Stainless Tumbling Media for Brass Cartridges is the only way to go.
I’ve never been able to get brass ammo cartridges as clean as I’d would have liked until now. On a recommendation, I purchased a cheap dual rock tumbler from Harbor Freight and with my 20% off coupon and tax, the total came to $44.00. After that I also ordered a 2 lb. bag of .047 Diameter stainless tumbling media pins and a package of Lemi-Shine. Today was my first trial run and I selected about 190 each 5.56mm range brass that I collected. A guy next to me ran through a couple of new boxes of American Eagle cartridges. After that he offered the brass to me. He showed no interest in keeping it. They weren’t real dirty, with only the usual post firing carbon inside and highly visible signs of the manufacturer’s annealing marks.
I de-capped them with a universal die and split them into two batches, half in each of the tumbler barrels. Next I added 1 lb of the stainless pins, 16 oz. of hot water, a good squirt of Dawn dishwashing soap, and an 1/8th of a teaspoon of Lemi-shine ( a dishwasher aid), to each barrel. I loaded the barrels in the tumbler and let it run for about 3 hours. The tumbler is pretty quiet due to the barrels being made of hard rubber. After when I shut it down and opened the barrels, the water was nasty gray from the cleaning process.
The Results
The Stainless Tumbling Media for Brass Cartridges really did the trick. The cases were spotless and shiny both inside and out. The primer pockets showed no fouling and the cases looked like brand new unfired stock. I must say that there is no hype with his method. It works, with no “buts”.
It was pretty easy to strain out the cases through an old plastic colander and recover all the pins in a bucket. After a good shake, to make sure there were no pins inside the cases, and a once over with a magnet and I don’t think I lost a single pin, in spite of how small they are.
I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story, but if you want a cheap way to get REALLY clean brass, and you don’t need to do 1000’s at a time, it is worth a look.
