stainless steel pin/water/lemishine cleaning of tarnished brass

[M1A4ME]

I've been running a Harbor Freight double tumbler unit for well over a year now.

It's been great.  Doesn't matter how bad the brass looks when I pick it up at the range it will be clean/shiny when it comes out of the water/lemi-shine after running it with the SS pins.

Yesterday I had something happen that's never happened before.

I separated the ugly brass after it had been run through the vibratory tumblers.  I had the good looking stuff ready to be resized and the stuff that was still tarnished enough I figured it would take days in the vibratory units to finish it up.  That ugly brass got separated again, into a batch of .45 acp and .30-06 brass and a batch of 9MM, .357 SIG and .223.  The two batches were segregated to put similar sized brass that can't work it's way into another piece of brass while being tumbled.

I set one drum up with the big brass, water, SS pins and lemi-shine and the other the same except for the small brass.  I sealed the drums, set them on the tumbler and turned it on.

I let it run for right at 4 hours and went back to the garage.  Shut the machine off and pulled the drums off.  By chance I got the small brass drum opened up first and everything was normal (water was blackish looking and brass was clean).  Poured off excess water, shook out the SS pins and most of the water and dropped the brass into the vibratory unit to dry it out.  Set the timer for 2 hrs.

Then I opened up the big brass drum.  Uh-oh.  The water was clean, relatively speaking.  Never saw that before.  The brass was black and greasy/tacky feeling.  Never, ever saw that either.  Got the SS pins out and some of the brass a gooey/greasy material down in the bottom of the brass near the primer flash holes.  Had to get a small screw driver to scrap that out.  Got all the brass separated from the SS pins, as much crud out of the cases (that had it) as I could and tossed them in the other vibratory tumbler and set it for 2 hours.

My fingers/palm of my hand were stained with the tacky black crud and I had to wash my hands twice with dishwashing liquid (usually used for oily/greasy hands after working on a car/truck) and then a third time with a 3M pad and dishwashing liquid to get the last of the stain off the ends of some of the fingers/finger nails.

I should have taken pictures but it was getting late, it was trying to rain and my right hand/fingers would have ruined the phone.

Anyone every have a reaction like that when cleaning with SS pins/water/lemi-shine?

Funny, since both ran with the same pins (out of the same jug), same water (out of the faucet on the back of the house) and the same bottle of lemi-shine (brand new, just opened for this cleaning cycle).  One batch normal, the other one ? not normal at all.

Went out today, looked at the brass in both vibratory tumblers and the big brass was nice and shiny and the small brass was cloudy looking.  Set the timer for 3 hrs. and came back in the house.  I'll take a look at it tomorrow and if clean throw the used walnut shell media in the trash.  Not sure what was on the brass, but I feel the need to get rid of it.

[Sidecar2]

I too use the Harbor Freight wet tumbler. I do recall having a batch come out kind of gooey. I think it was a reaction to the black rubber drums.

So I modified the tumbler and fabbed a single, long drum made from 4" PVC pipe, as described on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtTxBqOwtnA

I had already invested in a bunch of those SS pins, but they are a real pain to control and separate, so I eliminated them. They were all over my shop floor.

Now I just let the brass tumble against other brass. I like to deprime the cases first so water will flow through and wash the primer pocket and they also drain and dry out more easily.

Fill the drum with brass to about 3 inches from the top, add water within about 2 inches of the top (i.e., leave an inch of airspace), add a squirt of Dawn and a sprinkle of Lemi Shine, seal the drain plug and set the timer for 4 hours.

I drain the tumbler after the 4 hours, rinse twice with clean water and pour out the brass onto a towel and put it in the sun to dry. Cleans up nicely.

I save my vibratory tumbler for a final 10-minute polish if I use lanolin/alcohol case lube. Corncob absorbs the case lube nicely. One change I made from the YouTube design is that I had to buy a 3/8-16 x 3" stainless steel carriage bolt and a 3/8-16 brass nut. The zinc-plated carriage bolt that came with the drain plug turned black interacting with the brass and water. The stainless carriage bolt is holding up fine and the brass nut doesn't gall with repeated tightening and loosening against the stainless threads.

One final note on the timer: I chose one with removable On and Off pins. I remove the On pin and leave only the Off pin so it only turns off, never on in case I forget and leave the tumbler plugged in.

I've retired both the little HF rubber drums and their finicky lids and the little pins.

[M1A4ME]

I didn't think about the rubber drum deteriorating.  Only one of the two did it but the other might only be a run or two away from doing it.

I'll have to check out the stuff at Lowes to see if they carry what I need to make the longer PVC drum.

Thanks for the link/video.

I seldom run mine.  I gather up brass, look it over, segregate if based on what is acceptable to me for tarnish/bulldup and when I get enough I run some through it.  The two vibratory cleaners get used a lot though, so that may be one reason I don't have to use the SS pin tumbler much.  Only downside (I can see right now) to the bigger drum is all the brass will have to be the same.  I won't be able to run a drum of "big" brass and one of "small" brass.

[painter]

Is it possible that all the crud that was washed off started to 'congeal' back on to the brass? I wonder what would have happened if you just re-agitated things?

[IDescribe]

Is it possible that all the crud that was washed off started to 'congeal' back on to the brass? I wonder what would have happened if you just re-agitated things?

I had a similar thought and the same question. 

I wondered if something got hung on somethjng else, and the tumbler barrel wasn't turning at all, just sat there still while everything dissolved then congealed back wherever gravity left it.

It would have been interesting to see what would happen if you'd run it another cycle.

For what it's worth, I replaced my broken Harbor Freight tumbler with a Franklin Arsenal, which is giant by comparison. Then I eventually got tired of dealing with the toxic waste and SS pins, and now I use it with walnut.

[M1A4ME]

Too late now to run it again, with the same brass/water/lemishine.  All the brass is in one of the vibratory cleaners.

I'm pretty sure, at the time I stopped the tumbler, both drums were turning.  I can't say both turned the whole 4 hrs.  I turned it on and walked out of the garage.  I have a timer that can handle two units, but I've only used it with the vibratory tumblers, so far, so they are usually off when I go to the garage but the wet tumbler runs till I get back outside to shut it off.

Now that you've mentioned it, I'm wondering if the drum was turning the whole time.  If it wasn't it might show "skid marks" on the outside surface where the drive bar turned a few hours against the drum surface.  I'll take a look when I go out with the dogs in a few minutes. 

The brass was blackened so I may have missed that the tarnish was still there.  I've run it in the vibratory cleaner for a total of 6 or 7 hours (two sessions as the couple of pieces I looked at after the first session still looked hazy/dirty - but I didn't look at all the brass to see if the tarnish was still there).

Not sure, if not turning was the issue, what caused the tacky black stain on all the brass and my hands (from handling the brass and reaching into the drum of pins/brass.

[newageroman]

Ive been using the Lyman wet tumbler for a year and a half now and it's pretty good. Some pistol cases do get stuck on the inside rim at top and bottom, but no huge deal.

I started with using the SS pins, dawn and lemishine. After shaking the pins out over and over I now just do an initial 30 minute hot wash with steaming water, dawn, lemishine and NO SS pins. Quick and good enough for me. Specialty rifle brass may get deprimed and SS tumbled... maybe... but I'm starting to get to the point of too much stuff to do and not enough time to do it.

One other trick that you might could use in the HF PVC drum is take an old plastic peanut jar and drill a bunch of holes in it. I use it to tumble different types of brass in the big drum.

Or... I bet you could rig up a flat washer strainer between two bolts to create separate compartments (if you can easily remove the top and bottom of the PVC... just throwing stuff out there.

[Sidecar2]

I went Big Tumble at first, based on some YouTube videos.

I have a small, one-bag Harbor Freight cement mixer for, amazingly, mixing concrete. (It's great for that, by the way. Mixing even one 80-lb bag of concrete with a hoe is not fun at all, and I've used it for a surprising number of small concrete projects like mailbox and fence posts, and small slabs. But I digress.)

I bought the SS pins, added the Dawn and Lemi Shine, and then made a big mistake: based on a YouTube suggestion, I added some Nu Finish car polish, and probably added too much. 



The entire batch of brass and the interior of the cement mixer turned into a horrible, sticky mess. So much for industrial-level brass tumbling. And it was noisy! Hundreds of cases banging around in a cement mixer is not pleasant. I even coated the interior with that spray-on bedlining plastic because the brass was being beat up. Another mistake. What goes on can come off. Now I had a sticky black mess. Rest assured, the cement mixer is exclusively for concrete now.

So I went small with the HF tumbler. Not liking the little rubber drums and their lids, I built the larger PVC drum. I even built a second, "backup" PVC drum, but have never used it. The one drum meets all my needs and I have never had any grimy, gooey results again. Just gray, dirty water flows out, leaving the brass clean. 

As I have never had a bad result with the PVC drum, I highly suspect the rubber drums themselves were breaking down and coating the brass. And don't get fancy by adding some magic polishing medium like Nu Finish.

For years I vibratory-tumbled in walnut and then corncob. But cleaning brass like that is like dry-cleaning your hair. Water with a bit of detergent and Lemi Shine simply works better, is less mess (the walnut and media corncob can get stuck in the primer pocket and tend to migrate onto the floor) and give great results, even without the stainless wonder-pins.

As for losing the ability to tumble different batches at the same time, I just build up enough brass of a given caliber to fill the larger drum. I'm not in that much of a rush. Four hours goes by pretty fast. I can set it at night, too, and it's done in the morning, ready for a different caliber. So far, everything from .32ACP to .45-70 has worked fine in the larger PVC drum.

You can purchase a 2-foot piece of 4" PVC for less than $10, the glue-in plug and the removable plug at either Lowes or Home Depot -- but I'm boycotting HD because they came out against gun rights.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Charlotte-Pipe-4-in-x-2-ft-Sch-40-Cellcore-PVC-DWV-Pipe/3223375

[M1A4ME]

The new finish (about a cap full every three or four runs) does wonders for shining up the brass in the vibratory/walnut shell cleaner.  It may even put a very thin layer of protection over the brass to help keep it from starting to tarnish from the handling when you prime, charge and seat a bullet in it and then store it away (or load it in the magazine to go to the range).

I need to get to Lowes and see what I can find for parts to make my own drum, or two.

[Sidecar2]

I wish I'd made the connection to put Nu Finish in the corncob or walnut media before I invested in a full gallon of Flitz Tumbling Media Additive.



I already had the Nu Finish and the Flitz doesn't work that well. Probably why it's discontinued, at least in gallon bottles on Amazon.

Oh well, live and learn. I'll try some Nu Finish in my corncob.

[M1A4ME]

Should have mentioned - when you add the nu finish, let it run for a few minutes to mix in well before adding the brass.  It makes a difference.  Very nice shiny/bright brass.

One jug contains brass run in plain crushed walnut shell media, the other contains brass run in crushed walnut shell media with nu finish added to it.

[lewmed]

 I've been using a Franklin Arsenal wet machine for about 2 years it works great with or without the pins. I found a easy way to separate the pins is to use my Dillon case media separator with the tub about 3/4 full of hot water spin the crank several times all the pins fall to the bottom of the tub then just dump the water and  spin dry the cases. I have also found it cleans best when the barrel is about 3/4 full for a total weight of 25 to 30 pounds.  I use a shot of Dawn and a 45 acp case full of Lemi shine per load for 3 hr.  My latest addition to my set up was a garage sale find a very large food dehydrator with 10 pull out trays to finish drying the cases.

[1SOW]

Another loader addressed using the pins a different way.
It's been a while back;  but a reloader made an innovative brass cleaner using pins.  Instead of the drum rotating,  only the pins rotated inside the sealed drum.
A spinning disk sat just below the drum.  The rotating disk had 4 strong polarized rare earth magnets attached that spun the pins irregularly.
I believe it used water with a little cleaner added.  In a "very short time",  brass came out looking literally like new .
When my previous computer crashed,  I lost the relatively simple plans to make it with commonly available parts.
Essentially,  it's just a motor with a verticle shaft that spun a disc with the polarized magnets that "churned" the pins due to the changing magnet "poles".  The brass case drum didn't move.  It just rested above the spinning magnets.

I thought it was a cool idea..

[muncie21]

Similar to Sidecar's experience, I added too much car wax (potentially wrong kind, I use synthetic now) and ended up with a black sludge mess.

[painter]

I wish I'd made the connection to put Nu Finish in the corncob or walnut media before I invested in a full gallon of Flitz Tumbling Media Additive.



I already had the Nu Finish and the Flitz doesn't work that well. Probably why it's discontinued, at least in gallon bottles on Amazon.

Oh well, live and learn. I'll try some Nu Finish in my corncob.

I use the Flitz...works fine. Are you shaking the bottle? It does separate somewhat.