I’ve tried a number of things but keep coming back to porcelain media mixed with cornhusk w/ jewelers rouge. for pistol brass.
Only down side is the rouge dust gets in and on everything. And I do mean everything…
Interested to hear what others are using.
We have stuck with the KISS principle in Hatcher’s. We use plain walnut and tune with the vibratory tumbler. I often start a batch in the morning on my way to work and empty it in the evening on my way home.
For rotary tumbling I’m a giant fan of stainless steel pins. They are fast and thorough, the catch is you need to tumble them wet with a detergent to keep the grime suspended. Which means more clean up and you need to dry the brass. But, I think the results are worth it. You end up with beautifully polished brass with all surfaces shiny. Inside, outside and primer pocket.
As if we needed any more reasons to mess with it, but the ultrasonic would also super-shine brass with some Dawn and citric acid. I’ve seen the results online and even the primer pockets look brand new afterwards.
Have you tried a dryer sheet in w/ the stainless media to catch and trap the debris?
I’ve been tumbling the brass to loosen everything up - then putting the shells in chem-ip carb cleaner - then rinsing and drying them. I’ve been getting good results with this. Trick is to de-pin the rounds between the tumbler and the chem dip.
After much more experimentation, I now put a cotton cloth into the bottom of the tumbler with a small smear of FLITZ polish on it - this captures and holds fine particulate GSR and extends the life of the cob flake a bit. I use a mix of corn cob flake media and a dash of tiny stainless steel pin polishing media to knock the worst of the GSR out of the cases.
I have given up on corn cob with polishing rouge - that crap gets into everything and stains.
I have given up on porcelain polishing pellets - 2 can get jammed into a shell nice and tight and can damage the decapping pin - not worth it
I have given up on cut bamboo pieces to remove GSR - seemed like a likely idea - wasn’t… I might try this again in much finer pieces.
I bought and tried some walnut shell and am totally not impressed - corn cob seems to do better
I tried pistachio shell but bits kept getting stuck in the shells - I will probably try this again in the future but will put the pistachio shells through a coffee bean blender into a smaller grind that then won’t be able to stick in the shells.
Still want to hear what others have tried good & bad
Update - I discovered that used primers (about 2500) mixed with a cup of walnut is great for a tough GSR cleanout. As usual, a piece of cotton T-shirt in the tumbler to collect & catch fine particulates.Had trouble in the past cleaning out Winchesters, but this mix seems to take it right off. Also tried used primers and corn-cobb and it’s a bad mix. The granular walnut keeps the primers from slipping back into the shells if you’re rough tumbling after de-pinning. The corn-cobb will occasionally make a primer slip back in and lodge tight after de-pinning.
I’ll toss a different point of view here. When I was shooting USPSA and IDPA and trying to win, my weekly practice budget was 3000 rounds of 40S&W. I shot an SVI full race gun, a limited gun, and a Glock36 in the production classes. I reloaded them all on a Dillon 650. I scrounged brass every where I could get it, and some of it looked mighty poor. It can’t all be Starline brass.
I used plain old walnut, and a capful of mequires wipe on polish, and everything came out looking the same - nice and clean, with a slight burnish to it. I prefer that to high polish, because I don’t want anything on my gun to shine. It was cheap, worked a treat.
If you like shiny. you can get a pretty decent shine just by using corn cob and meguires. (If the brass is nasty, run it through the walnut hulls first). I used pecan hulls actually - I’d go down to the pecan cracker in november or so, and they’d let me have 50# of it for the effort of bagging it. You don’t have to grind the hulls for pistol ammo, the case mouths are decent size.
I’ll say, that if stainless pins were around (or perhaps I had just heard of them), I’d have sure tried them.
I don’t recommend depriming before tumbling, Pistol primer pockets won’t normally hang up the primer seating on a little residue, and you can decap and prime on the press at speed. Picking walnut hulls or other media out of flash holes isn’t my idea of fun. If you don’t get it picked completly out of there, the reduced burn in the powder chamber can cause a lot of auto-loaders to short-cycle.
I’d be careful to use a waxed rouge too - you don’t want anything on the round that holds moisture.
Stainless steel pins in a rotary tumbler with water, Dawn, and a touch of lemonshine.
Beautiful brass, perfectly clean, no fuss, no mess.
I have gone through one container of corn husk with rouge in it - never again - once that stuff breaks down it becomes a paste that gets into and sticks to everything.
I have tried adding a cotton rag with a very small dab of FLITZ on it with good results.
I don’t necessarily want or need a high polish - but I want all of the GSR and carbon deposits off so I can spot case defects. Same reason for having a totally clean primer pocket to check the case for cracks.
Yes - I’m OCD on checking my cases - got worse after I learned about Kabooms - I never go below 5 checks per case in my process and some cases go through 7 different checks.
I also take fresh cases and remove the primer hole burs so that I get a cleaner burn on my powder. In Winchester rounds especially, one of the reasons the WIN cases are so much dirtier fresh off the range is because the burs inside the case are so bad. WIN reloads of mine always come cleaner off the range after my reload then fresh out of the box.
Doing a case debur step also weeds out the cases that don’t have a centered primer hole. This seems an issue with shells that came from south of the border for the most part. While I know intuitively that a primer hole not being centered isn’t an automatic reject of a case, it is for me. Means the manufacturer didn’t care about one production tolerance, what else did they go lax on?
Overkill? - yes - but I reload to the standard that it’s got to be good enough to defend my family with.
Is there a rotary tumbler you favor? Do you have a favored source for your stainless media?
And the experiment continues -
I tried 2/3rds crushed pistachio shells with 1/3rd crushed walnut with the following results - I prepared the pistachio shells in a coffee grinder. A blender would likely do the job too.
GSR removal was better than walnut alone overall on a 5 hour tumble.
Needed a pair of needlenose pliers to get some larger pistachio shell fragments out of some of the cases - I need to find a way to sift out the larger bits,
Also - the Pistachio tends to “flour” and needs to be removed from some of the primer pockets if you’re tumbling de-pinned shells. - I need to sift out the fine powder - a.k.a. flour before and between uses going forward.
So - works - but most will find it to be too much work clearing the brass of some larger shell fragments.
Why did I try it? - Had the pistachio shells handy. I like free.
In future - I hope to try finely chopped aged bamboo as tumble media.
Nice,
I’ve been wondering about Solutions for powering as well. Walnut after a few uses powders pretty bad as well.