LEE Load All II review i found

[perfect]

To start, I bought a Lee Load-All II (39.99) and the Primer Feed accessory (10.99) from MidwayUSA. Arrival was quick, but it arrived on a day in which I was incredibly busy - it sat, unopened, for hours. This is not typical behavior when I get a new toy. So, the first problem may easily be my own damn fault. When I did open it up to at least take a peek, I may have mislaid the used-primer feed door, or it may have been missed on this one - I can't say, either way. At Lee's list price for replacement of one buck, it's not anything I'm gonna lose any sleep over - but I can't comment on how well it works or not, since I don't have one.

 

The press comes with a full set of bushings, a small instruction booklet, a bushing capacity chart to go with the bushings, and a load booklet that looks like a joint effort between Lee and Hodgdon powders. The primer feed attachment is a cheap-looking piece of plastic that comes in a separate box with a single card of instruction.

 

The instruction brochure is pretty simple, and also covers guage conversions, and the conversion kit to upgrade from previous models of the Load-All to the Load-All II - not an overwhelming amount of information, but it's clearly written and illustrated. It goes against what my reloading books say about the necessity of picking just the right primers for your loads - but my local loading shop proprietor agrees with the Lee comments, and he's been happily loading for longer than I've been alive.

 

The bushing capacity chart is a single 8.5" x 11" sheet, and the other side is Lee's charge tables. After spending big bucks on loading manuals that tell me how important it is to choose and match each component carefully, I ignored that part - though you could, apparently, buy nothing but the press and components and start loading.

 

The little card that comes with the cheap-looking primer feed is all the information you'll need to install and use it. It has worked for me flawlessly so far, loading it with Lee's recommendation of 50 primers max. Installation was pretty easy - Lee apparently assumes that you're likely to buy the primer feed, so you've got to install the primer punch/guide if you don't install the primer feed.

 

There is an error in sequence in the instructions labeled "Before you start loading" - step 2, installing the primer feed/punch, should be done before step 1, mounting the press. Luckily, I read the card that came with the primer feed first, because the first step there is to unmount your press from the bench. Mounting the primer feed was simple and straightforward, and it looks like mounting the primer punch/guide would be, as well.

 

Lee even includes mounting screws for mounting the press to your bench, or to a board that you can clamp to a table for portable use. The mounting screws, primer punch, spring, and guide, an extra wad guide, and the sizing die all come in the red box that doubles as the cover for the powder/shot hoppers. The cover for the box would also work to cover the hoppers if you want to keep the box elsewhere, but the box doesn't seem to get in the way of anything. This lid arrangement is held on just by gravity, but seems stable enough in use.

 

I tested this press with Remington-Peters STS hulls, Remington 209PSTS primers, Aliant Red Dot powder, and #7-1/2 shot. The press I bought was for 12 ga, but I don't see why it would work any differently in any other size.

 

Folks - it's _easy_! The Lee Load-All II is not a whiz-bang piece of sophisticated machinery, but it does what it claims to do. For setup, after the primer feed/press is attached and the press is mounted, you take out two screws in the front of the nameplate, take out the bushing guide, put in the bushings you want to use for powder and shot, and put the screws back in. As these are sheetmetal screws into plastic, I can see where someone who changes loads a lot may wear out or strip the screwholes - but adding a toothpick to the holes at that point wouldn't be a crisis. This press is not going to be a favorite for folks who will change bushings often anyway - but more about that below. After the bushings are in place, just fill up the respective hoppers with powder and shot, throw a few cycles of powder and shot into primed (used primers work fine) shells to let the bushings get fully filled as the shot and powder work thier way into the bushing feed area, and you're ready to roll.

 

First, you place the full-length sizing die (shaped like a short section of really thick-walled pipe) onto your hull, and put the hull in the first station (the leftmost), and press the lever down. There is enough slop in the station to make it easier to put the hull onto the depriming die and hold it with your left hand while the right hand pulls the handle down - but this is easy to get used to, and caused me no problems. Pull the handle down as far as it'll go - not something that's going to take much muscle, the leverage is good. The unattached sizing die does get a bit futzy, but I'm told that if you're only loading hulls that are going back into the same chamber they were originally fired in, that it's not necessary to resize anyway. Anyway, when this stroke is completed, you have a deprimed hull with a sizing die stuck firmly around its base.

 

The primer feed attachment isn't as automatic as I'd envisioned - it needs to be lifted/dropped for each primer, and hangs at the rear of the press - but once used to it, it's not much of a problem. Without the feed attachment, you'd have to pick up and place each primer in station 2 - which seems like a lot of work to avoid spending 11 bucks to me. (I'm cheap, but I'm lazy, too.) After you feed the primer into station 2, you place the hull there and press the lever down again - which unsticks the sizing die just before you seat the new primer. Take the die off of the hull, and drop it onto the next hull in line. The die is directional - there's a groove around the outside that needs to be on top. Then, move the hull to the 3rd station.

 

The wad guide at the third station keeps the hull pretty stationary - getting in in there is easy to get used to, too. Once the hull is there, it stays in place until you take it out on purpose.

 

Lower the lever until you barely touch bottom, pull the handy charging handle to the right, and the powder drops in. Raise the lever, place the shotcup side of the wad on the plunger, guide the other into the wad cup, and lower again - which sounds more complicated than it is. I stop when I begin to feel resistance - no need to compress the powder or crush the wad. Then push the charging handle back to the left, and the shot drops in. Even with small shot, sometimes, it sticks at this point, and needs some jiggling when a ball catches at the cutoff point of the bushing - again, not ideal, but no real annoyance.

 

The next station is the crimp starter - and there's a trick to it that I haven't mastered yet. More on that later, though. Basically, you put the shell in a shallow depression that marks the station, and press the lever down past some moderate resistance. The 8-fold crimp starter is at the front, the 6-fold is behind it. I've got 8-fold hulls, but there's plenty of clearance, so I don't think the location would make 6-fold crimping a problem.

 

Then, it goes to the next station - the final crimp. There's a bit of "mechanic's feel" to this one, but it's not difficult - press down until it feels right, and you're done - and the right feel is pretty easy to get the hang of. Too light is no problem at all - you just try again.

 

I tried "too hard" twice in my first box of shells, ruining two hulls - but I don't expect to make that mistake again any time soon. Getting the hang of the pressure required is really pretty easy, and after those two mistakes, the rest of my first 200 hulls went by without any problems with the feel of it.

 

However - crimping is not something I can claim to have mastered.

 

The first guy to suggest shotshell reloading to me let me shoot off a couple of his homerolled - and his crimps were horrible. He told me that the pretty crimps on factory loads were almost impossible to reproduce in a home press, so he used an old soldering iron to make his crimps stay in place until fired, semi-melting the hull to form a weld.

 

Boy, was he mistaken. I wish I'd asked him what press he was using, so I could avoid it.

 

About half the crimps I get are picture-perfect - they can't be told from a factory crimp. The other half, I'll 'fess up on appearance in a paragraph or so - but they hold just fine.

 

A few of the pretty ones tend to unfold - not all the way, but to a noticable bulge - after a few minutes of resting after being loaded. I just press these down again in the crimp finisher, and they mostly behave after that - a few have required two or three runs at that station before they lie down quietly. I'm guessing that my wads are at the long end of the range I've got to work with, but they're not really a problem.

 

On the other half, it looks like hell - they fold okay, but they look malformed. I think that this is because the crimp starter is starting the folds between the previous folds. I don't think that this is anything but cosmetic, but it doesn't seem ideal to me.

 

On some of them, after they're finished, the centerpoint of the fold seems offcenter - again, this probably won't have much effect on function, but it's downright ugly.

 

There may be a trick to this that I'm just not getting, or ugly crimps may just be an unimportant thing that reloaders learn to live with - I dunno, I'm still a novice at this. None of the books I've gotten say much of anything about crimp starting that seems to address this one way or another. All they talk about is crimping short or long, which isn't any problem I've seen yet.

 

Anyhow, after loading some fairly light loads, I decided to try some heavier loads - just to see which seemed to work better when I next went hunting clays. (I'm still not sure that I'll be able to tell any difference without patterning, chronographs, and like that - but I've got a new toy, and wanted to play with it.)

 

Here is where I was first sorely disappointed with the design of the press.

 

To change bushings, it seems that you need to totally empty both the shot and the powder resovoirs, or spill them all over the floor. Since the lid over these is one piece, covering one and pouring the other out is awkward as hell. If there's a trick to it that makes it easy, the booklet that came with the press doesn't mention it at all.

 

As the resoivoirs are attached to the press, to pour out the hoppers means to turn the whole press over. This isn't heavy (not even with a full hopper of shot and a board on the bottom), but it is awfully ungainly. I strongly recommend the "portable" mount to a board until an ideal load is decided upon - otherwise, you'd have to unmount the press (3 screws, probably not a major problem, but a pain in the neck) or lift the whole bench to empty the hoppers, unless you want to throw charges until they're empty. (Both hoppers are roomy - if they're near full, it'd be a LOT of charges to throw.)

 

This is not, to me, a permanant problem - once I find the recipe I really like, I'll be leaving the press set like that forever. I don't hunt anything but clays. But for someone who wants to load various hunting loads and is going to change bushings fairly frequently, this will be a serious downside to this press. For me, it'll mostly be a pain in the *** as I experiment, looking for that "just right" load.

 

If you regularly use several different loads for your shotgun, you're not going to be happy with the Lee Load-All II. I suppose, if you've only got two different loads in mind, that you could get two presses, one for each load - but beyond that, you're well up into the MEC price range, and I've heard from several people who claim to be happy with them.

 

Is the press ideal? Not at all. Is it good enough for someone who wants to crank out a lot of one load (trap, for me) cheaply and easily? Yes - at least, I'm happy with it. Is it easy enough to be an introduction to reloading? Oh, heck yeah - if someone like me, a raw beginner who tends to be a perfectionist, can do this - anyone who can read a reloading manual and follow a recipe can do it.

 

This press is not built strongly enough that I'd expect it to survive major abuse - but it's simple, and I do expect my kids to fight over it after I'm gone, and wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that my grandkids were using it 50 years from now

Edited January 10, 2009 by perfect

[charlie-b]

enjoyed your article it pretty much sums up my own findings i bought one after fancying for 25 years if you dont mind me asking what sort of price did you pay for your shot the way it worked for me was powder 11 pence wad 2 pence primer 4 pence i got some shot for nothing after that i was quoted 50 pounds for a 7 kilo tub my lee is now gathering dust untill some cheaper shot comes along i also found cci and remington primers fall out of eley cases i nipped mine oval to make them stay in what cases do you use

[Welsh Stinger]

Guys I have been using a lee load all for over 30 years , I did have a 12 and 20 gauge model but I sold my 12 gauge loader several years back . They are so simple to use that I always wondered why more people didn't use them . Back in the day there were shot towers doted around the country where you could buy shot but the carriage was so expensive I ended up making my own .

As far as what empty cases to use I would always recommend Winchester when ever possible because they are parallel tubes so they don't use so much powder . Get a hack saw and cut straight down the center of a few different makes and you will see the difference , a Winchester cartridge is all plastic and there is no base wad in the tube , its all one piece with just a hole for the primmer .

What are you buying wads for ? the whole reason to reload ( apart from personal satisfaction ) is to keep the costs down . Get yourself long to a clay shoot and ask the owner if you can go around and pick up a few black bags of wads and a couple of black bags of empty cartridges . You can reload a Winchester cartridge up to 10 times before you throw it away . You can sort through the wads and pick out several different types then try them in the load all and you will see which ones will crimp best , you have nothing to loose if some don't work out just cut them open and tip the contents back in the load all to be reused . With a bit of practice you will soon be able to match wad to cartridge and those couple of black bags of empties will last you for years. Once you can match a Winchester wad to a Winchester tube you will get a perfect crimp every time , by using a used wad it crimps easier because its been bent before therefore it doesn't try and push the crimp open again.

Before you load always check you empties for wear and tear and if they look a bit worse for wear then ditch it and use a newer one . Another thing is to put a bit of tape on the load all lid to stop the bushings falling out if it is bumped as that can be a pain in the bumb if that happens .

Good luck and happy loading.

[tazkb]

i used to use a loadall 1 and it was really good, i used "gamebore black gold cases" as they where excellent for reloading, primers allways held firm and the base plastic was allways secure, I was told by a re-loading master that any of gamebores "gordon recoil system" empty shells where the best to re-load and my clayground has plenty who use those shells. There are a few mods you can do to make re-loading easier, i cut of the 8 star crimp tube as it was never needed, and glued an appropiate washer under the 6 star crimp tube to help locate the shell properly. I did find that the bushings and my scales didn't agree with each other on several occasions which made me nervous and that along with the lack of availability of shot at a reasonable price called a halt to my re-loading days, however i have been thinking about starting again, i just need a shot maker this time

[starlight32]

The load all is value for money but it is nowwhere in the league of the MEC reloaders... The junior Mark v's are an excellent machine for starters.

 

If you reload different loads it is far better to have a machine dedicated to that recipe.... Far too much messing about,

I have an array of machines which are dedicated to a specific load.

 

Most of my reloading is non-toxic.... Most non toxic powders are large flake so are unsuitable to be dropped through charge bars and bushings-you just don't get a good consisitency to be safe enough to trust, on volume reloading.

 

it is on that basis that I only use a reloader for re-sizing,priming and crimping so that is the qualities that you need.

 

On the whole the load-all is a good machine but I would never swap it for an MEC or a an RCBS, but the difference in cost is obviously an issue to many.

[deershooter]

starlight32

please advise what you mean about the powder I use CSB0 Aliant 831 CSB /PSB 2-3-4-5 AND HAVE FOUND NO DIFFERANCE IN METERING THROUGH MY MEC all these powders are very simular in size of flake to Vectan ASor AOor Hcc30/28

 

Deershooter

[Whitebridges]

I used to use a Lee loadall when I was exciled to Lincoln circa 1984. There was a small clay club called George Fisher. I think and virtually all the members were "reloaders". We liked the Winchester Trap 100 or 200 cases as they were compression cases. You could reload them a lot of times before they cracked. Those were the days when a standard clay load was 32g. I got on well with it just loading small volumes.

Edited January 14, 2009 by Whitebridges

[perfect]

As i said in the title it was a review i found, iv actually ended up buying a mec 600jr, i think savings are mostly made on steel loads and magnem loads.