Question for those that wet tumble

[shocker998md]

Originally Posted by trickg

See, it's posts like this that make me start itching to give it a try. It wouldn't even be that hard - the smaller FA isn't that expensive, and more and more I'm reading that you don't even need pins - just solution, your brass, and the tumbling action does the rest.

It's definitely piquing my interesting.

So I worked through a 40mm can of 556 brass that was old and nasty. Range pickups from two years ago, had dirt and water sealed up in it. Some of the brass was completely brown.

2 hrs in the wet tumbler with ss pins, water, and frankford arsonol cleaner and most of it cleaned up decent to good. But this stuff started out rough! I'm going to swap over to soap and lemi shine for cost purposes once I use up what I have.

If your cleaning normal dirty brass you can get away with 30 min to an hour and then roll right into drying.

[85MikeTPI]

Originally Posted by trickg

See, it's posts like this that make me start itching to give it a try. It wouldn't even be that hard - the smaller FA isn't that expensive, and more and more I'm reading that you don't even need pins - just solution, your brass, and the tumbling action does the rest.

It's definitely piquing my interesting.

I grabbed a Thumbler a few years ago, but found that wet tumbling was a PITA for cleanup/drying compared to dry so it got shuffled to the corner. Reading some of the posts here about NOT using SS pins was enough to get me to try it and it actually makes the process feasible for me again. I've been given some nasty brass thats been poorly stored for years and the walnut just never recovered it. An hour in the wet (dawn and a dash of citric acid) made them almost new again..

[85MikeTPI]

Stepped up the game a bit with my HF mini mixer that I was using with 25lb of walnut and ~2gal of brass for 4-6hr runs. Going wet I was able to process an entire 5gal bucket of brass at one time, and for only 1hr runtime. Few squirts of Dawn and dash of lemishine and the process worked great (No SS pins). I'm holding off doing more until I can get full 75deg sunshine days for drying.




This just begs for a caption:
She: You'll pull out in time, right?
Me: ...