Post
by romer522 » 13 Feb 2012, 16:26
I've got the high-speed Thumlers Tumbler, if you get it lined up correctly it's also less annoying sounding than a vibratory tumbler. Slippy is right on the no vibratory, just doesn't work and I don't know if any of them are designed to run wet. When you dump the water out the first time and realize that all that crap is normally going into the air it makes you think a bit. I personally hated vibratory tumbling, it was fine if you were just processing what you shot that week, but if you ever wanted to do like 5K pieces of brass it became a pretty tough challenge to keep it from either caking on the brass or leaving a substantial residue unless you wanted to swap media every few batches.
I'm using
5lbs media
1Tbls Dawn Concentrate
1/2 tsp Lemishine (but I've got a bit more experimenting to do on this)
~300 pieces of 9mm at a time, been running 4+ hours but I may try a couple shorter runs too.
Water to within 1-1.5" of the top.
The "recipe" changes around a lot from site to site, some say a squirt or 2 of dish soap others say 2 tablespoons, some say 2 tablespoons lemishine others say 1/4 tsp.
To rinse them I use the following procedure.
1. Open the drum, dump as much water into sink as I can.
2. Remove rubber liner, rinse while shaking the rubber liner maybe 5 times with cold water.
3. Poor brass+media into RCBS media separator, close, rotate it ~30 times.
4. Pull the basket out of the separator, rinse it all in the sink with cold water for the final rinse.
5. Put the basket w/contents back into the separator, run ~10 rotations to knock the water out.
5. Open the media separator, wipe off the basket outside and inside, then throw 2 small dry rags in with the media, close back up and rotate for a while to dry off the outside of the cases.
6. Dump the brass into the circular tray for the dehydrator, put in dehydrator and dry for ~20 minutes at 150F+
7. Dump the media and remaining water from the separator back into the rubber liner, add another load of brass, soap/lemishine, put back in drum, add water, close up and repeat.
I don't worry about losing a few pieces of media down the drain, I've discovered that a chain of buckyball magnets retrieves it out of the trap wonderfully, just be careful with whatever else is down there you might pull up :p