Editing a mesh in the UDK

Off the bat, im very new but ill try to keep my questions clear and try to spare everyone as much pain as possible.

Anyway, Im using the UDK and what i am attempting to do is take a mesh already in the editor (HU_Mech_SM_Light01 to be exact) and edit the material attached to it.

**I was practicing Shooting out a light tutorial, but the mesh as it comes is a little bright. Its good for the Before light, but i wanted a secondary Darker mesh to replace it**

1. I duplicated the mesh and the material within their respective packages. I renamed them so not to confuse with the originals.

2. taking the new material, i edited it within the Material Editor to my satisfaction

3. Using the new Mesh, i opened the Properties, found my way into the LODInfo, and pointed the Material window towards my newly edited material.

The mesh itself appeared unchanged in the preview window, and when i closed the properties, the new material appeared to not be on the mesh within my level as well. So i opened the properties of my edited mesh to find that it was still using the original material.

Is there a save option I'm missing? or is the mesh itself slaved into using only that material? any help is greatly appreciated. Thx everyone

-DemonFrost

Update: i ended up just Drag and Dropping the material onto the mesh in the level editor. that seemed to get me what i wanted, but i was just a little thrown by not being able to edit that material that meshes use in the content browser.