And now that I've sent the info...here's my studied view of the Six-Pack Pro/Pro 6000, as a Lee customer of the last 17 years.
Lee Precision really hit it out of the ballpark with this one. Turns out I also have a Dillon XL650, also in .38 Special, where the Pro 1000 in .38 Special used to sit on my bench. The XL650 was a purchase basically to save a friend who some unscrupulous vendor had upsold her on (a Classic Turret Press would've been perfect for her). So, I set it up on my bench and got it going. No hogwash here; the XL650 really is a good, well-made press.
And then the Six-Pack Pro/Pro 6000 came along.
This press is serious XL650/750 competition, at about a third of the price. My current example is in .45 ACP, bought to replace a Load-Master. Setting this thing up took me about 3 hours to get it right. Compare that with the XL650, which took me a couple of days to figure out. You nearly have to have a Mechanical Engineering degree to figure out an XL650. Now, once you get it set up, it works very well, but that set-up is something else.
The Six-Pack Pro didn't take nearly as much "mechanical engineering" education to figure out how to set up and get going. Changing out cartridges on a Six-Pack Pro is loads easier than either a Load-Master or a Pro 1000. Same goes for primer sizes. The Classic Cast/Turret Press style of spent primer pass-through tube is excellent. It keeps things nice and clean. The die setup is the complete four-die .45 ACP setup, with an RCBS powder-cop die in Station 3. The powder-drop system is the good ol' Pro Auto-Disk Powder Measure that I had also used on the Load-Master and my twin Pro 1000's from 2009.
The new priming system...this is the really big improvement. Changing primer sizes is super-easy. It acts totally automatically, as should be done on any progressive press. And unlike the original Auto-Prime system on the Pro 1000 and Load-Master, this priming system seems like it was designed to operate even after 20,000 rounds without having to clean it. I'm not saying the previous Auto-Prime system was "bad". It did work, so long as you cleaned it every 5,000 rounds or so. But you absolutely had to do that, otherwise primers would go sideways and get crushed. Not so good. This new priming system fixes that. It's also got the same benefit that the Safety Prime has in that setting off a primer during the priming stage does not set off the rest of 'em. This is a major safety improvement. Its fully-automated nature really helps with ammo output.
And speaking of ammo output....
You know how some companies advertise these crazy rates of ammo output? We all know how they do it; first, they stock the press, then they measure ammo production until they run out of primers or powder, whichever comes first (usually something like 10 minutes), and then they multiply that number to get "rounds/hour". That's cheating, as it does not count having to restock the powder, primers, or shells.
So, I decided to do a real test. At 12:00 high noon one day, I started the timer on my .45 ACP Six-Pack Pro. The press was empty--no powder, no primers, no shells. I do not use a bullet feeder because I use cast bullets (Lee moulds) with liquid Alox, and the Alox is a little sticky. I then stocked the powder hopper full of Titegroup, filled up the primer tray, and also filled up the case feeder tubes via the Case Collator. Did 10 powder drops, then measured the next five powder drops on an RCBS 10-10 beam scale, to make sure.
Then I settled in and made some ammo.
An hour and ten minutes later, here is the result, attached as a picture. This is 350 rounds of ammo, using Federal LPP's. I pulled these ammo trays out of their boxes after I was done, but originally they were boxed and ready for the range. I also had a few oopsies that I caught and fixed during that hour and ten minutes. So, this was a *real* test of ammo output. I did not have a single crushed primer. Not a single crushed case. Powder-drop measurements at the 100-round, 200-round, and 300-round points showed a variance of only a tenth of a grain. It's basically the same results as the XL650 provides.
This is what a well-designed progressive press is capable of doing. That's why I'd like two more of these. Well done to Lee Precision on this one.
--TP
San Francisco, CA
