Tumbling and adding Mothers aluminum mag polish

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Gottcha

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I tried searching and found some hits but nothing that really said it was bad other than it might turn the media black so I tried a bit and compared it to some previously tumbled brass which I only used corn cob media and a bit of car wax. The results were great if you want really shinny brass! This was the best picture I could take to show the difference. I came up with this idea when I made a couple of bullet necklaces and polished them with my dremel tool. brass mothers.jpg Mothers aluminum.jpg
 
Yeah, I tried nufinish after hearing about how great it was and the horrors (horrors, I tell you) of using brasso. I was not impressed, the parts that were already clean were pretty shiny but the necks and shoulders took forever to get clean. Not to mention my media seemed to foul much faster. Needless to say, I'm using brasso again.
 
Yep. It does take more than an hour or two though. Wet tumbling is faster.

Here is some brass done in corncob and either Nu Finish or Midway polish, I don't remember, but they both work the same.
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I use that to smooth out gritty triggers.

I use NuFinish, Turtle wax finish restorer or Flitz media additive in my tumbler.
 
I tumble my range brass with SS pins/Lemi/dish-soap & they come out super shiny. But after an over-night drying they already start to tarnish & lose that yellow glint & turn slightly amber. Is there some type of additive that keeps the shine?

Yeah, I know clean is clean & the shine doesn't really matter.
 
I tumble my range brass with SS pins/Lemi/dish-soap & they come out super shiny. But after an over-night drying they already start to tarnish & lose that yellow glint & turn slightly amber. Is there some type of additive that keeps the shine?

Yeah, I know clean is clean & the shine doesn't really matter.
Try 2-3 Tbsp of a decent wash n wax like armorall in place of the dish soap and you will see better results. It leaves a protective film on the brass. & it won't look like crap overnight if at all.
 
Don't laugh but here is what I do for brass prep. 1.) deprime and tumble with SS pins,(swage if primers crimped in) 2.) resize and trim, 3.) put in vibrator with corn cob and Nu-Finish, then proceed with reloading. Yep do the same with handgun rounds except don't trim.
 
I'm going to let my cases sit out for awhile and see if they start to dull. The media already had a liquid car wax added to it along with the polish so we will see what happens.
 
I would not use Brasso for cartridge brass. It will attack the zinc in the brass and weakened it. Any thing with ammonia in it will attack the zinc. Called inner-granular corrosion.

Copper. It attacks the copper. Ammonia and copper bond to form cuprammonium [Cu(NH3)4]2+. If you're putting enough brasso in your media to cause this to happen, you're doing it wrong. One bottle of brasso will last me over a year and I shoot nearly 8 pounds of powder per year.


This is how rummors start. All this hubbub about brasso comes from a single source regarding Brits in India storing their ammo (with un-annealed brass) in horse stables for months at a time.
 
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So the legend of brasso brass destruction/zinc corrosion is false Mr Orcon? No harm/no foul as long as like alcohol consumption, it is done in moderation?

I have heard that one since forever.
 
So the legend of brasso brass destruction/zinc corrosion is false Mr Orcon? No harm/no foul as long as like alcohol consumption, it is done in moderation?

There's a lot of half truths and misunderstanding about the subject. Brass is a substitutional alloy (either atom can take a place withing the crystal matrix) made of zinc and copper. Copper is a transition metal that can accommodate a lot of electrons so it sucks up an electron from Ammonia which then destabilize the Zn-Cu structure.

When brass is subjected to ammonia, it begins to ionize the copper. This changes the alloy compozition to be zinc rich. Zinc is harder, your brass becomes more brittle. Not unlike playing janga, the players are the ammonia and the blocks they remove are the copper. Eventually the structure becomes physically unstable.


The conditions in which the fabled season cracking occurred were pretty extreme. I think that the hour it takes to clean your brass is not enough to cause any damage.
 
I tried searching and found some hits but nothing that really said it was bad other than it might turn the media black so I tried a bit and compared it to some previously tumbled brass which I only used corn cob media and a bit of car wax. The results were great if you want really shinny brass! This was the best picture I could take to show the difference. I came up with this idea when I made a couple of bullet necklaces and polished them with my dremel tool. View attachment 231869 View attachment 231871
Cool how much of that did you put in?
 
View attachment 231891 IView attachment 231891 View attachment 231892 repurposed a rubber drum rock tumbler for wet tumbling with stainless steel pin media. It works pretty good.
While I use a frankford arsenal vibratory tumbler with corn cob media and their polish it works very well and was very cost effective. The best I have seen comes from the wet tumblers with stainless steel media with a little dawn and lemi-shine, this seems to consistenly produce the best results and also cleans inside and outside as well as the primer pockets. I tumble mine with the spent primers in so I dont have to pick out the media however, I usually clean the primer pockets separately. Most people on here will tell you cleaning primer pockets in pistol brass is a waste of time but I usually do it anyway. Whatever works!
 
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