enough tumbling?

S

Shadow9mm

New member
So, how much do I need to tumble brass:confused:. Everything I read seems to say it needs to be shiny, the shinier the better. Why? Does shinier really mean cleaner? How clean does brass really need to be? at what point are you polishing the brass and no longer cleaning off dirt?

Currently I am doing a 30min tumble in walnut with a little nufinish before resizing and trimming. After I am doing about 2hrs in walnut with nu-finish. I stopped using corn cob a couple years ago after it was taking 8hrs to run a batch of 9mm brass with fresh corncob. My though was the brass needs to be clean, and walnut does it faster. It is not perfect gleaming new brass, but it runs just fine. I am honestly wondering if I am tumbling too much and need to drop down to a 1hr final tumble.

thoughts?

update 10-10-2018

did a little testing, dirty, vs 10, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120min tumbles. brass randomly pulled from tumbler. I'm thinking 90min for a full clean, 120 seems about the same.
 

Attachments

  • 20181010_210552.jpg
    20181010_210552.jpg
    213.4 KB · Views: 45
Last edited:
Shadow9mm said:
So, how much do I need to tumble brass:confused:. Everything I read seems to say it needs to be shiny, the shinier the better. Why? Does shinier really mean cleaner? How clean does brass really need to be? at what point are you polishing the brass and no longer cleaning off dirt?

Currently I am doing a 30min tumble in walnut with a little nufinish before resizing and trimming. After I am doing about 2hrs in walnut with nu-finish. I stopped using corn cob a couple years ago after it was taking 8hrs to run a batch of 9mm brass with fresh corncob. My though was the brass needs to be clean, and walnut does it faster. It is not perfect gleaming new brass, but it runs just fine. I am honestly wondering if I am tumbling too much and need to drop down to a 1hr final tumble.

thoughts?
Click to expand...
It just needs to be clean. Shiny isnt a requirement. Personally I wet tumble with SS pins, but this is due to the dust given off by vibratory and i got tired of cleaning the primer pockets.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
 
I pick up a lot range brass there now seems to be a surplus since Trump is in office. So normally I put it all on the sonic cleaner for about 20 minutes than dry it. I clean it this way before depriming it so that my dies do not get scratched. Afterwards I just put it on a tumbler for about 20 to 30 minutes max. Polishing the brass for me is so that any small aberrations that may make the brass unusable shows up to the naked eye. But in more than 50 years of shooting, pretty shiny brass and dull brass shoots the same.
 
In reality, dirty brass loads & shoots just the same as shiny polished brass. You don't even need to clean primer pockets & you'll never notice the difference.

But the idea is to get the brass clean enough to prolong your dies & clean enough after sizing to remove lube & loose carbon that could make its way into your rifle chamber.

Before the tumbling craze started, I use to swish my fired brass around in big jar with water, soap & vinegar. Dried it, lubed it, sized it & tapped the case head down on the bench to shake any loose carbon out of the pocket. These were then wipes with a paper towel to remove the lube. That's it - case prep done. Prime, load & shoot!
 
Before the tumbling craze started, I use to swish my fired brass around in big jar with water, soap & vinegar.
Click to expand...

I never found it necessary to have a formula, I understand it was cool to use the NRA mixture but it that worked better than straight vinegar I would not be able to deal with the results.

Before vinegar I use some bad stuff. the difference between the bad stuff and vinegar could be measured in time. I used 5% vinegar for 15 minutes maximum, the bad stuff I limited the time to less than 2 minutes, after removing from the bad stuff I rinsed the cases twice in boiling water.

One more time: I only use vinegar for the worst of cases to reduce tumbling time.

And then there are show off cases, when I want to show off I use a spinner, the spinner saves time when loading 20 cases.

F. Guffey
 
BumbleBug said:
In reality, dirty brass loads & shoots just the same as shiny polished brass. You don't even need to clean primer pockets & you'll never notice the difference.

But the idea is to get the brass clean enough to prolong your dies & clean enough after sizing to remove lube & loose carbon that could make its way into your rifle chamber.

Before the tumbling craze started, I use to swish my fired brass around in big jar with water, soap & vinegar. Dried it, lubed it, sized it & tapped the case head down on the bench to shake any loose carbon out of the pocket. These were then wipes with a paper towel to remove the lube. That's it - case prep done. Prime, load & shoot!
Click to expand...
very interesting, i have wanted to try wet tumbling as i though soap and water getting sloshed around and lifting and removing the dirt would work better. My main problem is wet tumbling seemed quite expensive compared to dry.
 
for several years all I did to my brass was wash like Bumblebug. I went with wet stainless when I caught the Franklin rotary on sale for 130 bucks shipped and I had a little extra cash. I do like my primer pockets clean and my primers well seated. More consistent velocitys for LR rifle
 
I don't remember how many years... no less than 10, maybe it was 15. For my first 10-15 years of handloading, I didn't clean brass in any way whatsoever.

I most definitely prefer working with clean brass. But my position is that there is either NO ANSWER to your question, or there is only one correct answer: whatever you decide
 
In reality, you can wipe a case clean and its fine.

However, I LIKE shinny brass. I don't like smoked brass.

Now my case lube and neck lube are messy, so the run through the tumbler gets that off so I don't have to wipe it, and its SHINNY.

Then there is the crooked cake my Grandmother made (Grandad put the shelf back in the oven wrong, poor Gran pa)

Grandma was horrified. No German Housewax makes crooked cakes (slanted as it were). My suggestion to fill it in with frosting on the deep end did not go down well.

I think it got sliced in half and then swapped so it was level (you also do not throw food away in a German household!)

Did that slanted cake as was going to taste bad? Sometimes its the appearance that counts.

My wife (who probably cold do rows like her dad) was not allowed to do farm rows where the fields cloud be seen from the road.

Yep, a Farmer is JUDGED by how straight his rows are.

If I see someone with dirty brass I sneer. Peaseant I think.

Shiny brass is a reflection (pun) of the workmanship, but shiny brass alone is not the end goal. No reloader worth his salt (bullets? Powder) is seen with dirty brass going into his gun. -
 
I don't go crazy making my brass like new, I just want them clean so they don't scuff the dies... after all, when you shoot them, they just get dirty again....
 
I tumble range pick up, and my own collected brass until it’s clean...........could be 30 minutes, could be several hours.

I just need it to be clean, not bright and shiney as new. I tumble in walnut or corn cob to clean off powder residue, dirt, and to smooth any oxidation the range brass may have. I don’t care if it’s tarnished, as long as it’s not dragging debris into my dies, or creating feeding issues from a rough case.

I’ll also tumble after loading to remove any lube, but that’s usually only for 15-20 minutes.
 
These days I use a rotary tumbler with stainless steel pins for range pick up brass. (Outdoor range, with dirt filled, and water spotted cases from the barrel.) I wash the brass first to get the majority of the mud, and crud off so that the water in the tumbler will clean them.

For removing case lube I do still use a vibratory tumbler with walnut media to clean the case lube off. I used the vibratory for everything for years. I switched to the wet tumbling mainly due to allergies.

When I dry tumble I tend to let it run for about 2 hours or so. More than that does not do anything to make them look better as they were cleaned before I lubed them.
 
The brass should be clean, how shiney it is is nothing more than your personal preference.

To the dust issue. I started using a splash of mineral sprits in my walnut media. I like this combo alot, it cuts dust to nothing and seems to speed polishing by just a little bit.
 
The only thing tumbling brass does is reduce the wear and tare on your reloading dies
Click to expand...

I agree I did not agree with R. Lee when he said tumbling/cleaning brass was not necessary. There is a chance R. Lee never read responses typed out by bench resters and reloaders on all of these forums because the insist the case is driven forward with the impact of the firing pin and once newbies began to be impressed with bench resters they pile it on. One of them insisted the firing pin drives the case to the shoulder of the chamber and shortens the case an additional .005". To add insult to injury to the chamber the primer powder shortened the case from the shoulder to the case head an additional .005".

I want nothing between my die and case but air and lube, When I fire my cases I want nothing between the case and the chamber but air; not a lot of air. I understand the case is brass and the case is embeddable so if the dirt, grit and grime is embedded into the case when fired there is no quick fix.

So that puts me into the category of fans that want to limit case travel; and then there is how much travel and how. We will never settle down enough to be able to discuss those two; but for me there is nothing entertaining about closing a bolt on a dirty case and then pulling the trigger.

F. Guffey
 
"...Does shinier really mean cleaner?..." Nope. Brass doesn't need to be shiney at all. It needs to be clean. And that's usually just an hour or two in your tumbler.
"...wanted to try wet tumbling..." Adds another step. Isn't a difficult step, but you need to dry the cases. Takes 15 minutes on a cookie sheet in your oven set on warm.
"...water, soap & vinegar..." It's the vinegar that does the cleaning. Vinegar being a mild acid.
 
I don't go crazy making my brass like new, I just want them clean so they don't scuff the dies... after all, when you shoot them, they just get dirty again....
Click to expand...

My laugh of the morning (maybe the day)

I don't clean before I re-size. And dang it, no matter how hard I try I don't get scuffed brass from my dies!

Now my brass does not hit the ground (normaly) if it does it gets cleaned off.

Ahem, we all know dies are made of steel?

Back in Geology class, we ran tests of hardness on what will scratch what to make an assessment of what the material was. Does carbon scratch steel? Quartz in the gravel?

And in the end, I want clean and shinny brass because I like shiny. Tumbling takes the lube off so its not slimy. It all works quite nicely for me.

Shiny, scratch free and proud.
 
I used to tumble and at the recommended period of 2 hours. I now use my ultrasonic for very bright shiny brass in 10 minutes. If brass is real messy, I will still use my tumbler first and then run it through the L&R Ultrasonic.

I shoot on my property, and it can be difficult to find the spent brass. It helps with recovery if it is very shiny and the sun reflects off it.
 
Clean is all I really care about.

I only go for 'shiny' if it's tarnished brass.
Very little about cleaned brass will raise eyebrows like a mirror polish on dark, tarnished cases.
:D


Heck, last week I ran some .300 Blackout for only 10 minutes, or so. It came out carbon-coated, still (very much so, as it was fired in a suppressed rifle). I wiped it off, lubed it up, and went on with reloading.
I didn't have time to wait for the tumbler. The rag was 'good enough'...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top