I received my tumbler about 3 weeks ago and I am sold and will never go back.  It cleans the cases like nothing I have ever seen; inside, ouside, and primer pockets.  It even cleans off the annealing marks on the necks!!!

I will keep my vibratory to run cases straight off the range, but the Thumler's will be run on all my cases after resizing.

This is exactly what I do.  SS tumble all of it.  Then after resize throw it in the regular tumbler with corn cob with some polish.

i just got mine this past saturday.  only prob i ran into was water spots.  i know it sounds silly, but on that shiny brass to see big brown spots all over it is just upsetting.  i think i have figured out how to get rid of them.  hot water or cold, doesnt make a difference.  lemishine rinse doesnt do it either.  

you can use staight water, but u have to dry the outside off with a dry towel or u can use a vinegar wash/rinse.  but dont do more than u can quickly dry.  the vinegar can make spots too.

the key to it all is drying the outside and the most important of all is to stand the cases up not touching.  if u lay them on the side, for some reason water spots will appear.  maybe the counter was wet or whatever, but once i stood them up after drying the outside off, there hasnt been one spot.

Thanks!  No wonder I could not find it doing a search with the term "vibration".  



I see that they call some of them anti-vibration, my guess is that these are the ones with the insert that prevents them from vibrating loose and not actually preventing vibration.

nm.  found answer

Yes they are nylock nuts, but the threaded section on the tumbler is not long enough to engage the locking part...so the regular 'free spinning' ones will work just as good.

Thanks!  Much appreciated!

Well not that I broke down and ordered the setup, what else do I need?

Ordered the following:

Thumlers Model B high speed from Buffalo Arms
9 lbs of Stainless Steel Media from Buffalo Arms- Had to get extra for a friend who was intrigued by this method
media separator
I have Lemishine and Dawn dish soap on hand

You will want to get a big screen mesh tea/kitchen strainer.  It makes recovering the stainless media that you seperate out easier. Once it's all in the bottom of your media seperator bucket, you can pour the media and water through this to catch it all to dump back in the Thumblers barrel.

Is there some reason that I always see Dawn soap mentioned ? all I have at home is Joy , old habit as we always used it to make oil and fuel spills disappear while working in AK.

I'm just glad a reloading discussion topic has finally evolved into us trying to figure out what the best dish soap is for non-dish soap purposes.

A big thanks to dryflash and everyone that has posted on this topic. You cost me a bunch of money.

i have used gain dish washing soap also with similar results. dawn works a bit better when i am tumbling to remove the lanolin lube.

I joined the club, gents.

Order placed...

I have a small house, and reload at a desk in my room, and the dust and dust residue in cases was torquing me off...

Anywho... I have ~300  .223 range pick-ups that I will get to tumbling once my stuff comes.

Got the Thumlers through Miday, then found that midway doesn't sell stainless media... Got the media from OP's recommendation... Buffalo Arms...

THANKS to all the information from the participants of this thread.

Thanks to OP, dryflash3...

Maybe *next* Saturday will be a productive day reloading...

It makes zero difference what type of dish soap you use.  I was using palmolive, then that ran out and began using ajax lemon.  After that runs out It'll be whatever is cheapest at the store.  I'm not worried about it.  

Dryflash,

What do you use to remove the primers from the brass?  

Be Good,
Medic2RN

I use the Lee Decapping Die. Buy extra pins. They seem to break on 5.56 every several K. Here is where I buy my Lee stuff: http://www.factorysales.com/xcart/catalog/casecon.html

Dane

So I can remove the primer from any size brass with this Universal decapper?  Or is it just for 5.56?  And I'll need another one for .45 ACP and S&W .40?  Also, it doesn't matter what condition the brass is in?  

I just want to do this right the first time.  I'm trying to avoid paying out extra $ since the goal of this is to save $$$.

Thanks again for you help,
Medic2RN


ETA:  Ohhhhhhh!!!!!  Page 8 is mine!!!!!  Giddy UP!!!!!

the universal decapper will deprime all cases, rifle and pistol that is why it is a universal decapper.  

For the record, DON'T try to use a SS tumble for cleaning anything that has a finish. Think of it as a sandblaster.



Don't ask me how I know.

Don't throw in rifle parts that have a finish.

Quick question about the tumblers. Mine has an rubber insert inside the drum. Are you guys removing that rubber insert? The reason I am asking is, I noticed someone talking about painting the inside of the tumbler with rustoleum. Are you guys tumbling without the insert to increase drum capacities? Any help is much appreciated.

Awesome. Thanks for the quick response. Off to go buy some rustoleum.

I hate you guys and love you guys...

I hate you guys for forcing me to spend another $225 (against my will) in the pursuit of shiny brass but I love you guys because you convinced me before I put any money in an ultrasonic unit.

I got my tumbler and media from Sinclair a couple weeks ago.  $219 beat the other prices I had seen.  I got a can of Rustoleum and pulled the rubber liner out of the tumbler only to find that it already had a nice factory paint job underneath.  Recent upgrade?  I'll check on it from time to time just to be safe.

I have always used the typical corn cob or walnut media to clean my cases for reloading.  I've burned up several vibratory tumblers over the years, partly because I like my brass to be shiny.  3-4 hours may get the brass clean but 'shiny' takes 24 hours or so, depending on how funky that brass is to start with and how badly I overload my tumblers.  Then there's the dust issue to deal with, and each case ends up needing to be hand-wiped.

Here are some pictures of my first test run:
 
My 'football watching' decapping station - A Frankford Arsenal portable stand with Lee decapping die mounted on an $18 Lee press (my only Lee tools), and my custom LaRue primer-catching tray (since the Lee press throws them everywhere).  BTW, if you get the Lee decapping die, you have to use the biggest end wrenches you own to tighten that thing down enough to keep the decapping pin from slipping.  I wrestled that thing for 20 minutes with smaller tools.


I started with 80 cases: 20 x .270, 20 x .308, and 40 x .223.  I could have added 50% more with no problem.  .  

I picked some of the worst cases I could find for this test.  Those .270 cases came from a friend.  They belonged to his late father and had been sitting in a hot, humid garage for at least 30 years.  Normally I would have thrown them into the trash they were so funky.

The rest were a mixture of Win, IMI, PRIVI (Serbian surplus), and PMC from the late 70's when they were sold as military surplus.  All except the PRIVI (PPU) were 20+ years old and well aged.


The results after rinsing and toweling most of the water away.


It's hard to get a good picture, but the cases were just as clean inside as they were outside, even those funky .270 cases.


Overall, I am seriously impressed.  

After any full-length resizing, the brass will still have to go into a vibratory tumbler to get rid of the lube.  But that should only take 20 minutes or so and I'm hoping that with some clean corn cob media, the dust problems will be minimal.  I will still have to poke it out of primer pockets, though.  I hope I can wipe any lube (Imperial wax) from neck sizing using alcohol and avoid the old-style tumbler the majority of the time for bolt gun brass.

This takes much longer than the ultra-sonics I've seen discussed recently and the start-up costs are higher.  But look at those results.  Okay, maybe it's just the shiny cases that got my attention, but there's no doubt that this will take care of any powder residue build-up in the primer pockets and also inside the case body.  And there is no way the ultrasonics or the vibratory tumblers can shine up old cases like this.  It cost me just under $250 to gear up for this but I think it will be worth it in the long run.  Both the tumbler and the media should last many years, and I know I've paid more than $250 for the vibratory tumblers and media I've used up over the years.

I still can't believe how awesome this method is. I am getting mine set up tonight and should be able to make a run with it this weekend hopefully.

Looks GREAT!  The only advice I would give is after you clean the brass with SS-media and resize the case, using the vibratory tumbler to get rid of the lube is a great way to go, but before you do this, take a few minutes to empty it out completely and clean the tumbler out real well (read scrub), and put in fresh clean tumbling media, that way you don't contaminate your sqeeky clean brass with the lead that was in there before.

I plan on doing that jlow.  It's a mess inside there every time I swap out media anyway.

I cut open two of those funky .270 cases, one cleaned and one not, just to see how clean the inside of the case got.  Here they are:

They should both look like the one on the left, and frankly even cleaner.  Since the brass is so old, it just probably caked in there pretty hard need a bit more soak/tumbling time.  I would guess at least 4 hours if not more.  Of course, if you put a lot of stuff in there, it take longer as it dilutes the SS-media's effect.

A little better look into the cut-open cases shown above.

bump.


Mine came in today.

It has been on backorder for what seemed like forever.

Sinclair has the entire kit for $219 (on sale for $199 when I ordered it).

http://www.sinclairintl.com/.aspx/pid=42993/Product/Thumler-s-Tumbler-Stainless-Steel-Tumbling-Kit





BTW
Rust-Oleum (at WalMart) in 'Cherry' seems to be a near perfect color match for painting the interior of the drum.

First batch of brass will be tomorrow night.

I'll have to admit , I was sceptical of this method at first ,but as others , am sold on it now .

You should be sold. I did some 308 brass 2 weeks ago and I was dumbfounded as to how well it works. Plus the solution is cheap and the media is a one time purchase. Being able to reuse the media is a big seller for me.

Got mine all together and ran a batch of 223 and batch of 45 ACP. Both came out as clean as new with a 4 hour tumble.

I have seen some ideas for dryers but cannot recall where? Can anyone direct me to a thread related to dryers? I mainly would like a good way to dry the media so I can store it all out of the way quicker. The oven dries the brass pretty quick.

I forgot to take before pics!


Four hours and it looks like new brass!  I had some brass (about 80 rounds) that was surface corroded to the point a dry tumbler couldn't clean it up.

They came out clean and look new.

Pretty amazing, as it saved $35 or so worth of brass from the scrap bucket.