Tumbeling facts for me..

[jeeptim]

So much info here on tumbling thought I would tumble in my two cents.
To start off I sell lots of brass and short of new its as good as it gets.
I use two tumblers first is a 30 year old lymann had to replace the bowl twice wore through.
So in that I use lyman walnut shells really cleans but not much shine, as it gets older the media I add a lil mineral sperits. And a new it must be new dryer sheet picks up dust and dirt and I only tumble for 30 to 45 min.
Then in to the corn cob filled Frankfort tumbler you know it came with the best seperator.
Any way a lil car wax and again dryer sheet. Now if you ever waxed your car you know the wax drys and turns to powder that is of no help when waxing.
And 15min as good as gold.
45 min in the lymans will remove aneeling color.
Sorry about the grammer and spelling I have giant thumbs tiny key pad on my phone while on the bike at the gym. (turkey season)
Pet store shells to fine to much dust and your running your tool for 6 hr I have gone all the other mehtods but above listed is in the long run all considered the cheapest.
I gotta get off this bike butts killin me.
Thanks for keeping my mine off how sore I am.

 

[jim243]

Thanks for the post. You may want to try a 50/50 mix of Zilla lizard litter and fine corn cobb, I add two tea spoons of polish to the mix and run 1 hour.

Works well but I like your method, but I only have one Lyman tumbler for the last 8 years.

You may want to get a piece of foam for that bike seat.
Jim

 

[ljnowell]

I just use straight corn cob media, with nu-finish car polish(not wax). I also add a dryer sheet to help keep the media clean and keep the dust down. I tend to start mine about midnight and shut it off when I get up at 6am. My brass comes out looking like brand new.

 

[hentown]

I use 50/50 pet store walnut/1420 cc with Nufinish and torn-up USED dryer sheet. My brass looks like new in about 2 hrs.

Due to my expected increase in volume, I'm going to buy a cement mixer from Lowes and use the same receipe as noted above. Will use untreated cc for cleaning/polishing loaded rounds.

 

[noylj]

Walnut only for really grungy cases.
20/40 corn for everything else (see Drillspot for great prices and, last I checked, free shipping).
Nu-Finish and such are fine abrasive and plastic (no wax in them at all).

 

[gamestalker]

I tried something new a couple weeks ago. I put several small globs of cutting cream in the walnut, a shredded up cotton ball, and my brass came out better than it ever has. My test run was with some badly grundged .270 win brass, I ran it for about 6 hrs.. And I just did some 9mm night before last that was probably on it's 4th or 5th reloading, and was very grundgy as well, pretty, pretty, pretty. It's the first time I've seen primer pockets come out clean too, which seemed odd.
GS

 

[evan price]

I buy and sell a lot of brass. I used to run 3-4 Berry's tumblers 24-7 with Zilla walnut.

Now I use a 5-cu-ft electric cement mixer. 15 gallons of Zilla walnut, one pint of NuFinish car polish, 5+ gallons of brass. Tumble for 3-4 hours, all are shiny. Media is staying very clean. I add a cup of stoddard solvent with each batch. I run 4-5 batches a weekend. After two weeks the walnut media still looks like new.

Now I only use my vibratory tumblers for small brass- 32 caliber or smaller- or small batches of odd stuff like 44 spl or 45 colt.