Quote:
Originally Posted by 32-40win
Strikes me as you will likely wind up wanting two presses, a progressive for the pistol rounds, and a single stage for the rifle rounds. You can run rifle rounds on a progressive, but, with the number of cartridges you want to do, you could find yourself spending a lot of time setting up, to change cartridges. Which may not be practical for small batches. Look carefully at what it takes to set them up and what accessories you need to buy, to do it for each cartridge. Finding someone in the area, who is set up with both, would help you immensely, to see what is what on that. Either setup, requires the same steps to process a cartridge to a finished product, and you need to learn the peculiarities of each step one at a time.
Most reloading component mfgrs have info online for reloading, the one thing they do not have on their sites, are the procedures, those are best picked up by reading reloading manuals, which will also give you a fallback reference, when you make a mistake, to help figure out how you foobarred it. No one manual has it all, each one has some different stuff in it. Acquire as many as you can. Start with the bullet mfgrs.
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I think that you are right about needing two presses, if you load for rifle and also for semi-auto pistol.
Many auto pistol users frequently go through many rounds, which is why they reload. A press to load 9mm, .40 cal., or .45 ACP, doesn't need the beef and leverage for full-length resizing that rifle cartridges do. What it does need is the ability to crank out rounds more quickly.
A progressive might be essential.
For rifle and revolver shooting however, you probably aren't going through more than 40 rounds of rifle and 100 rounds of revolver cartridges in a session at the range. Also, you probably will be interested in experimenting with different loads for these, where you might just be cranking out the same loads all of the time for auto pistol shooting.
As for manuals, I think that you are spot on. Too often one manual won't show your favorite powder or bullet while another will.
Sometimes, older manuals will show older powders that are still around that you may want to use, or older cast bullets, but the newer manuals will ignore these powders and bullets entirely.
The Lyman Cast Bullet Handbook will show only cast bullet loads, where some manuals show little of these. Also, this manual contains a wealth of information about bullet casting in general.