Sand blasting sand for tumbling

shelby78

shelby78

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Kingston, Ontario
Well being new to reloading and still waiting for a few thing's to arrive all i had to do was tumble some brass. My wife makes jewlery so we have a couple tumblers :D

You guy's know how it is when it's sat night at 7pm and you decide what do i have that might work.

I had a huge bag of sand blasting sand thats been doing nothing for a few months and decided to try it for cleaning old brass (i didn't use my own once fired i saved)

I do have the use of my wife's tumbling media (various thing's) but i wanted to try my own. I went to check it after only 40 min (she said it wouldn't have done anything yet). I could already see a difference so i ran it for 4 hours.

Here's what they looked like when time was up last night. They have a rough to the feel finish and i now need to polish them if they even will.

tumble.jpg


tumble1.jpg


I'm going to load up the tumbler with something else today and see if they will clean up or not. I did a search for blasting sand for tumbling but didn't see much. Maybe this will give other's a idea of what it can do to shell's.

If these clean up (or not) i'll post some more pics. The brass did clean up rather well :p
 
I guess you have answered your own question, about whether or not to use sand as a tumbling medium!
 
I wouldn't use that brass in any of my rifles, due to the embedded fines inside the neck, that get transferred to the bullet. The fine sand then goes down the barrel and pouches the barrel. 303 british that now shoots 1 minute of garage door. It used to shoot a 5 gallon bucket at 200 yards. I cleaned up the old military brass the same way. Regrets!!
 
Been there, tried that, got the same result.
Here's another one for you not to try. Take some plastic resin pellets, add 44 mag brass and start tumbling. Then decide to add a little NuFinish car wax to make things bright and shinny. That will bring the whole thing to a grinding halt as if you added glue to the mix. CRAP !!!! Ok...what have I got around here to thin that out....oh...there's a bottle of windshield washer fluid...basically alcohol with some soap added, right ??? Non-corrosive, and has detergent properties......I'll just dump a bunch of that in there too (DUMMY) and pick the cases out one at a time. Ummmmm....yea.......the resulting crap made the resin pellets stick to the cases and I had to half beat the hell out of every piece of 44 mag that was in there just to get the plastic pellets out. It took me a few hours to complete. Big mistake, not to be repeated. Learn from my pain :D
 
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