Somewhat similar story, my RCBS scale came as a part of a package deal with the press. The beam was wrapped up in a chunk of t-shirt and the base, pan and tray were floating around loose in a shoe box. When I assembled it in order to get it to zero I darn near had to completely unscrew the adjuster. Obviously a mismatched set, google provided the answer. After rescrewing the adjuster in to get the base into a more level attitude the contents of the pan were dumped into the tray and pieces of the lead shot were pulled out with tweasers until I got to a rough zero. Dumped the shot back into the pan, reassembled everything and fine tuned it out. Didn't quite make it to Miler time... The fine adjustment label decided to fall off at that point.