I had a Dillon RL550 for a long time and punched thousands of rounds out of it. It doesn’t have the automatic case and bullet feeders, so those had to be set in place by hand each cycle. I didn’t find it to be disagreeable though. Once you get in a rhythm it goes pretty fast. I stopped about every 50 anyway to double-check the powder measure and bullet seat depth.
It might be nice to have the case and bullet feed, since then all you have to do is crank the handle. But those also about double the size of the thing. Might get in the way for other activities around the bench. I wonder too if going too fast wouldn’t end up letting me double-check measures less often. It would be a bummer to crank through 500 or so and then find out that the powder measure was off... somewhere in there, and have to pull all those back apart.
I’m probably just paranoid though, because thinking back on it I’m not sure that I even once ever found the powder measure on the RL550 to have started throwing anything other than the correct amount.
I mostly loaded .357/.38 but also did some .270 and .45. Loading .357 is really easy since it is a roll-crimp. I found .45 to be way more difficult to get set up because of the taper-crimp. Had a hard time getting the seat and crimp to be just enough, not too much, but once there they crank through just like the others. .270 is a taper-crimp too, IIRC, but it seemed a lot easier for some reason. Though, I didn’t make those in anywhere near the volume of the handgun rounds.
I didn’t load .223 then since I didn’t have one at the time, but I imagine it’s similar to the .270. Should be easy as pie. Lots of money to be saved there, no doubt.
My loader is now in the hands of an old friend that borrowed it years ago, and I had told him he could keep it. I wasn’t shooting as much and didn’t have space for it. But at these prices I may have to consider getting back into it with a new one. It’s just crazy these prices.
No kidding about the prices. We took ten people to the range Saturday. Fortunately we mostly shot 22 but...
Heh, didn’t know you had a blue machine too. I’m still in the ‘antique’ single stage press era. I concur on the .38 being easier than the .45 to set up. I shoot a variety of .38 bullets so tend to load them in batches. Wadcutters vs jacketed for example. My rifle and shotgun loading started out with the LeeLoader. Finally got a nice Mec press, but I was shooting trap twice a week in those days. Not sure about how feasible that would be with today’s prices.