The 5 Best Reloading Presses of 2026

Four dies sit in a rotating head, the head indexes a quarter turn with each stroke, and a case moves from sizing to charging to seating to crimping while your hand stays on the handle. That's a turret's bargain, and this is the budget way into it. Lee builds the frame from cast aluminum, which keeps the press light and the price down, and the auto index does the shuffling a single stage makes you do by hand.

We like it best for pistol cartridges — 9mm, .38, .45 — because the pace suits a few hundred rounds at a sitting without asking you to learn a progressive's timing. What it doesn't do is flatter heavy rifle work. Cast aluminum is less stiff than iron, so full-length resizing on once-fired military brass is the wrong job for it; small rifle and pistol cases are its lane, and it stays in that lane happily.

The details are worth knowing before you mount it. Extra turret plates are the smart add-on: set one plate per caliber and a changeover becomes a lift and a drop instead of a die-adjustment session. Lee covers the press with a two-year factory warranty, and the basic on-press priming arm that ships with it is the one piece most people replace first.

Its footprint is a modest 15 by 8 inches, which matters more than it sounds in a garage where the bench doubles as a work surface. A press you can leave set up and still use the bench is a press that gets used.

One pull of the handle indexes the shell plate and sets five jobs in motion: a case is sized and deprimed, a primer drops in, powder is thrown, a bullet is seated, and the round is crimped. What comes off the press is a finished cartridge, and Hornady rates the Lock-N-Load AP at up to 500 rounds an hour.

The difference from a single stage shows up immediately: you stop thinking about one case and start watching the whole cycle, because a missed primer or a short powder drop surfaces four stations later. That's what the speed costs — attention. This press also expects a proper setup. The shell plate wants a lock washer, the pawls need adjusting, and the whole machine wants to be bolted to a bench that doesn't move.

Where it earns the money is caliber changes and stations. Lock-N-Load bushings let you pull one die set and drop another in seconds, and the powder measure uses quick-change metering inserts so a new charge doesn't mean dialing from scratch. Five stations leave room for a powder-check die, which is worth the money on pistol loads.

The catch is that this is a press for a tinkerer. The primer shuttle and shell plate are the parts that jam or loosen, and small components have broken under use — the base mechanics are solid, but nothing here runs unattended. Check the primer feed and shell plate before a run and it will hold the rated pace.

A shotgunner's math is different. You're not tuning a load for 300 yards; you're trying to turn a shelf of spent hulls into shells that break clays, a hundred at a time. The Load-All II is built for exactly that: a compact bench press that deprimes and resizes, primes, drops powder, seats a wad, drops shot, and crimps, with you moving the hull from station to station by hand.

What we appreciate most is that the crimp is a real crimp. Set up correctly, the fold closes like a factory shell, and the press covers the 12-gauge range from light target loads to field shells. Setup matters more than the press here: a hull that's already been fired once folds easily, while a stubborn or new hull may need a shim under the crimp station before it closes cleanly. That's a shim and a test shell, not a defect.

The frame is plastic, and that's the honest trade. It's light, it's simple, and the base is the part that gives — keep it on a flat, solid surface so there's support underneath, and don't expect it to enjoy a marathon session. The other boundary is the gauge: this is the 12-gauge tool, and a 20-gauge shooter needs the 20-gauge version. For a flat of shells before opening day, neither limit bites.

The chore a turret eliminates is the one nobody warns you about: unscrewing a die, threading in the next, and re-checking depth every time you move from sizing to seating. The All-American 8 answers it with volume — an eight-station turret that holds two complete four-die sets, or four two-die sets, and lifts off so a spare turret can go on in its place.

The frame and turret are cast iron, the press weighs 28 pounds, and the straight-line primer feed comes with both large and small primer tubes. This is a substantial machine on the bench, and it earns its place in this group on die storage: set up .223 and .308 in the same head and you never touch a lock ring between sessions.

The parts that need attention are at the stations, not the frame. Die threads can arrive rough, and a press whose ram doesn't line up with the die will cant a case instead of seating it square, so run one case through each station and look at the base before you commit a batch. The primer feed is the other piece to check early; hand priming with a separate tool is a workaround this press takes in stride. If you want eight stations without a progressive's rhythm, that's a fair trade — but buy it knowing you may spend the first evening sorting it out rather than loading.