The Forster is a lovely press. But for loading some handgun ammo it could be seen as a bit of overkill. The upside is that you'll never outgrow it though....
If you're serious about 150 rounds a month then a single stage will work just great for you. I found from my own loading that I was able to work up to 150 rounds per hour in three batches of 50 at a time. This included sizing and flaring, using a hand primer to prime the cases, a dipper for powdering them, powder level inspection with a flashlight and finally seating and crimping the bullets to finish the rounds.
So one evening's worth of easy work and you'd be set for a couple or three months worth of shooting.
For me there's two things I look for on a single stage press. One is the ability to swap dies easily and with repeatability of the die settings and the other is how easily the press handles priming without the need to handle each primer.
The first issue can be dealt with in one of two ways. The first option is to buy a bunch of Hornady split clamping die rings. These tighten up on the die body threads such that they form a really good and accurate collar around the die to allow you to thread it into place time and again with consistency of the depth setting. If you're using a Forster or any sort of screw mount press these are almost a "must use" item due to the "no fuss, no risk" way that they clamp onto the die and ensure that the collar can't move. The Lee Oring style is junk and the RCBS nuts with the set screw are not a whole lot better. The Hornady rings are a whole other level compared to the rest. And if any other company sells such split rings with clamping screws those are going to be comparable. It's the METHOD, not the company that makes such locking rings great.
Next is to avoid this issue and buy a breech lock or bayonet lock press that uses special collars on each die to achieve this same consistency of placement. Lee and Hornady make presses with this feature. Again this is about being able to swap dies easily and consistently that makes this feature desirable. Either is a bit faster than screwing the dies into place. And over hundreds and thousands of die swaps it all adds up. Because the dies are locked into these bushings by the locking nuts the style of nut in this case isn't important.
Another feature is how well the press handles priming. While I really like the Hornady LnL single stage I bought for its bayonet die mounting I should have looked into the primer handling a little more. I'm having a tough time (although I haven't really tried all THAT hard) in finding the tube style priming kit for it. And frankly it's not that great a priming setup. The Lee Safety Primer system used on their single stage presses looks to be a better way of doing things.
I do not like to handle the primers individually because it only takes a moment's inattention to end up with some oil on my hands and then that can be transferred to the primers if I'm working with a "one primer at a time" situation. So I tend to prefer a bulk primer handling setup. This can be a hand primer tool or a press mounted bulk priming system.
One "on the press" setup that I really admire is the Redding sliding primer system. It would be almost enough to encourage me to opt for a Redding and a bunch of the Hornady locking rings for the dies.
For powdering up there's a couple of options. The cheap and easy method is a Lee dipper set and a little funnel. But it can begin to feel like you don't have enough hands with this method.
Another option is a Lee Auto Disc powder measure on Lee dies. With that you could flare and powder all in one go. So your loading process would be:
- Size and decap the cases
- Prime the cases either on the return stroke if priming on the press or with a hand primer
- Swap the sizing die over to the flaring/powder die that has the Auto Disc measure on top and run the cases through again to flare and drop powder
- Inspect for proper powder level.
- Swap dies for the seating and crimping die and set the bullets
Since the dipping and funnel work took up much of the time when I was doing this with a single stage using the on die powder measure promises to speed things up to where you should be able to get up closer to 200 rounds per hour with a bit of some speedy but still attentive flow to the work. Or if you're happy with a casual pace still hit 150 to 180 per hour with ease where using the dipper required a certain amount of "purpose" to get to 150/hr.
