Not a bad product, but wish it was better - Lee Load Master 38 Special/357 Magnum Reloading Pistol Kit

I bought the Loadmaster because it was easily half the price of a Dillon unit. I don't know anything about either, so I took a chance on this one. First of all, whoever claims that you can do 600 rounds per hour with this is outright lying. I can do that rate for about two minutes until the thing jams in one way or another. How does it jam? 1)Cases tip over when dropping from the chute. 2)Cases fail to load properly in the first station of the shellholder for depriming. Lee blames it on out of tolerance case foot dimensions, but they fit fine in any other shellholder on the planet and in my gun and fire fine. 3)Primer feed jams. 4)Primer feeds upside or sideways. 5)Cases get hung up when trying to eject. 6)Turret fails to rotate after a jam because the "pushing arm" is at the wrong position. So all in all, after clearing the jams, re-doing the cases that were removed due to the jams or what-not, I am able to do about 250 cases per hour on a good day.

On the plus side, its definitely rugged, the powder measure is dead on accurate, and the seating and crimping stations are also dead on. But overall, it reminds me of a rube goldberg contraption. I can live with it, but don't buy this unless you enjoy tinkering. Also on the plus side, the folks at Lee couldn't be better. Very helpful with my litany of questions to them, and very responsive.

I also bought the case collator. Cases like .357 seem to always feed into the tubes correctly. 38 special has an upside down case once in a while. .380acp has every 10th case load upside down which is just one more "thing." Seems like the less weight and moment arm on the base of a short case, the more of a tendency to feed upside down.