I have allready lost more than half to 3/4 of my pins. I ordered 5lb of SS Pins.

I use this media separator to separate the pins. I think I've only lost a few pins over the past 3 years.

I seem to get pins to bounce out when I'm pouring water and media around.   Plus even with the media separator, it seems there is always one or two left in the brass when I'm toweling them off.


The magnet is good for getting those strays.


 

Having pins bounce around when you pour out the tumbler contents means you're pouring too fast. I tip my barrel over just enough to pour off most of the water, then is slowly pour out the rest of the contents (pins and brass) into a plastic colander lined with an old tee shirt.  The tee shirt helps keep things from bouncing when they hit, and I spread it out enough so any random bounced pins are still going to stay on the shirt.  I do all of my case rinsing right there, through the brass and tee shirt and then down the drain.  You don't need to get the stuff soap free, so just rinse enough to knock down the suds.

The basic plastic media separator (almost all of them are identical except for the color of the outside shell) is going to do a great job of separating your pins from your brass.  I gather up the corners of the tee shirt from the colander, and wind up with all the brass AND pins in one drippy ball.  I roll it around to get rid of some of the water, then carefully lay the tee shirt into the basket of the media separator.  Once it's in the basket, I maneuver the tee shirt out from around the brass, sort of rolling the brass out of the tee shirt and into the basket.

If you want to get most of the pins out in a short period of time,  close the top of the separator!  It takes some fast, abrupt movements of the basket to shift everything around enough for damp pins to fall out of wet brass.  I will crank my separator around four or five times, then do a series of quarter turns back and forth.  As you turn the basket, you'll hear pins come out of it, first a lot for each movement, then fewer and fewer.  After several back and forth "shakes" of the basket, I'll rotate it a few more times then repeat the short movements.  This sounds like it's awkward and time consuming, but it's really just loud.  I probably don't spend more than 30-40 seconds turning the separator.

Finally, I empty the separator's basket onto an old towel on the countertop.  I pour the brass carefully, away from the edge of the counter - this tends to get the brass to pile up without bouncing around.  At this point, I may find 20-30 pins among these cases - my process is really pretty efficient.  I got 5 pounds of pins with my Thumler's kit, and without precisely weighing them right now, I think I still have pretty close to 99% of them.

I'm not patient enough for all that.  

Pour it that way, pour it the other way.  Run the magnet over the area.

20-30 pins after a run in the rotation basket is way too many, you might want to tweak your procedure.  Some people prefer to run the basket flooded, as the hydraulics will aid in removing the pins.  That's probably true.  Though, I've found just upending the tumbler into the media separator basket, closing the clam-shell, and  rotating the media separations basket at a spectrum of speeds and a few back-rotation's works just fine if you do that for 30+ seconds or so.  At most 4 or 5 pins will make it past that.  Usually not even that.

I had bad luck with losing pins.

I tried that, and I'm not coordinated enough to make that work well for me.  I worked up my method to not rely on me being able to do more than pour things slowly, and it works, while essentially "cleaning" the pins pretty much every run.

20-30 pins is a worst case SWAG, it's usually only a few.  Further, since I'm doing this literally at the kitchen sink, I don't feel that the few pins that wind up on the towel with the brass are a real issue.  They add a trivial amount of time to clean up, which involves me dumping the mass of wet pins from the separator into the tumbler barrel.  If I were to tweak anything, it would have to be far less work and take far less time than my current process, and I can't see a way to do that.  I'd be more efficient if I spent more time turning the separator, and that may be a useful idea.  I could also rinse the brass/pins more thoroughly, since I'm pretty sure the Dawn helps keep pins stuck to and inside the cases.

One observation: Straight, short pistol cases don't let many pins hang around, but longer straight cases (like .38 and .357 pistol cases and like .30 Carbine rifle cases) take more work to get the pins out, and bottlenecked cases, whatever length, take even more.  I could probably use that as a guide for how long I should rinse, and how aggressively I should operate the separator.  My last several runs were with over 1,300 Lake City 7.62 cases, and my impression of how many pins came out with the brass was just that, an impression.  I imagine something like one of the small caliber "super short magnum" cases would gobble up tons of pins and take a lot of work to separate everything.

Do you guys think the "guts" from one of these Thumblers could be harvested to make something larger like a 3 or 5 gallon jug? I have a lot of 50 and 338 brass and I dont think the "status quo" is going to be a good choice!

Get one of those plastic mini cement mixers.

http://www.harborfreight.com/1-1-4-quarter-cubic-ft-compact-cement-mixer-91907.html





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcvbzEwTv8A&nohtml5=False





 

EDITED-- not the right thread.  Apologies.

I had thought my drive shaft's rubber rollers were getting glazed - the barrel didn't like to get started rolling without a little help.  Well I was wrong.  It was the belt getting worn out.  . So I went to The Rock Shop's web site and ordered a couple of new belts, plus a new gasket for the lid (since mine is looking pretty rippled at the moment).  Got the belts and gasket for $21.05 shipped.

I remember someone mentioning a vacuum cleaner that used a compatible belt, but I can't seem to find what model that was.  I'm OK with paying $4 per belt, but if there's a working, less expensive alternative, I think it would be good to keep that info handy.

I was tumbling the last dirty 9mm and 380 brass I had on hand, and was going to do another load later...   I guess not until I get the belts.

I got the gasket and drive belts in the mail today.  Not bad shipping time, I think.

Some time back, there was a discussion here about "what to do about pink brass."  I'm going to try to dig that up so I can "un-pink" the brass I just tumbled.

Added:  So far, all I've found was that "pink brass comes from using too much Lemishine," though I used a very precisely measured amount (one .45 case full, without spills!) for this and my last (pink) run.  I'm wondering if there is something different about these chips I'm using.  They are very clean now...not so much when I started out with them.  I'll update if I find an answer.  I'm thinking of just running the whole batch again for a short time.  Maybe I contributed to this by going a little short on the water - chips are denser than pins, so my measured one gallon of water may not have been quite enough.  

Excellent.  Thanks for the reminder.  I was coming here to post that I'd found YOUR post on that from about 4 years ago.  I have a couple of walnut tumbling loads to run now (my last .45 batch got the pink treatment too).

I'd just like to figure out why it happened.  Was the slipping belt somehow to blame?  In the last run, it went from slipping to shredding, and that probably means that it didn't tumble as fast as it should have...could that do it?  I dunno.

It's taking longer than I expected for the walnut to de-pink my 9mm brass, but I think that's because I need to dump this particular batch of walnut and start over with fresh.  It's getting better, just not very fast.  And since it's cheap walnut (fine-ground "lizard litter"), I'm not worried about changing it out.

Doesn't using the walnut sort of negate the entire purpose of wet tumbling in the first place?   A bit of funny color isn't going to hurt anything.

I wanted to make sure I hadn't goofed up the "formula" with Lemishine and Dawn when I used the chips.  If they tumbled more or less pink-free, I would feel confident that I hadn't.  They did, so I'm moving forward assuming I have the formula right and that I just left the stuff in the tumbler too long.  I do not necessarily believe the chips are a "problem," but I am not going to assume they're not when odd stuff happens.

I use the Frankford Armory wet tumbler and have no issues separating the brass from the pins, and do not lose any of them.

My process is simple, I remove the cap and put the strainer cap on that comes with it.

I pour the water out through a fine mesh strainer just in case any pins come out with the water.

I then rinse the brass and holder a few times and drain it again until no soap or dirty water is present.

Then I take a large plastic pan and stick the strainer in the middle.  Set the drum with on top of it and shake it up and down.  All the pins will fall out into the strainer.

After pins stop coming out I add some water and shake around a bit, drain and then shake over the strainer.  

Remove the strainer with pins, and then pour the brass into the plastic pan.  99.99999999% of the pins are out, and I just run the magnet through the brass to pick up any stragglers.  

Whole process takes about 5 mins or so.

Then the brass goes to the dehydrator.

I'm using the Frankfort Arsenal Rotary Tumbler (F.A.R.T.) as well and having good luck with it. Prior to that, I was using the Harbor Freight dual drum rock tumbler. I've been using Armoral Wash & Wax instead of dish washing detergent. I still use a .45 shell worth of Lemi-shine. For 9mm, I don't need to lube them now because of the wax and they don't tarnish over time either.

I've always used a regular separator to both remove pins and to sling water out of the cases. I've noticed that most here seem to be tumbling for several hours with the Thumbler. I've only been doing an hour and my brass comes out fine. Don't know why it takes so much longer with other brands.

What is the deal when they comes out nice and bright, but the next day after drying they are dull?

Use this instead of Dawn (one ounce per gallon):

^^^^^ Yep. works as case lube too!

I may have to build a strainer for my Thumler's barrel to just make things simpler.  I rinse my brass until the suds are mostly gone, and then move to separating the media.  Pistol cases tend to fill up with media and then stand mouth-up, so I'm working on how to keep that from being a problem, considering the chips I've been using don't line up and flow the same way pins do.

I pour the separated brass out on a towel to get the outsides less wet before it goes into the dehydrator.  I have gotten to the point where I'm finding maybe 5 chips on the towel (and remember, these guys are TINY), so I think the separation process works well.  But I want to streamline that separation process because the chips still take me more time to separate them from the brass than pins do.

I've been using a regular media separator for pin removal with no problems whatsoever. After I spin it for awhile to get all the pins out, I remove them from the pan and then continue to spin the brass to get most of the water out. Dump them on a towel to dry them off a little more then onto a cookie sheet. I typically do this in the winter and just set the cookie sheet on the pellet stove for a couple of hours. Could also put them in the oven at the lowest setting for about an hour to let them dry.

I try to run 3 or 4 thousand at a time. Normally lasts about half the year.

The strainer for the drum is just bars that go across the opening.  They are just small enough that brass can't fit through but the media can.

I would imagine you could make one pretty easy for the thumblers.

Finally took the leap with the F.A.R.T. tumbler, using the Dawn/Lemishine combination outlined and 5 lbs of stainless media. I use a Lee universal decapping die prior to tumbling, and they come out pretty well. Here's the last bit of range pickup .223 I had on hand before tumbling...



And after...




I'm a believer

I've been wet tumbling for a little over a year.  Using Dawn + Lemishine.  I've noticed lately my brass isn't near as clean anymore.  I think my rubber gasket/barrel liner is causing this,  Anyone else have this problem?

Figure I would bump this back up with some recent pics...



used THIS brass which had been stored outside in cans and gotten wet and submerged and dirt and rust stains from rusty enblocs etc...  just "nasty"













Tumbled them 8 hours with lemishine and dawn and they came out OK clean but tarnished brown somewhat...






did a full rinse of the brass with cold water and the tub and the pins...






tumbled again for 2 hours with lemishine and dawn...






after annealing..













I also found out Husqvarna orange is good copy for USGI tracer tips on these dummy rounds I made from the same brass.



 





 

Needing to add some pins to my mix - Over the years some have gotten lost/washed down the sink. I am currently running the longer .062 pins - would it be ok to mix in some .047 pins or should I just start from scratch and buy a new 5 lbs? Thanks

My tumbler has started leaking no matter how hard I tighten the nuts.  I even tried a new gasket.

I guess I'm going to have to buy a whole new liner.

I have cleaned about 130,000 pieces by now though.

I rub some mineral oil on the rubber gaskets which seems to help.

Is anyone using chips instead of pins?