Reloading
I just bought a new rifle. I could cut to the chase and just tell you what I bought, but I like letting you in on my thought processes regarding why I bought the one I did. There will be a bunny trail or two along the way. Here goes.
First Steps
One of my first steps into prepping was the purchase of a handgun for home defense. When I started prepping, in addition to storing water, food, and other basic necessities, I reluctantly came to the realization that when the going gets rough I’ll need to be able to discourage others from taking the supplies I’ve invested in. If (when) things get ugly, I might need to be able to defend my life or the lives of others. So I got some training and bought my first handgun, a full-sized Springfield Armory XD in .40-caliber.
Yeah, my “first” handgun. The mighty XD-40 is a great gun for home defense, but a bit on the large size for concealed personal defense, so it was back to the store to buy another. (Sandy wrote a really excellent piece on this site some time ago called “How Many Handguns Do We Need?” which chronicles her side of that chapter in our lives. It’s a good read.) Needless to say, I’ve gotten a couple of other handguns since then, and if I don’t make it out to the range to practice at least twice a month, I start to get cranky.
For those of you who have the proper mindset (a combination of maturity, self-control, wisdom, and determination to use a gun if the situation warrants it) I strongly recommend that you get training, get a handgun that is appropriate for you (different strokes for different folks — there is no one “best” overall handgun), and get lots of regular practice. In that order.
What Next?
But the question arises, is a handgun enough gun? While it’s a good option for home defense and your only option for concealed carry, a handgun is not a “one size fits all” solution to my prepping needs. If you can become a reliable marksman at 30 feet with a handgun, you’ve done well. When you need to extend your reach further than that, you need a long gun.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog (and we hope that you will enter your email address in the block near the top left corner to subscribe), you know that we approach prepping in stages. Once you’ve met your basic needs in any of the many areas of prepping, you’re ready to step up to the next stage. These stages won’t be the same for everyone. If you’ve grown up in a rural area and been a hunter for most of your life, you probably have a nice selection of rifles and shotguns. That would be Stage One for you, and moving into handguns could be your Stage Two. Being a “townie” who has never hunted a day in my life, my firearm acquisition stages came in the reverse order. For the past several months I’ve been in the process of learning about and clarifying my values regarding long guns. I found a couple of very popular options.
The Gold Standard

Remington 870 Express
Many people consider a 12-gauge pump action shotgun to be the premium home defense piece. Just the sound of it being racked will give any reasonable, prudent bad guy second thoughts about their intended course of action. It holds anywhere from 5 to 14 shells at a time, and it’s good for hunting, too, as shells can be loaded with anything from granular birdshot to solid lead slugs. One downside of shotguns is that they aren’t good at longer distances. Because shot pellets spread out as distance increases, the effective range using shot is only about 25 yards. Solid slugs are good to about 100 yards. This might be a good, logical, and appropriate Stage Two gun choice for you, but we already have a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun. It’s a nice little gun and a decent option for home defense, but it only holds three cartridges in the magazine and one in the chamber (3 + 1). I want more ammo capacity than that and I wasn’t sold on the idea of a second shotgun. I had a rifle in mind.
A Real Crowd Pleaser

Customized AR
For many, the choice among rifles is almost a no-brainer. Get an AR-15 and you’re good to go. ARs are hugely popular and, like the shotgun, they hold multiple rounds. 30-round magazines are standard equipment on most ARs. (Thirty rounds for an AR is not high-capacity – it’s standard capacity.) I’ve only shot an AR one time and it was fun. That’s not my highest criteria for a gun, but why would I want one that I don’t like to shoot? There are a lot of advantages to an AR-15. They’re light, easy to maneuver with, holds a lot of rounds, and are endlessly customizable. Just like you may know a computer guy who builds his own PCs from parts and pieces that he cobbles together, there are a lot of people who build their own ARs the same way. And let’s face it — ARs look bad-ass. Cradle one of these babies in your arms and you’ll look like you’re ready to go commando.
And that’s why I stayed away from the AR (or as gun enthusiasts call them, an MSR — modern sporting rifle). People are afraid of ARs. Not just the guns themselves, but also those who use them. As the gun control culture picks up steam, there is a continual cry for an all-out ban on these types of guns. Some states are passing this kind of legislature right now. Places like New York, Connecticut, Illinois, and California are unfriendly environments for people who own ARs.
Do I care what other people think of me and what I do? You bet I do! I want to have as much control over how people evaluate me as I possibly can. Sometimes I want to send the message that I’m not a guy that you want to mess with. But other times (probably most of the time) I want people to grossly under-estimate me. I don’t want to telegraph what I know, what I have, or what I’m capable of doing. That’s part of OPSEC (operations security). We don’t practice a lot of OPSEC here at TADPrepper because our mission is to get the word out that we need to get ready for hard and potentially dangerous times to come, and that means being open and transparent about sharing information that we would much rather keep private. But just as I carry a handgun concealed so as to not alarm anyone or let those around me know that I’m equipped to stop a threat, I want a rifle that would fly under the radar as well as possible while still meeting my needs.
My Solution
I wanted a rifle with more effective range than I could get with a handgun. I wanted a rifle that held a decent number of rounds of ammo. I wanted a rifle that met multiple purposes — suitable for both defense and hunting, usable by both Sandy and me, fairly economical to shoot, easy to reload the ammo, and that didn’t scream “bad-ass commando (wannabe)” to anyone who saw it. So where do you find something that meets all those criteria? I found mine 122 years in the past.
Here’s something that I’ve found to be a general (but not entirely universal) rule of thumb about prepping. The solution to many of your prepping issues is to go as old school and low-tech as you can get. If the electricity goes off, you don’t want all of your preps to be computer-controlled. You want to be able to thrive in semi-primitive conditions. For me, that meant no gun that looks like it was used on the set of Battlestar Galactica. I went for an antique, a cowboy gun designed by John Moses Browning (the most brilliant gun designer of all time, IMHO) way back in 1892. I chose a lever-action rifle made by Rossi, a clone of the classic Winchester Model 92.
When I arrived at this conclusion there were still some decisions to be made, most notably which of the calibers that it’s available in would I like. I was initially drawn to the .357, with the hopes and dreams of someday pairing it up with an excellent .357 revolver. Seemed like a good idea at the time, with one notable problem. You can’t find them anywhere. I asked for one at my favorite gun shop and the man laughed in my face. He said they get a shipment of them once in a while, but they sell out in no time. I found none of them at any of the big online gun dealers, either. Time to go to Plan B.
Plan B
Plan B wasn’t a bad option. I was getting excited about it. It was the venerable .30-30, the cartridge credited with harvesting more deer and elk in North America than any other round. Some of the reloading forums also said it was an ideal round for beginners to start with. And availability wasn’t an issue. Every store that sells lever-action rifles carries it in .30-30.
With my mind firmly made up, I made the pilgrimage to a gun shop about an hour’s drive from my house. I had never bought from them before, but I had visited once and was greatly impressed with their inventory. They have things that you only see in magazines but are never available in any other gun shop I’ve been in. And their prices are rock bottom. What’s not to love? Sure, they had the lever-action .30-30 that I had decided upon, but there was another little beauty in the rack, a .44 Magnum with a stainless steel barrel. I love stainless steel guns. Love ‘em. I know that they’re not as discrete as a blue barrel, but I love ‘em just the same. And they don’t rust.
Plan C — or was it Plan A?
I was just about to call an audible and buy the .44 when something caught the corner of my eye. It’s not easy for me to read those little tags they have on guns from my side of the counter, but I could have sworn that one of them a few slots over from the .44 said .357 Magnum. Naw. Couldn’t be. You can’t get them anywhere, as the past six months of Internet window shopping had abundantly proven to me.
But there it was. Brand new. Calling to me. “I saved myself for you, Phil. Take me home with you.”
No stainless steel barrel, but it was $80 less than the .44, it holds four more rounds than the .30-30 (10 + 1 versus 6 + 1), it’s cheaper to shoot, and easier to reload. The action was so smooth I could cycle it with just one finger and the trigger was fantastic. And here’s the kicker — the shop owner said that it’s illegal to hunt deer in the great state of Ohio with a .30-30 because it’s too high-powered, but they’ve recently changed the law to say that you can hunt deer with a .357. I don’t know if I will ever set foot in the woods with this gun, but I wasn’t going to let this Holy Grail moment slip away from me. The .357 went home with me that day.

Rossi Model 92 Lever-Action .357 Magnum
I haven’t fired it yet, for all the same reasons that we haven’t posted a new blog on this site for the past three weeks — our life has exploded a bit and we’ve been swamped, but soon I’ll get it to the range…and hopefully, often. I’ll let you know how it goes when I do.

Photo credit: www.UltimateReloader.com
Disclaimer
What you’re about to read is the result of a lot of reading, learning, and comparison shopping. The final product was the formation of an opinion as to the best choice of a first reloading press for me. I expect that if you go through the process carefully, you’ll find the best press that meets your needs, but I don’t necessarily expect you to arrive at the same conclusion that I did. I’m not trying to persuade you to agree with choice that I made. There are a lot of good presses made by lot of good brands. Each of them has the potential to be the absolute best option for someone. I present this article to you because there are a lot of people in the same place I find myself in — relatively new shooters with no previous reloading experience who have come to the conclusion that reloading is a valuable skill for a prepper to have. Making the right choice about where to jump into the reloading craft is an important decision.
My Story
Last summer, after waiting two months to get an order of 9mm and .380 from my local ammo fabricator, I decided that it would be in my best interest to learn how to reload. I just couldn’t face another year of ammo shortages and escalating prices. Sandy and I didn’t shoot nearly as much last year as we did in 2012. Money was tight for us and ammo was hard to find. Shooters who weren’t sitting on a big stockpile of ammo curtailed their practice sessions because they didn’t know when they’d be able to restock their supply — and at what price. Sandy and I have set a goal of shooting more in 2014. Having the ability to make our own ammo goes a long way toward ensuring that we’ll be able to keep that resolution.
Sandy’s only stipulation was to make sure there was no exclusion in our homeowner’s insurance policy that would cause a claim to be denied because we make ammo in our home. I called them and was told that reloading for my own personal use would have no impact on my insurance coverage or rates so long as I limited my supply of gunpowder to less than 20 pounds. You should check with your insurance company to see if the same holds true for you.
Single-Stage Presses — The “Training Wheels” of Reloading
OK then, what kind of press should I buy? Conventional wisdom says that you learn the craft of reloading on a single-stage press — a press where you batch process one cartridge at a time, performing one reloading function at a time — in order to thoroughly learn all of the stages of the reloading process at a safe and manageable pace. Making ammo is inherently dangerous, but it is completely safe if you approach it with sanity and wisdom. The object for newbie reloaders is not to make ammo as fast as possible, but to learn how to not maim or kill yourself as a result of your ammo-making.
There are a lot of great single-stage presses on the market and they can be the most economical presses you can buy, so there is a lot of appeal to go with a single-stage. And the noble single-stage press is the way to go for the highest precision in reloading. Many competitive shooters and hunters hand craft each round on a single-stage for the ultimate in control and quality. Some of these presses include the RCBS Rock Chucker, the Forster Co-Ax
, the Redding Big Boss
, and the Hornady Lock-N-Load Classic
. Great, great presses. I’d like one of each. And if you’re on a really tight budget, Lee make the Lee Reloader
for less than 30 bucks. Obviously not in the same league as the others, but it’s enough to get you started.
But the downside of any single-stage rig is production speed. Eventually I would learn the process well enough that production speed would become an issue, especially when it comes to reloading for handguns. It takes multiple pulls of the reloading press lever to complete one round of ammunition on a single-stage press. Production speed isn’t an issue for those who reload for hunting rifles because they don’t shoot as many rounds in a year as I blow through in an hour of shooting handguns. Single-stage is the best way to go for high-precision hunting rifle ammo, but the online reloading forums are full of guys who say that if they had to load all their handgun ammo on a single-stage they’d rather give up reloading and just buy factory ammo. Those guys say that a progressive press is the way to go for handgunners.
Progressive Presses — The Speed Demons of the Reloading World
Once you’ve completed the first cycle, a progressive press completes a round of ammo with every pull of the lever. Instead of working on just one cartridge at a time and doing just one step of the reloading process at a time, a progressive press does it all at once. All of the dies are mounted in a circle with a cartridge in place under each die. Every pull of the handle engages each cartridge with the die it’s positioned under and then advances all the cartridges to the next die position. After a cartridge has made it through the entire circuit, a completed round pops out and a new empty case takes its place.
Once you get the hang of it, you can crank out 400 or more rounds of ammo per hour with a progressive press. Equip one with an automatic case feeder and bullet feeder and you’ll easily be able to do 600 or more rounds per hour. As you can well imagine, progressive presses, especially those that are tricked out with all the bells and whistles, are considerably more expensive than a simple single-stage press, but time is money, too. What is it worth to me to be able to make 600 rounds in an hour on a progressive press versus maybe 30 rounds on a single-stage press? Based on that, I started my search with a long, hard look at the progressives.
The seduction of lightning fast production rates was too much to resist. Despite the chorus of old-timers who were saying to start with a single-stage and work up from there, I decided to start my shopping with the progressive presses. Here are the contenders:
- Dillon — If you’re in the market for a progressive press and you don’t give serious consideration to a Dillon, you’re doing yourself a major disservice. I consider them to be the gold standard of reloading machinery. If there is a cult among people who reload, it’s made up of owners of Dillon presses. Dillon has a rabidly loyal clientele, some of whom tend to regard any other brand of equipment as not worthy of consideration. Dillon earned their reputation by consistently manufacturing top-notch machinery, backed by the best “no B.S.” warranty in the industry.You can’t buy a Dillon just anywhere. They control their marketing channels pretty tightly. If I were buying a new Dillon, I’d get mine from the website of top competitive shooter Brian Enos. His site is packed with solid info on the products and he has some kit bundles that are carefully thought out.Having said all of that, and believing in my heart the Dillon Precision sets the industry standard for reloading presses, I didn’t buy a Dillon for my first press. I looked longingly at their whole product line, drooling over their sturdiness and reliability. But the workhorse of their line, the RL 550B, doesn’t auto-index (automatically advance the cartridges being worked on from one die station to the next). For a progress press to not perform this automation function seemed to be contrary to the whole purpose of a progressive press. The next step up (the XL 650) and the one after that (the Super 1050) both auto-index, but they were just too far out of my beginner’s price range.
- But still wanting a Dillon, I dialed my sights down to their Square Deal B. This is a press that is just for reloading straight-walled handgun ammunition. Since that’s what I shoot, it looked like a real contender. But one of the significant disadvantages of it was that it doesn’t do rifle cartridges at all — just straight-walled handgun ammo. While I only shoot handguns now, I wanted to leave open the possibility of reloading for rifles in the future. Another big strike against the Square Deal B is that it is the only press that uses proprietary dies. The dies for this press aren’t interchangeable with any other press, nor can you use standard dies, even those made by Dillon, with this press. I didn’t like that. Time to broaden my search to other options.
- Hornady —Hornady is best known for their great bullets, but they also make a lot of high-quality reloading tools and equipment. Their progressive press is called the Lock-N-Load AP
, and it’s a real honey. One reviewer who did an excellent comparison of progressives from Dillon, Hornady, and Lee (click here for How I Spent My Winter and Then Some). You really should read it and see how your values line up with his, but I’ll cut to the chase and reveal that he ultimately chose the Hornady LNL. And I almost did, too. All impressions I have of it is that it is a technically more advanced press than the rock-solid Dillon, and that it has some reliability issues that come with that distinction. Sandy actually encouraged me to buy one of these while we were at our favorite outdoor specialty store, but I wasn’t far enough along in my comparison shopping process to feel confident with this decision. When I did spring for my first press, I didn’t buy this one, but there very well may be a Hornady LNL in my future. They have tons of appeal.
- Lee — Let me say one good thing about Lee’s two progressive presses: they’re inexpensive. The Lee Pro 1000
can be found for under $200, and the Lee Precision Load Master
goes for close to $250. But my experience was that on the forums I was seeing far more complaints and problems with them than anything else. Lots of folks, even those who loved other Lee products, had some less-than-splendid remarks about the Lee progressives. They have some very loyal fans, but the negatives seemed to far out-weigh the positives for these machines. A fool doesn’t learn from his mistakes. A smart man does learn from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others and doesn’t make them himself. I want to be a wise man. I didn’t give the Lee progressives any serious consideration.
- RCBS — This was the last of the major contenders I looked at. Best known for their outstanding single-stage presses, RCBS also make a progressive called the Pro 2000
. I didn’t do nearly as much research on this one as I did with any of the others because the price stopped me in my tracks. With a list price of $777 for the auto-indexing version of this press ($694 for the manually indexed model), I was in the deep end of the pool. I have no doubt that RCBS makes a fine progressive. It may even be superior. But it was too far out of my price range to give it any consideration for a first-time purchase. Maybe some day.
All of this research in progressive presses left me with no clear winner between Dillon and Hornady, but one thing it did succeed in doing is convince me that I really wasn’t ready to plunge into a progressive as my first press. Others have done it with good results, but one thing that I kept reading in the forums were comments by actual owners and users that progressive presses require a fair amount of mechanical aptitude to set up, to operate, and to maintain. As Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry was prone to say, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” This is one of mine. I don’t tinker with machinery. Not with good results, at least. I barely know which end of a hammer you’re supposed to hold on to. The preponderance of comments about the need for mechanical aptitude caused me to abandon my quest for a progressive press. For now.
Turret Presses — The Middle Ground
If a single-stage press was too slow and a progressive press was either too expensive or beyond my ability to troubleshoot and maintain, was reloading out of the question for me? Thankfully, no. There is an intermediate class of presses that address some of the limitations of a single-stage without introducing the complexity and expense of a progressive. I’m talking about turret presses.
Like a single-stage press, a turret press only works with one cartridge at a time, but like a progressive, all the dies you need for the complete reloading process are installed and ready for use. You don’t need to swap out dies to go from one reloading step to the next. They’re already there, mounted on a turret that can be rotated to place each die over the cartridge that you’re working on in turn. This means that you don’t have to batch-process your cartridges like you do with a single-stage. You can do all the steps to go from an empty case to a completed round of ammunition before you need to swap in a new case.
Production speed can be a lot higher with a turret press than with a single-stage, but you can choose to operate a turret press in single-stage mode if you want to. (For that matter, you can operate a progressive like a single-stage, which might be a good idea in some situations, but still doesn’t overcome my personal reservations against going directly to a progressive.)
So the search was on for the best turret press for my needs. There are a number to choose from with offerings from Lyman, Redding, RCBS, Lee, and others.
I went shopping at my favorite outfitting shop and the reloading specialist gave me a strong sales pitch for the Lyman T-Mag 2 press kit. You can buy a number of single-stage or turret presses in kit form, with many of the the basic tools that you’ll need for reloading bundled together. The downside of buying these kits is that the tools they include are the cheapest and most basic versions available. Most reloaders will want to upgrade to better stuff almost immediately. My salesman said that if I was looking to buy a turret in a reloading kit, he’d recommend either the RCBS Deluxe reloading kit
because he felt the kit contained some good tools — things that you wouldn’t have to go out and replace with the tools you really wanted anytime soon — or the Lyman Deluxe Expert kit
, because it had a good case trimming tool. I ultimately decided against going with a kit and assembled my own selection of individual tools instead.
When I was considering a progressive press, I read a lot of negative about Lee’s progressives. This led to an unfavorable opinion of the company in general, but as I did more research on turret presses, the name that kept popping up was the Lee Classic Turret
. Lee makes a couple of different turret presses, so don’t get confused by their names. The lesser of the two is called the Lee Deluxe turret press. There’s really nothing “deluxe” about it. The better of the two is the Lee Classic turret press. The word “classic” might lead you to believe that it is an older design, but it’s actually a newer and improved version of the Deluxe turret.
Among the many reviews that I read on the Lee Classic Turret was a great series of articles on the website RealGuns.com. Highly recommended reading. The author pointed out that the turrets on most turret presses are mounted with a single bolt in the center of the turret. The dies are arranged on the outside edge of the turret and the ram on the press engages the dies on this outer ring. That design essentially makes most turrets a “C” press, which is a weaker and less accurate configuration. By comparison, the Lee Classic Turret is supported by three rods in a triangular pattern on the outside edge of the turret, and the dies are mounted much closer to the center of the turret. This design allows for a more compact machine, and it also focuses the force of the reloader’s ram closer to the center of the turret.
Besides being impressed with the smart design of the turret on the Lee Classic, it also is the only turret press that auto-indexes, which is to say that as you pull the handle, the machine automatically rotates the turret to align the next die over your cartridge. This feature is common on progressive presses, but Lee makes the only turret presses that auto-index. The auto-indexing capability can propel your production rate to 200 rounds per hour or more. That’s not too shabby for a humble turret press.
You will be hard pressed to find a bad review of the Lee Classic Turret Press from someone who has actually used one. Sure, the web is full of Lee bashers who have a bad impression of their progressive presses or reloading snobs who view their budget prices as being indicative of inferior products, but Lee Precision is a company that has dedicated itself to giving you the best bang for the buck. So while you’ll see a lot of people who talk trash about Lee, you will also be amazed at the number of glowing reviews of the Lee Classic Turret. These reviews widely recommend it as the best press for a beginner to start with.
The Bottom Line
I’m glad that I kept an open mind and didn’t let negative reviews of one segment of a company’s product line sour me on the whole store. I chose the Lee Classic Turret for my first reloading press and I’m confident that I made the best choice for my budget and skill level. Your mileage may vary, but if you’ve decided that now is the time for you to get into reloading, I’d recommend you take a long, hard look at the Lee Classic Turret.