Time for SS Tumbling?

[Pres100]

Lots of people with different experiences with SS tumbling.
I never tumble for very long; 20-30 minutes max does plenty to clean and they are still shiny externally. Internally they are cleaner than with media tumbling but not as shiny as exterior - probably still have a little carbon, but mostly clean. Necks are not peened or damaged.

I can only recall 2 pieces of 308 brass that had a pin stuck in the neck out of multiple thousands of cleaned brass, I haven’t had any stuck in the flash holes. The ones that stuck in the neck weren’t really stuck and easily stuck out when handling during prep - easy to spot and just as easy to remove. Corncob/walnut material always got stuck in my flash Holes and I found myself constantly having to inspect and knock it out.

My method for rinsing afterwards includes dumping 90% of the soapy water out into mud sink, refill and dump 2X, then fill my RCBS media separator bottom 80+% full of clean water. Fill the tumbler back up (50-60%) with clean water and then pour into the media separator basket. Most of the cases should be under water in the separator basket. A very slow spin for a minute will remove all of the pins and final rinses the brass - takes about 5 minutes. Key is plenty of water.

Towel tube dry and you can either finish with air dry or heat them using the oven if you need faster. I find that at about 200 degrees you are dry in about 20 minutes or so. Whole process takes about an hour or so and most of the time you are doing other tasks while waiting.

For me, SS tumbling is not really a hassle and doesn’t take much time. I had decent results with dry media as well, but no where as fast or clean as SS. The best results I had with dry media was corncob and NuFinish car polish.... just took multiple hours and had to check flash holes for stuck pieces. Also long term there is a lot of dust build up.

My $0.02

 

[Texas10]

So is it impractical to pick and shake out 25 pieces of brass by hand?

I’m trying avoid another closet full of gadgets.

David

Very practical for small batches. About 5 seconds per case, so you're done in like 2 minutes.

I pour the contents of my tumbler into a 5 qt bowl. Then move into the kitchen sink where I rinse and let the water flow into a second bowl. This catches the SS pins/chips that might otherwise go down the drain. When the rinse water is clear, pour out the water in the second bowl back into the first bowl to recycle the pins/chips. Shake the cases on the water's surface held in a mouth downward position. Drop into the second bowl, filled again with water. Drain out the water, blow out with compressed air, roll on a towel, place in the dryer. While it's drying, load up another batch in the tumbler. After 10 minutes, take out the hot cases and place into another container for inspection, trim, whatever else.

The whole cycle takes about 10 minutes for each batch, so you're processing a batch every hour. I annealed, tumbled, trimmed, sized and inspected 200 6BR brass, 200 223 brass in a weekend day, with loading and barrel cleaning in between.