the speed, you only need another $100-$200 to go to a good progressive (RCBS 2000 or Dillon) that will be much faster than the turret press.

If you want to try for real precision re-loading, then the Forster CoAx single-stage is actually as expensive as the turret presses, but also has the advantage of not needing to re-adjust the dies every time you change calibers.

January 28, 2001, 05:23 PM	#2
Chris McDermott Senior Member Join Date: March 30, 2000 Posts: 245	As far as strength, the only way you will ever hurt any of the presses is by trying to swage bullets with one - and use too hard of a lead wire. Just reloading you might eventually wear one out, but there are presses out there that are 50 years old and still work as well as they did when new. The Lee progressive presses have had a bad reputation about trying to get them re-adjusted when changing calibers, but I haven't heard anything bad about the single stage press. Their turret press has fewer stations than the others, which will slow you down and prevent you from using one turret head for two different calibers. Turret presses have several advantages over single stage You can buy extra turret's so you don't have to re-adjust your dies when you change calibers. They are faster to use as you can leave the case in one place while you do all of the operations in series - including loading the powder if you buy a powder measure and Lyman's universal expander/powder die system. If you still load powder by measuring individually and dropping it in the case, then you don't actually save much time as you have to remove the case from the press to use a powder funnel. The dis-advantages are the cost and inability to do some large cartridges that currently can only be done on SOME (not all) single-stage presses (50 BMG, 577 Nitro etc) that can take the larger diameter dies. I don't think the advantages really out-weigh the dis-advantages as by the time you buy a powder measure etc to gain the speed, you only need another $100-$200 to go to a good progressive (RCBS 2000 or Dillon) that will be much faster than the turret press. If you want to try for real precision re-loading, then the Forster CoAx single-stage is actually as expensive as the turret presses, but also has the advantage of not needing to re-adjust the dies every time you change calibers.