Lloyd Smale said:
Id bet 1/2 or more of the people that buy them get so frustrated with them that there stuck in a closet or sold for half what they bought them for. Yup a dillon or honady will give you an occasional headache but not one every time you load a few rounds.
I speak from experience ... and bought a pro 1000 and a loadmaster ... Ill finish saying this. Anyone that compares the troubles with a lee to the troubles with a dillon has NEVER loaded on a dillon.
Lloyd, anyone familiar with my posts should know that I started reloading when I began shooting USPSA matches about 19 years ago. My reloading/shooting mentor was a seasoned Bullseye match shooter and he trained me on both Dillon 550B and Pro 1000 after we covered the reloading basics on a single stage press.
He covered the pro's and con's of each press and we range tested 9mm/45ACP Montana Gold Bullet loads which were my match calibers at that time. Although my inclination was towards the more expensive Dillon press, when I asked my mentor why he also loaded his match loads on the cheaper Pro 1000, he talked about the powder measure on the Dillon "drifting" while the fixed disk holes on the Pro 1000 did not. He taught me that accuracy came from reloading consistency and weighed and grouped bullets by same/less than 1 grain weight and preferred powder charge variance of less than 0.1 grains to qualify for "his" match loads. Yes, I started my USPSA match loads with same sorted head stamp cases, cleaned primer pockets and hand primed primers .004" below flush.
When we range tested the match loads loaded on both Dillon 550B and Pro 1000 presses at 10, 15, 25 and 50 yards, the shot groups were comparable. When I asked my mentor why as I expected the Dillon loads to be more accurate, he said my match guns couldn't tell the difference as long as the reloading components were consistent in my finished rounds.
I ended up buying the Pro 1000 kit from MidwayUSA thinking I would just spend $140 initially while I saved money for Dillon 650/1050 (I did not like the manual index feature of 550B) but my match loads did well enough for me to climb the local USPSA match ladder above 80 percentile in Limited/Limited 10/Production. I was curious and did comparison match load testing with loads loaded on other brand progressive presses but other match shooters were surprised when my Pro 1000 loads outshot some of their match loads. To figure out why, we all went to each others houses and verified powder charge weights and OAL, etc. (we used unsorted/unweighed Montana Gold bullets for these comparison range tests).
What we found that seemed to be the greatest contributing factor was the powder measure drifting. In a typical reloading session of 1000 rounds, some of the Dillon presses drifted by more than several tenth of grain and most users of Dillon presses admitted they checked powder drops every 100 cycles (some even more frequently). When I told other match shooters I only needed to verify the first several powder charges from Pro Auto Disk for consistency and the fixed disk holes dropped with less than .1 gr consistency without drifting with Bullseye/Clays/Titegroup/WST/W231/Universal/WSF/HS-6 powders even after 2000+ round reloading session, some of the match shooters considered checking the powder drops more frequently and a few even considered using the Pro Auto Disk.
Now all you lee lovers can come and gang up on me all you like but Ive been there and done that so its going in one ear and out the other Also if your riding hentown for not contributing anything worthwhile to answer the original posters question you might want to read your own post
This is THR and not every Lee press thread has to end with "Dillon/Hornady is the solution". As I have previously posted, I do not claim the Pro 1000 to be the "best" progressive press out there - Far from it. Is it for everyone? No. But if a particular reloader looking for a progressive press for multiple pistol/short rifle calibers doesn't have the money to buy Dillon/Hornady presses with caliber changes, Pro 1000 offers a viable progressive reloading option.
Don't get me wrong. Had I never met my reloading mentor who showed me the virtues of Pro 1000, I probably would have never considered one and bought either the Dillon 550 or the 650 as they are great progressive presses. I have the financial stability now to be able to afford to buy whatever press I want but do like loading on Pro 1000 enough that I now have 3 set ups for 9mm, 40S&W and 45ACP. Instead of adding 2 more Pro 1000 set ups in the tune of $380, I could have bought a Dillon 550 or LNL AP but after some consideration, I chose to go with having two more dedicated press stations so I can load each caliber without doing any caliber change work. I prefer to load .223/.308 on the C-H 205 single stage press or the Classic Turret (Hey, it's a great country!
).
Last year, I seriously considered buying a Hornady LNL AP but the problem was I couldn't decide between the Dillon 650 vs the LNL AP. Whenever I think about "upgrading" from the Pro 1000/Classic Turret presses, my wife would ask me, "But honey, will it load more accurate loads?" I had to ponder and admit that it probably won't. But the 500 free bullet offer with the LNL AP press is tempting and I may consider pulling the trigger.
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If you started your progressive reloading experience with Pro 1000 and moved on, that's fine. If you want to warn other reloaders to stay away from Pro 1000 based on your experience, that's fine too. This is a free public forum that permits freedom of opinion. But when the posts are made that claim the Pro 1000 is simply "junk" and the only solution is buying another progressive press in the face of quite a few Lee Precision reloaders who learned to make the Pro 1000 work for them, now that's not so "High Road".
Peace.
The fact that some users are able to successfully use their Pro 1000 on a regular basis (even for some new users) may point to the fact that how well a particular Pro 1000 press functions may be dependent on the user of the press. 
