Have you taken one of your dies apart to see how it works? The part under the cap with an angled surface on its bottom, interfaces with the angled top of the collet, so that its fingers are forced inward, pinning the case neck to the mandrel. Once it reaches that condition, with the neck pinned against the mandrel, about all you will accomplish with further pressure is to create ribs on the outside of the neck where the splits in the collet are. One thing to make sure of is that you do not operated the die without a case in place. If you do, it will deform the collet so that an unsized case neck will not easily slip between the collet and mandrel. The point of Lee's prescribed method is that as long as you raise the ram till yo meet solid resistance, you will have sized the neck. Any variation in pressure beyond what is needed to do that is like pushing down on your desk top with your hand by variable amounts. It is of no consequence as far as the height of the desk above the floor goes. Change in neck tension is achieved by changing the diameter of the mandrel. I will say that I have operated LCDs by setting them up to very lightly toggle at the top of the stroke, and that method has worked just fine...for me, but in getting to that point of enlightenment, I managed to make the mistake of using a die with way too much toggle (using that well established principle that if some is good, more is better, and too much is just right) producing ribbed case necks, and in one case seriously deforming the bottom of a collet, where it came in contact with the shell holder. This was decades back, when I knew a lot less about reloading, and was in a more ham fisted stage. You can toggle, if your cases have reasonably uniform neck thickness, and set up to do it ever so lightly, almost not at all, but I can assure you that my friend who screws his die into his Rockchucker till he can't, Like the directions specify, and tries to apply the same 25 lb. of force at the point where the handle stops, gets excellent results. I have even seen pictures of one fellow's press that he modified so that he uses a torque wrench instead of the handle, when using a LCDs, but as I said, I believe that once the minimum pressure is achieved, variations in pressure above that are inconsequential. Given the variations that I have observed in shooters' mechanical sense, I believe that Lee has taken the proper approach with their directions, and that the only problem is in the head of the reloaders who have a problem with the idea of the ram not topping out, because in every other press operation it does. As it turns out, in this instance, the problem lies entirely within their heads, and has nothing to do with the results achieved.
