out of roundness

[rideage]

hello to everyone. so I just got the lee 500 gr mold for 45-70 from midway..... nice working mold..... the bad news is that it seems to throw out of round bullets. right at the seam it is .459-460... just right... but mid point between the seams its only measureing .451-452.... that just doesnt seem right..... I also have a .358 mold that the blocks are too loose which causes the alignment pins to not line up right... I am starting to think the quality is slipping a bit. SO have any of you had a simular problem? and also do I send it back to midway or to LEE?
jim

[David R]

If you send the mold back, it goes directly to lee.

David

[drinks]

Rideage;
I have 34 molds by 5 makers, all are out of round, mostly .0005 to .001", except for 2 I have just reamed out, they have no detectable out of round, at least not that I can tell.
I have had a couple of Lee molds that slopped around on the handles and did not want to align, I just put them together in alignment, put a rubber band on the handles to hold everything in place and put Crazy Glue in the slots where the handles are.
Next day I tried the mold and it was fine, I deliberately ran it hotter than I usually do to see if the Crazy Glue would burn out, but after several months, there has been no problem.
On the out of round, that is a bunch for your 500gr mold, I would send it back to Lee, I have that mold and it is not over .001" out of round in mine.
I have sent one mold back, a soup can that would drop perfect bullets from one cavity and in over 300 tries, including all the cleaning, smoking and spraying with release agent, the other cavity never made a fully filled out bullet.
It was replaced with no problems, they even tried the new mold out before they sent it to me.
I recently had a member send me a group buy fat .44 mold to try, a 2 hole mold, one cavity was .430 at the parting line and .439 at right angles, the other was .430 at the parting line and .440 at right angles.
I do not know why he did not send in to Lee, but I would have.

[Buckshot]

..............Rideage, welcome to the board. For the most part Lee does a fine job in producing their moulds and they're a great value with the included handles. I've had problems with RCBS and Lyman moulds, both took care of them immediately with no problems other then I didn't have the mould for awile. By all means send it back to Lee, and best even would be to send a cast slug back with it.

My, and I think a lot of other user's main issues with Lees are that for some reason in several designs they cast a bit smaller then we'd like to see. Their 458-405F and 458-340F both immediately come to mind.

If you are new to Lee moulds, a good one (and they DO make some :-)) are great and produce very nice slugs overall. However you can turn a Lee mould into a useless piece of junk pretty quickly by heavy handed use. Pay particular attention to keeping it lubed, and close the blocks gently.

The 'V' grooves at either end that control lateral or horizontal movement have a tremendous amount of surface compared to other maker's means of alignment. And when aluminum gets as hot as molten alloy it can become sticky. Lack of lube there on the 'V's will also have an effect on how well the vertical alignment pins mate with their slots.

The vertical alignment via the pressed in steel roller bearing(s) is a kind of neat way to accomplish it, but it is steel on aluminum and the softer metal looses everytime . It doesn't take too many times of that rollerbearing hitting the edge of it's mating slot to mess it up.

What I do is first of all, at the first hint of stickyness I lube the 'V's with a tiny dab on the underside of each steel pin. Also, when I close the mould blocks I do it gently and kind of pinch the bottoms together when they get close. Naturally I have a glove on my right hand when doing that :-) Don't ever just clap them closed.

Threated gently and kept lubed they will cast many thousands of good boolits before they die. And regardless how nicely they are treated, they WILL eventually bite the dust.

.................Buckshot

[drinks]

I have more than 25 Lee dies, the only repeat problem I have seen is they sometimes press the needle bearings in too far and raise a burr at the end of the slot and have a small burr where the needle bearing enters the face of the block, both are easily removed with an exacto knife.

[Bucks Owin]

My method for keeping Lee mould blocks aligned in use is to run over the "Vs" and pins with a soft carpenter's pencil....

I don't worry too much about a "little" out of round (.001" or .002") as "hopefully" sizing will make it round again. But in your case the out of round is pretty excessive...

I've had great luck with Lee boolit moulds and the price is right.

FWIW,

Dennis

[lovedogs]

All the above is good advice. Another problem some have is the use of these drop-out spray lubes. This stuff can build up and cause out-of-round problems. Use smoke and forget the sprays.

[JeffinNZ]

Ditto above. Most of my moulds appear minutely out of round.

The foolproof way to fix them though I have found is to launch them down a rifle barrel at a goodly pace. Seems to true them up sweet. [smilie=1: