POLL..Who Uses S/S Pins for Case Cleaning

[alf]

Interested in who here uses stainless steel pins for case cleaning on their match brass.

I'm only interested in people that shoot Benchrest competition, point blank PPC, VFS, Hunter BR, or 600/1000 yard BR, where the ultimate in accuracy is the goal.

Not the guy that has a rifle, or knows a guy, that shoots in the "ones all day" or "one ragged hole all day long", or PRS guys, etc.....personal experience only.

Why or why not?

 

[Alex Wheeler]

Tried it, peened the ends of the necks work hardening them and caused excessive seating force. Now I only brush with a stiff nylon brush.

 

[waldo1979]

Tried it. Ran a number combinations of time and solvents. Never got it to work. Now my tumbler collects dust.

I use an ultrasonic cleaner or don't clean at all.

 

[Dusty Stevens]

I use them with much success. Lots of tricks involved tho. Tumble new pins alone for a few days with lots of soap before doing brass

 

[alf]

I use them with much success.

You regularly do your PPC brass?

Why?

 

[waldo1979]

I use them with much success. Lots of tricks involved tho. Tumble new pins alone for a few days with lots of soap before doing brass

Dusty, can you describe your cleaning and reloading process?

I have so many questions:

• Did you need to adjust your neck tension due to less carbon in the neck?
• Are you using a neck lube?
• How many brass do you process at a time?
• How much media are you using?
• Which tumbler do you have?

I'm currently using 7lbs of stain media in a STM tumbler with 2 tbls of Dawn w/ 1 teaspoon of lemon bright for 1.5 hours. I typically process 50-100 brass in a batch and length trim after washing.

 

[FFEMT]

Tag, could be an interesting topic.

 

[Pappy42]

Yep, I'm hooked.

 

[Dusty Stevens]

Yes i do my ppc cases after a match. I used to just junk em. I do 100 with 5lbs of pins in a thumler. I squirt some blue dawn in there and put a few squirts of real lemon lemon juice filled to 85-90%. I tumble for an hour or more if i dont set a timer, put em on a towel and do the 4 corner shuffle, put em on a pizza pan in my oven at 200 for 1hr. Then just run over em with a debur tool and theyre ready to go. I dont worry about the bare neck tension anymore since i got a hydraulic press and confirmed on paper it doesnt matter but before that i used the graphite in bb can neck lube kit and it worked fine. Ill never clean my brass any other way and ill never go with dirty brass ever again its so easy for me

 

[zipollini]

This works

1. Anneal brass 1st
2. Slide 1/2 inch pieces of Tygon or rubber tubing over case necks to avoid case neck peening
3. Tumble brass in Thumblers Tumbler for 2 hours with 5# SS pins, just enough cold H20 to cover brass and pins, 50-100 pieces 6XC brass, 1 tsp Dawn, 1 tsp Lemi Shine
4. Dump brass, H2O and pins into media separator
5. Remove Tygon or rubber tubing from case necks
6. Rinse brass in filtered or softened H20
7. Place cases on drying rack to air dry or into dehydrator
8. Spray outer cases and inside necks with One Shot spray lube
9. Full length size with Redding Type "S" die with neck bushing
10. Expand necks with Sinclair generation II expander mandrel
11. Trim and chamfer case necks with Giraud trimmer
12. Re uniform and clean primer pockets
13. Wrap 0000 steel wool around a bronze wire brush and spin inside case necks with a drill, electric screwdriver, etc.. Will leave inside case necks super smooth every time
14. Rinse cases in 99% isopropyl alcohol to remove One Shot lube and use nylon brush on inside of case neck
15. Rinse in STM brass tarnish inhibitor - http://www.stainlesstumblingmedia.com/brass-tarnish-inhibitor.html
16. Place cases on drying rack to air dry or place in dehydrator.

That's it. SD always in mid single digits

 

[BenPerfected]

I love my SS pins and Tumbler and usually wash 100 pc at a time. My process is to rack and spray lube the brass then bump the shoulder. Next the brass is then full length sized/decapped and then dropped into the tumbler. Using liquid dish soap & Lemishine, the brass is tumbled for 5 hrs. After drying, the primer pockets are then trued using the Sinclair tool. As each piece of brass is primed the chamfer on my .010 necks are also lightly touched up. My final step is to powder and seat bullet in one process.

 

[Dusty Stevens]

I also should add i can tumble .0087 necks for a .262nk barrel just fine. I guess i just dont have some of the problems ive read about. One tip tho- follow the directions! I know they say to tumble pins alone and when i first get a batch it takes about a week to get rid of the metallic water. Those sharp edges causes problems i just dont have

 

[memilanuk]

The peening of the case mouths can usually be mitigated by either reducing the amount of time or increasing the amount of media and/or brass in the tumbler.

When I first started, did a batch for about 2 hrs, great results. Being a typical guy, more is better, right? So I left a batch in over night, like I frequently do with my vibratory tumbler. Holy heck. The mouths were so baddly peened, they looked like they'd been ran thru a roll-over crimp die - without a bullet inside. Couldn't get rid of it with a chamfer/deburring tool; had to trim those suckers back a good 10-15 thou and start over. With new brass :/

Over time, I've found a few things. Like I said, time is a critical element. The longer you have 'em in there, the more things can happen to the mouths. Also, case size plays a big factor. A .223 Rem case, climbing up the side and then tumbling back down the slope of the 'pile' in the tumbler, isn't very likely to damage its mouth, or any other cases' mouth, on the way. A .338LM case... sweet jesus. Those things have enough mass to dent themselves and everything else in sight in short order. The more 'fill' you have in terms of # of cases / amount of media affects how freely the cases 'fall' when they climb up the side and tumble back down. To some degree, thats sort of tied to the case size: I can only fit about 50 .338LM at a time in there with the media and water, and not go over the weight rating for the tumbler - but I can fit about 200 .223 Rem cases. I have spoken with people who have ran theirs overnight, supposedly with no ill effects - but they had that thing so over-loaded it had to have been slipping the belt on the pulley!

Nowadays, for my .308 F/TR loads (vast majority of what I shoot in matches) I tumble for about an hour. Is it perfectly clean? Nope. Is it clean enough? Yep. No grit, no dust to get drug thru the sizing die, etc. Is the chamfer on the case mouth pristine any more? Nope. Does it matter? Dunno, because after F/L sizing I run the cases thru a Giraud case trimmer that touches them up, so its a non-issue for me.

I shoot a (very) little Benchrest - a match or two a year with my .30 BR, all 31 pcs of brass, turned down pretty thin (don't recall off the top of my head, the gunsmith supplied them with the barrel). I don't have enough of them to really make a load worth doing in the wet tumbler, so once every year or two I haul out the ultrasonic cleaner and zap 'em in there a few times. Load 'em and shoot 'em once or twice for practice, then leave 'em alone other than a quick twist with #0000 steel wool on the neck/shoulder until the next time I get bored enough to clean 'em

YMMV,

Monte

 

[waldo1979]

I also should add i can tumble .0087 necks for a .262nk barrel just fine. I guess i just dont have some of the problems ive read about. One tip tho- follow the directions! I know they say to tumble pins alone and when i first get a batch it takes about a week to get rid of the metallic water. Those sharp edges causes problems i just dont have

I'm not sure i follow. How much neck tension are you running? I just measured and i'm running 0.0031" neck tension in my .308WIN redding dies (competition non-bushing). I think this may be part of my problem.

 

[sparky123321]

Lots of steps, but admittedly I'm OCD. Do I feel all of this time and effort are really required to be a competitive shooter? Absolutely, not!!! Many competitive shooters for decades have only cleaned their case shoulders and necks and you can't argue with their success. You'd get much more bang for your buck starting out with high quality components, properly prepping and sorting brass, sorting bullets, more accurately weighing your chargers and minimizing case concentricity and bullet run-out.

1) Fire
2) Decap
3) Clean with SS pins*
4) Anneal
5) Lube - only if full length resizing
6) Full length resize or neck size
7) 15-30 minutes in vibratory cleaner with untreated media just to remove the lube
8) Reload or trim/debur with a Giraud as needed

You may or may not agree with my method and that's fine, but I start with consistent and pretty much brand new brass each and every time I reload.

* - I could write pages on cleaning brass with SS pins, but this topic has been well covered in numerous prior posts. The one thing I will restate though is that SS pins do no have sufficient mass to damage, work harden or peen your case mouths. Any damage you may observe is due to cases impacting one another and has nothing to do with the SS pins. If you experience damage, your tumbler is running too fast(primary cause), your tumbler barrel design is incorrect for SS pins, your tumbling too much brass compared to the amount of water and or pins you are using. The cases are supposed to roll along with the pins and not be falling from the upper portion of your tumbler barrel onto the other cases.

 

[memilanuk]

Just in case any of that was directed my way...

Thumler's Tumbler (designed for wet tumbling), slow speed model, full to the brim of water. The items I mentioned above still stand.

 

[LHSmith]

Short range Score shooter. I fell into the shiny trap, then proceeded to shoot my worse scores ever. Now I admit there may be known fixes to the problem, BUT you are adding so many extra steps to get to what end result? Shiny brass?
The only other rational is supposedly case volume......it is said you loose a certain internal volume due to carbon build-up. While the #1 tenet in BR is reduce variables by doing the same thing exactly each time...I don't find any accuracy degrade I can account to loosing a extremely small amount of case volume....the cases are kept segregated by # times fired....so they all have the same carbon build-up.
Lastly, I've had pins stuck in primer holes and seen how they adhere to the inside case wall when wet.....and the last thing I want is too blow out pins through my $500 barrel because I missed that upon inspection.
For me the bad outweighs the good by a long shot.

 

[Webster]

QUOTE "SS pins do no have sufficient mass to damage, work harden or peen your case mouths. "

I agree. The pins have little mass plus the impact velocity is close to zero. I am sure many will disagree. Even if the edge of the neck was cold worked from the pins it would be well under 1 thous in depth and not affect neck tension. Funny how the sides and shoulders don't show a texture change from pin impact? The brass is soft enough to ding each other? In any case it's nothing to worry about. If you don't like the marks on the neck opening just trim to length after tumbling. The pins I bought didn't have sharp edges. No breakin tumble was needed.

 

[waldo1979]

... If you experience damage, your tumbler is running too fast(primary cause), your tumbler barrel design is incorrect for SS pins, your tumbling too much brass compared to the amount of water and or pins you are using. The cases are supposed to roll along with the pins and not be falling from the upper portion of your tumbler barrel onto the other cases.

-What brand of tumbler are you using?
-What is your mixture of pins, brass, water and solvents?
- are you adjusting neck tension (I.e. Using a bushing die)?

 

[jlow]

QUOTE "SS pins do no have sufficient mass to damage, work harden or peen your case mouths. "

I agree. The pins have little mass plus the impact velocity is close to zero. I am sure many will disagree. Even if the edge of the neck was cold worked from the pins it would be well under 1 thous in depth and not affect neck tension. Funny how the sides and shoulders don't show a texture change from pin impact? The brass is soft enough to ding each other? In any case it's nothing to worry about. If you don't like the marks on the neck opening just trim to length after tumbling. The pins I bought didn't have sharp edges. No breakin tumble was needed.

The peening of the case mouth is not caused by the SS pins. They are caused by other cases (MUCH heavier than the pins) colliding with the case mouth. This is why more pins (they actually act as a cushion), less cases (reduce chance for collision), and shorter cleaning time (again reduce number of collision) is what we use to avoid peening.