School me on wet tumbling

right, there's nothing physically wrong with it - other than for my personal use its relatively low volume.

and from someone who does a LOT of brass at a go, i can confirm you dont need to limit yourself to one batch a day
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i hold all my brass and basically have a brass washing weekend every winter where i process *ALL* of it.

i'll pick a snowy saturday and crack out batch after batch. just keep rinsing and refilling the tumbler
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its not bad, and with the downtime inbetween you can get a ton of other little things done around the house, just stopping long enough to rinse/refill as the timer goes off
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I have a cheap HF rock polisher. I went with copper wire pieces, at first. A few hundred pieces of #12 wire about 3/4" long. Worked great on pistol brass (straight wall). Then I did some rifle brass......not good, the pins got stuck in the brass.

So now, I use no media. Just the brass tumbling onto itself, cold water (softened) a squirt of Dawn and a 9mm piece of brass full of lemmi shine. Let it go for an hour or two, and done. Rinse well to make sure lemmi shine is all gone.

Brass comes very clean, don't have to bother separating media or digging pins out of rifle brass. Is the inside of the brass pristine clean? No, but that doesn't bother me.
 
Every time I fire it gets cleaned one way or another. AR's tossing brass sin the dirt/sand is a great way to ruin dies unless you are really lucky wiping them down. With some sizers North of $125.00 I want to be sure they are squeaky clean.

Greg
 
Originally Posted By: GLShooterEvery time I fire it gets cleaned one way or another. AR's tossing brass sin the dirt/sand is a great way to ruin dies unless you are really lucky wiping them down. With some sizers North of $125.00 I want to be sure they are squeaky clean.

Greg

Mine gets corncob overnight after each of 2 firings, and wet tumbled after the third firing before annealing.
All of my brass is from bolt guns so it rarely touches the ground.

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i wet tumble every go-round.

i dry tumble to get the big grit off, then run thru the case feeder for depriming with a universal decapper. this is like a 15 min preclean for me. just to get the schmoo off and keep it out of the hopper and case feeder assembly.


then into the thumblers to get sudsy.

then i do my processing (resize, trim, etc)

i'm annealing every other reloading right now.
 
I'm still refining my process. I used to just dry tumble, decap/resize, then trim, etc. I'll probably still dry tumble the stuff that looks OK, but I've been getting a lot of range brass back from friends and family that is just filthy. The really dirty stuff gets decapped, wet tumbled, then resized, trimmed, and so on. I'm glad I started wet tumbling. The results really speak for themselves - especially on that stuff that comes back extra grody.
 
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