Tips for Wet Tumbling?

I use a rare earth magnet by the drain to catch any stray's. I then use that same magnet in the towel when drying the worst of the water off to catch stray pins
 
Did my first run 3 weeks ago. Impressed was an understatement.
One thing I did find out, my pins are about .277" long and got stuck in the neck of the 270 brass.
The clean up is labor intensive and I am going to have to refine that process.
De-priming is the only way to get the pockets clean and they were not perfect.
Drying is something I have down pat.
I use an MTM tray that I have drilled out and stand them up then put the tray on the register and turn on the fan for 20 min. and presto they are dry.
Sorting the pins is easy. I use a strainer and that worked.

Going to keep an eye on this thread.

David
 
Brianma65 said:
Ya,I've been doing my nine without the pins.
Still comes out nice and clean, using dawn and lemi shine.

But if you keep using the pins, you should run those through a cycle,every now and again.
They get dirty and mess up your brass.
Click to expand...

This has been a fantastic tip.

Tumbled today without any pins...just dishsoap and a little bit a lemi shine. The only difference I noticed was the inside of the casing...it was much cleaner with the pins but I am not sure I care about the inside of the case for bulk 9mm reloads. The pins weren't that hard for me to separate so I will think about this some more but probably vary between the two options depending on how much time I have.

Also, I thought spreading out the brass to dry would annoy me...but it has actually been very useful to find and weed out the 40 & 22 casings that invariably end up getting lodged in or with with a 9mm casing. When I dry tumbled, the brass never got examined really closely and these things would jam up my press pretty good. Now I have an opportunity to sort a little bit when the are placed on their drying rack.

Overall, pretty happy with wet tumbling. Can't see myself going back to dry.
 
About 40 years ago, sling shooters in the US were wet tumbling their rifle brass with BB's. At least it wouldn't get caught in the necks!
 
My best way to seperate pins, is use a closed media seperator (i use CED one), fill it with water and turn brass 20 turns in water.
Drain the seperator from its water, turn 20 turns dry.
In either 9mm, 40SW, or 308, never found a single pin while reloading.
Processed over 10K brass pieces wet tumbling and seperating this way.

I did recently just drop wet SS tumbling, you will now realise how much sticky your brass now is for your dies
 
My first step is to deprime with the Lee Universal die.

Then I throw the cases into the tumbler, max I find is about 3/4 full. Then I fill with hot hot hot water, a squirt of dawn and a tiny squirt of lemi-shine.

Put it on for 3hrs and then dump into a 5gal pail.

I use a screen on the bottom when dumping to keep the brass inside, then I just take the top cover off and reach in and pull the brass out, banging them on the edge of the tumbler to get any pins out.

Then I rinse with warm water and throw them in a tray lined with a towel. Put in the oven at 200 to dry.
 
I find dumping the dirty water, refilling the drum with fresh water and running for 15 minutes helps to rinse the cases and pins.

I use a plastic sieve that I got from Lee Valley to separate pins from cases.

I want to try a strainer that fits a five gallon pail. It is called Grit Guard and it is available from auto detailing suppliers.
 
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