I screwed up

[Lead melter]

Well, I tried my first attempt at enlarging a mold today. As you can see by the title, things did not go perfectly. I bought some polishing compound yesterday and mixed in some borax powder, drilled a hole in the boolit base, ran a wood screw into the hole, cut the head off the screw, chucked the shank in my drill and went to town. On the good side, my Lee .429" 240 grain SWC gas check mold is now larger in diameter all around, weight increased from 221 grains to 225 grains. On the bad side, the shank where the gas check fits now has "wings" on it where the compound removed metal from the mold at the top where the sprue plate fits. A simple trim with a knife will remove the wing, but that is going to get old after a while. Perhaps I should have closed the sprue plate before attempting the enlargement, or maybe used just the polishing compound. Any ideas? I did only one of the two cavities, so the other is not changed, although casting boolits of 2 sizes from the same mold might get a little confusing. Oh well, live and learn. Someone please post saying how he has done something just as bad so I don't have to feel like the village idiot!

[MtGun44]

You can remove a few thousandths from the top (sprue plate side) of the mold
and maybe get rid of the wings. If you are very careful and use a wide
fine cut file you can do this by hand. Another, perhaps better way is my
old method of a piece of wet or dry sandpaper on glass or a surface
plate (the chinese ones are really cheap) and a few drops of kerosene
to float the dust. If you carefully work the pair of blocks on this, striving
for smoothness and uniformity, not speed, you can 'surface grind' off a
few thousandths, and may be yet a winner.

If you have a friend with a mill, this will be an easy project.

Too much removal and you won't be able to seat the gas check, but most
molds have at leas .010" clearance to the first band.

Good luck.

And remember none of the rest of us have EVER screwed up any job
like this. [smilie=1:

NOT ! :-D

Bill

[TedH]

I've had good luck cleaning up the top of some old Lee molds using the sandpaper on a piece of glass method. In your case it would sure be worth a try.

[RayinNH]

If your going to screw up, the Lee is the one to do it on. About 15-16 bucks will buy you a new one. You should be able to find that in the sofa cushions:-D...Ray

[Ernest]

You've only messed up one bullet mold????wish I could say that

[georgeld]

Hell man, just mail it back to Lee. they'll send a new set of blocks.

Might even be n/c, but, enclose a check for half the cost just in case.
they don't seem to say much even if you did screw it up. Maybe they
figure it had problems you tried to correct and went too far.