How much for stainless pin tumbling?

[BCRider]

Apparently I NEED to get into stainless pin tumbling to clean my black powder cartridge brass. I'll be doing batches of .357 and .44-40 brass along with Magtech brass 12ga hulls.

The plan is to set up a tumbling tub made from a 4.5L drywall mud bucket and lid with some paddles inside as the tumbler. I'm assuming that I should fill it roughly half full of brass and media but I'm wondering about how much weight of pins to use? Would I be way out of line if I buy a 10lb bag or would that be just about right for that size of tub?

 

[VinnyQC]

I bought 5pounds of pins on ebay for a Model AR12 thumbler (which has a capacity of 12 pounds) and when I tumble I put in about 4-6lbs of brass, and the thing is about 2/3 full. Then I fill with water and it weight about 11-13 pounds.

So I'm not sure how much weight of SS/brass/water a "4.5L drywall mud bucket" contains (I suppose it's some kind of container to mix drywall powder?), but I would fill it about 50% with your brass, and buy that weight in SS pins. The power of the motor will be the limiting factor, so make sure your motor can handle the load with the water and you're gonna be good to go.

And just FYI: too much SS pins doesn't matter, not enough and you need to tumble longer. If your brass isn't clean within 4 hours, you've probably put too much brass for your amount of pins.

 

[BCRider]

Between my original post and checking just now for replies I had a thought..... I won't and do NOT want to mix the different size casings in with each other. The .357's will fit in the .44-40's which will then go into the 12Ga shells. So after a while I'd have a whole lot'ta "Russian Dolls" all stacked neatly within each other and wedged together with SS pins.....

I think I'll taper down my size and plan on one style of cases at a time. I'll use your "match the weight" idea and post back in a while about what size of bucket I'll need.

The 4.5L bucket I mentioned is just a little larger than a large ice cream bucket. Think "gallon of paint" but a little fatter around. It's the larger "house hold" size of pre-mixed ready to use mud. I'm thinking now that this will be rather large. But I'll have to try out some different options I have to find the one that takes all the one size and ends up half full.

 

[VinnyQC]

Yeah, mixing calibres is a bad idea. Even when the cases don't fint into each other, you still have to sort the cases after cleaning, which is an extra unnecessary step.

You don't need a container large enough to clean all your brass of a particular calibre. In practice, you never wait until all your brass is dirty to clean a batch, cause that would mean you're out of ammos of that calibre. If you can choose the size of your tumbler, go for something that's between the quantity you shoot in a range session (you don't want to have to run the thumbler 2X for every calibre every time you get home from the range, that would be annoying) and about half your brass of that calibre. If you can clean all your brass in one shot, you're gonna run it under capacity most of time (which isn't particularly bad, but it probably means you should get more brass of that calibre and run the thumbler less often).

If you can clean what you shoot in 3 range session in one shot, it's pretty good imho. If you shoot all your brass in 1 or 2 range session, I personnaly would get more brass.