Been loading since a boy in 1958. Up until the tumbler came into use, no one was worried about shiny cases. We just cleaned 'em with soapy water. Rinsed. Dried. And that was it. Along around 1980 I bought a Lyman tumbler. Used crushed corn cob and a small touch of Braso. Later, I found tossing in a used dryer sheet removes much of the dust and carbon that forms in the media as it comes off the cases. It will extend the life of your media. Think of the dryer sheet as a little broom sweeping up the dust.😊
I appreciate you guys making a reloading series. One video I’d like to see outside of the normal brass prep, size, powder, seat videos that everyone does would be getting the measurements. A video on shoulder bump, distance to the lands, measuring to the ogive versus OAL, and the tools used would be pretty cool
I used a Thumler's vibrating cleaner for 30 years. When it finally died I bought a different make and it didn't work as well. I was running them for 8hrs to get the brass clean. One thing about the vibrating cleaners, if you don't replace the media frequently you will get a lot of dust. A few years ago I got a rotary wet tumbler with pins and I was blown away by how clean it got even very dirty brass in 30-60 minutes. I would never go back. I went through and re-cleaned all my previously cleaned brass and was amazed by how much dirt was still there. Also, you can buy a magnetic pin pickup tool that works very well - the only thing is you need to make sure there's no pins in the cases. After drying, I turn them upside down as I putting them in a container.
i use that , plus i have an extra jug and FART grip too! ugly heavy range brass, i use the harbor frieght shaker 1st to deep clean the bad stuff if needed.
I use the FART wet tumbling w/o pins as well. After rinsing, I dump the brass into a bag that my wife made for me out of an old terry cloth towel. I shake out the bag and then lay out the brass to dry.
Great job guys. I started using the wet tumbler with steel pins with dawn and lemi-shine , they look like factory new cases. I do use a rare earth magnet to pick up the pins which is slow but works, I put the magnet in a sandwich bag, pickup pins and then turn the bag inside out to release the pins in a bucket then repeat. I usually let everything dry and check for pins in the cases the next day. I usually only do about 100 at a time.
Bought a Vevor ultrasonic cleaner (3L) on Amazon, and it works very well. It's also very fast, I usually do 7' per batch. Some dish soap and a tiny bit of Lemi Shine and it's good to go. It cleans the insides of the cases very well. I highly recommend this way of brass cleaning
Great video! I use the corncob media for years and it works great. I once tried wet tumbling using vinegar and a Dawn solution. Given I was doing this in my garage when I was finished with the solution I tossed the liquid on my lawn. My lawn has never forgiven me! The resulting liquid would give agent orange a run for its money!
this makes me happy to see the new series!!!! i batch load in sets of 1000. ( 556) i order my brass dirty range brass from a place in El Paso Texas, it gets shipped to me fast here in Maine USPS. , and I use a large water vibratory shaker from harborfrieght, then go into the proper steps.. i am a huge frankford arsenal fan boy.. i stick with the frankford brand for case prep. !!! might armory and squirrle daddy have great prep tools too! Please dont stop this series!! keep going!!! i need a good 30-30 reloading class! dont forget to keep the kung fu grips clean too!
Thanks for the video. Looking forward to the rest of the series. You might mention a couple of words of caution about protection from and dealing with lead dust when cleaning cases. One of my mentors sadly got lead poisoning from too much dry tumbling without taking precautions against dust and contamination. He became quite poorly. I have to deal with fairly large quantities of range pick-up brass, a bucketful every two weeks or so, all calibres mixed, handgun and rifle, including .22lr. is there a sieve or other system, maybe along the lines of the Lyman, that facilitates sorting mixed brass into calibres for further processing?
In place of Lemishine and dawn dish soap I use a tablespoon or so liquid laundry detergent and 0.6 cc of powdered citric acid. In the Lyman tumbler. I use one of the little Lee reloading scoops to measure. The citric acid is in the canning supplies. Cheaper than Lemi-shine, and the laundry detergent is cheaper than the Dawn.
A rotary tumbler with white rice as media, the cheapest rice works best. Tumble about 8 hours will clean primer pockets if brass is deprimed prior to tumbling.
Two things, when you tumble brass, your tumbler, and the used media is full of lead, the longer you use the media the more lead is in the media. Be very careful of the spinning basket thing as it will spread a cloud of lead dust in the room. Lead accumulates in your body over time, keep yourself safe. Also if you are cheap as I am rice is a very good tumbling media. It will not polish, but cleans very well.
I have always used crushed walnut shells and jeweler's rouge combo doing a dry cleaning in a small tumbler (around 50 shell casings). It works just fine.
I dump my wet tumbled brass and pins into the Frankford Arsenal media separator and spin, set the separator in the sink while I drain the bucket, put the separator back in, fill it with water and spin the brass submerged to prevent the pins sticking due to surface tension of the soapy water/Dawn/Lemi-Shine solution. After draining the bucket the second time a magnetic screw and nail pick-up tool picks up the media while leaving any residual sand or organic material in the bucket to be discarded.
Place just water in ultrasonic and place your brass in a zip lock with a solution. This helps to keep your ultrasonic clean and not have lead contamination with other things you want to clean
Been wanting to get into reloading for some time now, but it's a lot to take in at once. This would be a good first step into it I guess, I do have a ton of .38spl and .357 brass lying around.
Anyone on a budget go to Harbor Freight and get a rock tumbler. I wet tumbled all my brass in one for years and still use it for small batches regularly. You don't need super fancy equipment.
I use a Frankford Arsenal wet tumbler and pins. I start with some brass, then pins, brass, more pins, etc… until it’s about half full. Then add super hot water and a few cap fulls of frankford brass cleaner and they come out great. I spin them in the separator but I still stand them up on a table after they dry and run a magnet over the top. Also make sure I didn’t inadvertently pick up a 380.
Primer pocket crimps used to be exclusively military brass. Now a lot of commercial cases, especially in Pistol Caliber Carbine calibers are coming crimped as are commercial 223/5.56 cases. I have some .380 ACP cases that were crimped. Even 38 special cases of certain brands. Some are also coming with a heavy coat of primer sealer that can make decapping and repriming difficult. Swaging those helps repriming. Some imported 32acp brass has primers glued in place so good that the face of the primer will come off when trying to deprime and it will leave the rest of the primer stuck in the shell.
I love my stainless steel pins as a media. They really bring out the shine. The downside is you really need to be careful when transfering the brass/media from one container to another, or the pins will bounce everywhere. You will run out of SS pins by attrition. And I like to clean my brass for at least 30mins before running them through my decapper. I theorize it is less wear on my dies by getting rid of the sand, dirt, grit, whathaveyou.
Wet vs dry tumbling cases comes down to two things for me. 1. I don't want to wait for cases to dry nor give up bench space for a drier to run. 2. I don't have access to a sink or drain in my reloading area. I don't want to run up and down stairs filling and draining the tumbler in the kitchen or bathroom sink. Some people drain and refill their wet tumblers to really shine up their brass. There just seems to be a lot of extra effort involved in an otherwise simple process.
My process is vib for about an hour. Decap. Sonic clean for about 15 min with Dawn and Lemi Shine. Places in dehydrator for about 2 hours at 160 degrees.
I do not have any secret formulas for homemade ultrasound cleaners. I prefer product called Chem Crest 235 as it is specifically made for firearms. It is an excellent cleaner. It is not cheap but it effective for a long time and still works even when the water is really soiled. What you do not want to use is the poor man’s ultrasonic cleaner Simple Green. It can attack or corrode some metals.
For the final step i pour a hand full of the brass alil at a time after dry media tumbling to dust off the media powder remaining on the cases for the best shine on the case...
Thanks for the series. I've done a bit of reloading -- for .30-40 Krag, 6.5 Swedish, and M-1 carbine -- but I'm still fairly new to it. I noticed that the Lee manual says cleaning is not important, but I use a tumbler with corn cob or nut shells. I do wear a mask when pouring the brass/media mixture into the sorter (thanks for the heads-up Iraqveteran8888). But there are so many variables: Some folks have you keeping all the brass separated by how many times it's been fired and such, and other people reuse brass they find on the ground at the range. I'm not reloading for match shooting. So how do I determine which load works best? I've used 50-yard groups as my metric so far. Should I get a chronograph? I basically just want to come up with a good load for each gun and do production runs of that. Do I need to keep my once-fired brass separate from my twice-fired brass and such? Thanks!
One note on the pins for wet tumbling. The pins can lose their edge and not clean primer pockets effectively. I switched to Southern Shine tumbling media. It's machining chips that do a better job of cleaning primer pockets and they don't get stuck in a 6.5mm diameter case mouth like the pins do.
Vibratory tumblers work best when full. If there are only a few pieces of brass in them they take a long time to clean. The weight of the brass presses against the media speeding up cleaning. I use, abuse actually, 2 of the old Midway (sorry) tumblers and one large Lyman tumbler with walnut. I can clean 1200pcs of 5.56x45 cases in the Lyman. I typically run 500+ pistol cases in the 2 midway tumblers and go from dirty range brass to clean brass in 90 minutes but it can take 3 hours if there are just a few handfuls of brass in any of them. I have a small Lyman tumbler with corn cob media treated with a cap full of NuFinish car polish that will polish cleaned cases up to a mirror finish in 30 minutes. When you treat the media you have to let the polish circulate in the media with the tumbler running until the media dries or it will cement itself into every case you put in the tumbler. I add a used drier sheet into each tumbler to reduce static and collect the finer dust. My tumblers run daily and the walnut media lasts about 6-9 months. It actually cleans better when it has been used a while.
I have dry and wet systems and I always go to the wet tumbling more than dry. I think wet does a lot better job cleaning and polishing... I went to stainless steel chips than the pins...
My son's a USPSA shooter. Somehow I got tasked as the "Brass Monkey." Wet tumble, pins and dish soap. Popping primes takes the longest time. No lemon shine! Case brass is 70/30 copper zinc. The acid removes the zinc. A magnet helps with the pins. In the old days, I bought walnut shell from the pet store. It's used for snake shit!
Depends on my Media for Corn Cob I use Pet Smart ground Corn Cob in the Lizard Isle, also I get Lizard media in Ground Walnut from them, then I go to Auto parts store or Wal Mart and buy New Finish car polish. I tumble when get home from Range, then Anneal, then tumble then resize, Tumble, trim and bevel and taper and cut to length, then Tumble. Only after then I glove up and start the reloading. But my brass gets tumbled up to 6 times before reloaded.
That's the biggest reason for the walnut media. Ground much finer so it doesn't get impacted into the primer pocket. DON'T use walnut with the primer still in place. That stuff gets impacted in the primer cup and flash hole, only to come spilling out when you decap the brass. Makes a frigging mess. I like a quick tumble in walnut as a convenient removal of case lube before priming the brass.
I like to sonic clean first to soften the crude up so that wet tumbling does not take near as long. Then wet tumble, to get things really clean, and then run the brass through a separator to get rid of the Southern Shine shavings. Then I dry the cases. I also vibrate clean with crushed walnut after sizing and flaring to get the lube off of the cases. but I deprime first as I like things good and clean. The following video is the best to learn what to and how much of for wet tumbling formulas: ua-cam.com/video/PPqK7yN0-4o/v-deo.html
In sunny AZ, I just spread them out on a tarp for a couple hours. Makes it easy to run a jobsite rolling magnet over them to catch any of the steel casings (some are brass coated, now, and look identical to the brass ones). I've also seen that some people will use a food dehydrator.
Harbor Freight rock tumbler, ss pins, tsp of car wash ‘n wax, tumble for 2 hrs. Dump out into a plastic Dollar Tree colander (needs slots, not round holes), rinse, and dry in the sun. I have literally used the original batch of ss pins for at least eight years. I’ll never go back to dry tumbling with the dust and clogged flash holes.
What is the best way to dry the brass after a wet tumbler? Water spots will make you brass look like a leopard pelt. That is not going to make your brass fail, but it is right up there with idiot scratches on a 1911 when your buddies see it at the range.
dry tumbling, way less cleanup, no drying, and no need for luve on pistol cases in carbide dies wet tumble strips the cases of all oil and makes even pistol cases stick. esp 45acp
You should do it the other way around. Use corn cob media for 1st clean, resize and decap, then tumble for 30 minutes to an hour to remove case lube and carbon in primer pocket. Walnut media doesn't get stuck in the primer pocket like the cob. You also won't have walnut media all over the floor and in the your reloading press from media stuck in the primer.
@@colemanhill the corn cobs takes off the lube and polish them. Walnuts will stick with the dust . I do use dryer sheets. That only take so much dust. I do not have problem with the ground walnuts because I check the cases both times after tumbling.
Been loading since a boy in 1958. Up until the tumbler came into use, no one was worried about shiny cases. We just cleaned 'em with soapy water. Rinsed. Dried. And that was it.
Along around 1980 I bought a Lyman tumbler. Used crushed corn cob and a small touch of Braso. Later, I found tossing in a used dryer sheet removes much of the dust and carbon that forms in the media as it comes off the cases. It will extend the life of your media. Think of the dryer sheet as a little broom sweeping up the dust.😊
Good tips - thank you sir.
I appreciate you guys making a reloading series. One video I’d like to see outside of the normal brass prep, size, powder, seat videos that everyone does would be getting the measurements. A video on shoulder bump, distance to the lands, measuring to the ogive versus OAL, and the tools used would be pretty cool
Great crash course video - thanks guys. Will check out the rest of the series.
I used a Thumler's vibrating cleaner for 30 years. When it finally died I bought a different make and it didn't work as well. I was running them for 8hrs to get the brass clean. One thing about the vibrating cleaners, if you don't replace the media frequently you will get a lot of dust. A few years ago I got a rotary wet tumbler with pins and I was blown away by how clean it got even very dirty brass in 30-60 minutes. I would never go back. I went through and re-cleaned all my previously cleaned brass and was amazed by how much dirt was still there. Also, you can buy a magnetic pin pickup tool that works very well - the only thing is you need to make sure there's no pins in the cases. After drying, I turn them upside down as I putting them in a container.
Once I run my brass through my ultrasonic cleaner I use a lettuce spinning device to help dry out the brass. Works great 👍
Frankford Arsenal wet tumbler with Dawn and Lemishine. No pins. Brass comes out super clean and bright. No dust or media to deal with.
That's what I use with stainless media
i use that , plus i have an extra jug and FART grip too! ugly heavy range brass, i use the harbor frieght shaker 1st to deep clean the bad stuff if needed.
I use the FART wet tumbling w/o pins as well. After rinsing, I dump the brass into a bag that my wife made for me out of an old terry cloth towel. I shake out the bag and then lay out the brass to dry.
Yep. A complete game changer for me. I go so sick on having media in my brass after cleaning. Now. No crap in there.
I use the same except I use car wash instead of dawn
Great job guys. I started using the wet tumbler with steel pins with dawn and lemi-shine , they look like factory new cases. I do use a rare earth magnet to pick up
the pins which is slow but works, I put the magnet in a sandwich bag, pickup pins and then turn the bag inside out to release the pins in a bucket then repeat.
I usually let everything dry and check for pins in the cases the next day. I usually only do about 100 at a time.
Bought a Vevor ultrasonic cleaner (3L) on Amazon, and it works very well. It's also very fast, I usually do 7' per batch. Some dish soap and a tiny bit of Lemi Shine and it's good to go. It cleans the insides of the cases very well. I highly recommend this way of brass cleaning
Great video! I use the corncob media for years and it works great. I once tried wet tumbling using vinegar and a Dawn solution.
Given I was doing this in my garage when I was finished with the solution I tossed the liquid on my lawn. My lawn has never forgiven me! The resulting liquid would give agent orange a run for its money!
this makes me happy to see the new series!!!!
i batch load in sets of 1000. ( 556) i order my brass dirty range brass from a place in El Paso Texas, it gets shipped to me fast here in Maine USPS. , and I use a large water vibratory shaker from harborfrieght, then go into the proper steps.. i am a huge frankford arsenal fan boy.. i stick with the frankford brand for case prep. !!! might armory and squirrle daddy have great prep tools too!
Please dont stop this series!! keep going!!! i need a good 30-30 reloading class! dont forget to keep the kung fu grips clean too!
I do the Frankford Arsenal wet tumbler with stainless pins, car shampoo and a teaspoon of citric acid for brighter cases, decap on a dedicated die!
I know less than nothing about reloading so this series will be interesting. I've got a buddy who is gonna teach me a few things as well
Always use certified loads, from a book or the powder manufacturers website.
Thanks for the video. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
You might mention a couple of words of caution about protection from and dealing with lead dust when cleaning cases. One of my mentors sadly got lead poisoning from too much dry tumbling without taking precautions against dust and contamination. He became quite poorly.
I have to deal with fairly large quantities of range pick-up brass, a bucketful every two weeks or so, all calibres mixed, handgun and rifle, including .22lr. is there a sieve or other system, maybe along the lines of the Lyman, that facilitates sorting mixed brass into calibres for further processing?
Thanks guys, Loads of respect, Phil
I have that RCBS primer pocket swage set, and have used it for years. It's slicker than a schoolmarm's leg, as an old shop teacher of mine once said.
Frankfurt Arsenal wet tumbler is all I have ever used. Same for me, dawn, semi shine and pins. No dust!
What do you do with the water after tumbling?
In place of Lemishine and dawn dish soap I use a tablespoon or so liquid laundry detergent and 0.6 cc of powdered citric acid. In the Lyman tumbler. I use one of the little Lee reloading scoops to measure. The citric acid is in the canning supplies. Cheaper than Lemi-shine, and the laundry detergent is cheaper than the Dawn.
A video on case annealing would be interesting.
A rotary tumbler with white rice as media, the cheapest rice works best. Tumble about 8 hours will clean primer pockets if brass is deprimed prior to tumbling.
Two things, when you tumble brass, your tumbler, and the used media is full of lead, the longer you use the media the more lead is in the media. Be very careful of the spinning basket thing as it will spread a cloud of lead dust in the room. Lead accumulates in your body over time, keep yourself safe. Also if you are cheap as I am rice is a very good tumbling media. It will not polish, but cleans very well.
Good information! I was thinking about this and I run my tumbler in the gaurage not the house!
I have always used crushed walnut shells and jeweler's rouge combo doing a dry cleaning in a small tumbler (around 50 shell casings). It works just fine.
Newbie here. I'm interested in the whole process, but that RCBS primer pocjet swager has caught my eye.
I dump my wet tumbled brass and pins into the Frankford Arsenal media separator and spin, set the separator in the sink while I drain the bucket, put the separator back in, fill it with water and spin the brass submerged to prevent the pins sticking due to surface tension of the soapy water/Dawn/Lemi-Shine solution.
After draining the bucket the second time a magnetic screw and nail pick-up tool picks up the media while leaving any residual sand or organic material in the bucket to be discarded.
Place just water in ultrasonic and place your brass in a zip lock with a solution. This helps to keep your ultrasonic clean and not have lead contamination with other things you want to clean
Been wanting to get into reloading for some time now, but it's a lot to take in at once. This would be a good first step into it I guess, I do have a ton of .38spl and .357 brass lying around.
Anyone on a budget go to Harbor Freight and get a rock tumbler. I wet tumbled all my brass in one for years and still use it for small batches regularly. You don't need super fancy equipment.
THIS!
Harbor Freight cement mixer is my go to...
I use a Frankford Arsenal wet tumbler and pins. I start with some brass, then pins, brass, more pins, etc… until it’s about half full. Then add super hot water and a few cap fulls of frankford brass cleaner and they come out great. I spin them in the separator but I still stand them up on a table after they dry and run a magnet over the top. Also make sure I didn’t inadvertently pick up a 380.
Primer pocket crimps used to be exclusively military brass. Now a lot of commercial cases, especially in Pistol Caliber Carbine calibers are coming crimped as are commercial 223/5.56 cases. I have some .380 ACP cases that were crimped. Even 38 special cases of certain brands. Some are also coming with a heavy coat of primer sealer that can make decapping and repriming difficult. Swaging those helps repriming. Some imported 32acp brass has primers glued in place so good that the face of the primer will come off when trying to deprime and it will leave the rest of the primer stuck in the shell.
I love my stainless steel pins as a media. They really bring out the shine. The downside is you really need to be careful when transfering the brass/media from one container to another, or the pins will bounce everywhere. You will run out of SS pins by attrition. And I like to clean my brass for at least 30mins before running them through my decapper. I theorize it is less wear on my dies by getting rid of the sand, dirt, grit, whathaveyou.
Wet vs dry tumbling cases comes down to two things for me. 1. I don't want to wait for cases to dry nor give up bench space for a drier to run. 2. I don't have access to a sink or drain in my reloading area. I don't want to run up and down stairs filling and draining the tumbler in the kitchen or bathroom sink. Some people drain and refill their wet tumblers to really shine up their brass. There just seems to be a lot of extra effort involved in an otherwise simple process.
My process is vib for about an hour. Decap. Sonic clean for about 15 min with Dawn and Lemi Shine. Places in dehydrator for about 2 hours at 160 degrees.
I do not have any secret formulas for homemade ultrasound cleaners. I prefer product called Chem Crest 235 as it is specifically made for firearms. It is an excellent cleaner. It is not cheap but it effective for a long time and still works even when the water is really soiled. What you do not want to use is the poor man’s ultrasonic cleaner Simple Green. It can attack or corrode some metals.
Cool thanks guys!
For the final step i pour a hand full of the brass alil at a time after dry media tumbling to dust off the media powder remaining on the cases for the best shine on the case...
Thanks for the series. I've done a bit of reloading -- for .30-40 Krag, 6.5 Swedish, and M-1 carbine -- but I'm still fairly new to it. I noticed that the Lee manual says cleaning is not important, but I use a tumbler with corn cob or nut shells. I do wear a mask when pouring the brass/media mixture into the sorter (thanks for the heads-up Iraqveteran8888).
But there are so many variables: Some folks have you keeping all the brass separated by how many times it's been fired and such, and other people reuse brass they find on the ground at the range.
I'm not reloading for match shooting. So how do I determine which load works best? I've used 50-yard groups as my metric so far. Should I get a chronograph? I basically just want to come up with a good load for each gun and do production runs of that.
Do I need to keep my once-fired brass separate from my twice-fired brass and such?
Thanks!
One note on the pins for wet tumbling. The pins can lose their edge and not clean primer pockets effectively. I switched to Southern Shine tumbling media. It's machining chips that do a better job of cleaning primer pockets and they don't get stuck in a 6.5mm diameter case mouth like the pins do.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I SHOULD buy a cleaner of any kind. But a bucket of warm water, dish soap and a scrubbing cloth have been good for the amount of reloading that I do.
Vibratory tumblers work best when full. If there are only a few pieces of brass in them they take a long time to clean. The weight of the brass presses against the media speeding up cleaning. I use, abuse actually, 2 of the old Midway (sorry) tumblers and one large Lyman tumbler with walnut. I can clean 1200pcs of 5.56x45 cases in the Lyman. I typically run 500+ pistol cases in the 2 midway tumblers and go from dirty range brass to clean brass in 90 minutes but it can take 3 hours if there are just a few handfuls of brass in any of them. I have a small Lyman tumbler with corn cob media treated with a cap full of NuFinish car polish that will polish cleaned cases up to a mirror finish in 30 minutes. When you treat the media you have to let the polish circulate in the media with the tumbler running until the media dries or it will cement itself into every case you put in the tumbler. I add a used drier sheet into each tumbler to reduce static and collect the finer dust. My tumblers run daily and the walnut media lasts about 6-9 months. It actually cleans better when it has been used a while.
I have dry and wet systems and I always go to the wet tumbling more than dry. I think wet does a lot better job cleaning and polishing... I went to stainless steel chips than the pins...
Is there a potential of cold working the brass when you tumble with the steel pins? How long is too long in the tumbler?
What do you do with the cleaning solution after tumbling/ultrasonic?
Will the primer sizer work on Berdan primed brass so it can be reloaded?
How many times can you reuse the dry media?
My son's a USPSA shooter. Somehow I got tasked as the "Brass Monkey." Wet tumble, pins and dish soap. Popping primes takes the longest time. No lemon shine! Case brass is 70/30 copper zinc. The acid removes the zinc. A magnet helps with the pins. In the old days, I bought walnut shell from the pet store. It's used for snake shit!
Depends on my Media for Corn Cob I use Pet Smart ground Corn Cob in the Lizard Isle, also I get Lizard media in Ground Walnut from them, then I go to Auto parts store or Wal Mart and buy New Finish car polish. I tumble when get home from Range, then Anneal, then tumble then resize, Tumble, trim and bevel and taper and cut to length, then Tumble. Only after then I glove up and start the reloading. But my brass gets tumbled up to 6 times before reloaded.
I use a terry clothe...
Hey Kaleb, how do you rate brass primers vs. plastic ones?
How much reloading do you need to do for it to be worth the money you are spending on equipment?
If you plan to dry tumble, keep the primer in until after, media will pack the pocket full, real pain to get out.
That's the biggest reason for the walnut media. Ground much finer so it doesn't get impacted into the primer pocket. DON'T use walnut with the primer still in place. That stuff gets impacted in the primer cup and flash hole, only to come spilling out when you decap the brass. Makes a frigging mess. I like a quick tumble in walnut as a convenient removal of case lube before priming the brass.
@@colemanhill lol exactly why I quit dry and now wet tumble. No mess, no contaminated dust, it's alot easier and brass gets much cleaner anyway.
As for crimp primer pocket Lyman has a remer. If someone want to go that way
I like to sonic clean first to soften the crude up so that wet tumbling does not take near as long. Then wet tumble, to get things really clean, and then run the brass through a separator to get rid of the Southern Shine shavings. Then I dry the cases. I also vibrate clean with crushed walnut after sizing and flaring to get the lube off of the cases. but I deprime first as I like things good and clean.
The following video is the best to learn what to and how much of for wet tumbling formulas: ua-cam.com/video/PPqK7yN0-4o/v-deo.html
I always Clean my brass before resizing… Not only to keep my resizing die clean, but also so I don’t get dry media stuck in the primer hole.
How do you dry brass after a wet cleaning?
In sunny AZ, I just spread them out on a tarp for a couple hours. Makes it easy to run a jobsite rolling magnet over them to catch any of the steel casings (some are brass coated, now, and look identical to the brass ones).
I've also seen that some people will use a food dehydrator.
Harbor Freight rock tumbler, ss pins, tsp of car wash ‘n wax, tumble for 2 hrs. Dump out into a plastic Dollar Tree colander (needs slots, not round holes), rinse, and dry in the sun. I have literally used the original batch of ss pins for at least eight years. I’ll never go back to dry tumbling with the dust and clogged flash holes.
What is the best way to dry the brass after a wet tumbler? Water spots will make you brass look like a leopard pelt. That is not going to make your brass fail, but it is right up there with idiot scratches on a 1911 when your buddies see it at the range.
dry tumbling, way less cleanup, no drying, and no need for luve on pistol cases in carbide dies
wet tumble strips the cases of all oil and makes even pistol cases stick. esp 45acp
Outdoors stranglehold 🇺🇸
How can one cut down on the tumbler dust?
I use a dryer sheet or add a little bit of liquid car wax like Nu-shine to cut the dust.
Why would you not show us a shinny vs not so shiny comparison, myself I don’t care about shiny but you have an ultra sonic comparison going here ?
Always use distilled water. Tap water contains minerals and chemicals.
I run brass in ground walnut before anything else. Then decap and size . Since I use case lube . I run it again in ground corn cobs.
You should do it the other way around. Use corn cob media for 1st clean, resize and decap, then tumble for 30 minutes to an hour to remove case lube and carbon in primer pocket. Walnut media doesn't get stuck in the primer pocket like the cob. You also won't have walnut media all over the floor and in the your reloading press from media stuck in the primer.
@@colemanhill the corn cobs takes off the lube and polish them. Walnuts will stick with the dust . I do use dryer sheets. That only take so much dust. I do not have problem with the ground walnuts because I check the cases both times after tumbling.
Swaging pockets.... I have multiple dies systems and I find that Lee Ram Swage does better job and easier to set up...
Ultrasonic clear. I use kerosene.
That stupid bucket is a solution looking for a problem.
You can always hawk tuah on the brass. Works well but will give your rounds an STD. 🤣🤣🤣
Sonic cleaner with simple green and water