Wet-tumbling brass on the cheap

[AndyC1911]

1,000 grungy 9mm brass cases arrived today:



So I decided to experiment and bought one of these:



Turns out each drum holds about 200x 9mm cases, so I added hot water, a dash of Dawn dish-detergent and a pinch of Lemi-Shine into each drum (no pins). I ran the gadget for an hour to get a baseline, et voila:

[MaduroBU]

I find that for getting the nasty off of range/bulk brass, pins are unmatched. However, for getting a really polished finish, pin tumbling doesn't finish the job. For range ammo, I just use the pins, but for stuff that I care about, I pin tumble and then vibrate in walnut shells. It's a little more work, but the end result is crusty range pickups that look new when I'm done.

[AndyC1911]

I have literally zero interest in pins - I just need clean brass, I don't care about shiny.

[flechero]

So I decided to experiment and bought one of these:

Have that same one... I run a little fan pointing at the back of it (by cooling fin) and I'm 5 years and at least 20k cases through it, still on the 1st belt! When I bought it people were complaining how it got hot and broke belts with every couple uses. I just took an old white noise fan that developed a click (which makes it useless for white noise!) and put it on the workbench. I'm on my 3rd? or 4th? fan now but still the first belt. Fans don't last very long around here for some reason

[AndyC1911]

Good to know!

I've reduced the runtime to 30 minutes - a few experiments showed no appreciable difference between 30 mins to 2 hours.