New Lee Dies

[quicksylver]

Dan,
Did you just polish it up or did you actually open it up / hone it ?
Jim

Jim...actually ended up honing it out...
It did not take that long...about a. minute per piece of paper...
I expected it to be a little harder..
It was harder than the push through
dies...but still cut nicely....must have been really tight....l can not remember. the starting and ending dimensions. ..
but as I said it is some slick now..
BTW...I did not touch the expanding. ball..per comments here.....

 

[Ian]

I keep hearing or people opening up bullet sizing dies with a split dowel and sandpaper, just by rolling the die on their leg for a couple of minutes. The case sizing dies are about 300 times harder than the bullet sizers, and take me around one hour per thousandth using a drill press and tight, oiled 3M emery paper. I must be doing something wrong.

 

[quicksylver]

I keep hearing or people opening up bullet sizing dies with a split dowel and sandpaper, just by rolling the die on their leg for a couple of minutes. The case sizing dies are about 300 times harder than the bullet sizers, and take me around one hour per thousandth using a drill press and tight, oiled 3M emery paper. I must be doing something wrong.

Ian...the only comment I can make is that from what I have seen and experienced is that the Lee push through dies seem a little rough on the inside ,with tooling marks present...lapping them out really only removes the rough milling and at the same time expands the diameter...it also polishes the surface making the bullets look like polished jewelry...nice...I would like to do that with out changing the diameter...

The FL die set I got from Lee was also a little rough ..so honing with the paper did the same thing ..it got rid of the tooling marks in the neck AND increased the diameter...so the initial honing only removed the tool marks, an easy cut...the second go around was a little harder and longer.

I can imagine that if this die had a nice hard polished surface when I got it, it might have taken a lot more work to open up....

 

[Ian]

True on the polish, all the Lee dies can benefit from little clean-up. One time I tried some really coarse AlO2 paper, 80 grit IIRC, and that really cut the nitride coating on an RCBS sizing die that needed the neck enlarged. Gotta be careful with RCBS, once you get through that coating, which is about 8 million on the Mohs scale, the metal is like putty and you can over-do it very quickly.