Wet Tumbling Brass

[mrdaputer]

You will find many ways to wet tumble brass. What I like to do is use a little Johnson and Johnson wash and wax with my soap and lemishine. I have the FART tumbler. I picked up a cheap magnet from Harbor freight with the release handle works great. I have a shell sorter to separate the pins from the cases. I also bought a cheap food dehydrator with a top mounted fan that dries in about a half a hour.

 

[Black Sunshine]

I like the idea of using lemishine (citric acid) in the tumbler. Are pins any more or less difficult to sort out of bottleneck cases vs straight wall or is it a non-issue?

 

[AManWearingAHat]

Black Sunshine,

Bottle neck cases can be a little bit harder to get pins out of, but nothing a magnet cant easily solve. Any time I do bottle neck cases, I wave each case over the magnet to make sure ALL the pins are out.

My wet tumble solution is a squirt of dawn and a bit of lemishine. Brass comes out gorgeous. I think I am going to switch from the oven to a dedicated food dehydrator. Inexpensive, and I don't take up the oven The bit of heat can tarnish the brass as well, which I prefer to avoid. Its just cosmetic but I like shiny cases

 

[TAROMAN]

I use an RCBS media separator to clear out the pins.
Fill it with water first. a few spins and the pins are all in the water.
Tip off most of the water and sluice the pins back into the tumbler.
ound up the strays with the aforementioned FA magnet.

 

[falloutboy89]

I use an RCBS Ultrasonic 2 Case Cleaner. I think the older versions of these were much smaller. I'm a big fan. Holds over 500 9mm per "bath", does a great job on the primer pockets and overall cleaning. It's really quiet and I like the smell from their cleaning solution. Smells like clean brass... lol. I just lay them out on a towel when finished and let them dry. I've never used anything else so I can't compare it to wet or dry tumbling. I would love to hear a comparison and see pics if someone has both...

 

[Black Sunshine]

I use a cheap harbor freight ultrasonic with citric acid. Cases clean up well (including primer pockets and interior), but doesn't shine them up like has been mentioned by the wet tumbling folks have stated.

 

[Greenjoytj]

I separate the SS pins from the cases with a with a Lyman Turbo sifter sieve set onto a small 2.5 gal Home Depot plastic utility bucket. I punched a line of ⅜" holes in the side of the bucket about 1" below the bottom of the sieve for water drainage. I put the bucket and sieve into the laundry tub, the tumbler is dumped into the sieve and water from the short hose attached to faucet sluces pins out of each case and through the sieve.
Pins fall to the bottom of the bucket and are rinsed off with the hose water.
I dump the wet pin into a large baking sheet to be dried in the oven.

To reduce the amount of time spent in the tumbler l decal with a LEE Universal depriming die and clean out the primer pocket fouling with the same cutter tool I uses to uniform the floor of the primer pockets.
A Sinclair Internationall carbide primer pocket uniformer mounted in a Forester Products Deburring Tool Base.