Again thanks all.
For what will work best for me I think dry is what I will get again.
For those of you adding brasso etc to your media I would be interested in hearing more. I always vibed dry!.! Lol
For starters, Brasso and any other cleaner containing ammonia is not a great idea for cartridge brass, although it isn't instantly damaging. That said, some reloaders online have said they have been using it for years and have experienced no problems.
For my perspective, abrasive additives to the polishing media is much better than adding harsh chemicals like ammonia. If ammonia based bore cleaners can etch rifle barrels if left for too long, I choose not to use any product that puts ammonia in contact with my brass. Every kitchen probably has Ajax or Bon-Ami or some other abrasive cleaner - and then there are the abrasive car polishes that others use as additives. NuFinish and Griot’s Garage Complete Polish are mildly abrasive automotive paint polishes, just throw in a couple of tablespoons or whatever amount you decide works. I sprung for a bottle of the Flitz brass cleaner once; it didn't appear to work as well as the automotive paint polishes do.
I have tried both wet and dry case cleaning, side by side. BUT, my dry setup is not the ubiquitous vibrating tumblers of today. I am still using the Thumbler's Tumbler that runs as well today as it did the first day when I bought it at the old White Elephant in Spokane around 1974'ish. So the tumbling action is sealed inside the drum, for those fearing they will get lead poisoning from dry tumbling. I've replaced the big O-ring drive belt two or three times, and one foot on the motor mount had the spot weld fail; I somewhat messily brazed it back in place. One of my brothers is on his third vibratory tumbler. The Thumblers are a high quality tumbler, and dead quiet compared to my brothers' vibratory tumblers.
Both methods clean equally well. N.B. It is not my usual routine to try and restore corroded cases to use - mine never get that way, and there is more than enough range pickups where I shoot that I can discard anything looking funky. In that case, wet metal media may clean better, that I cannot say.
Having tried both, my preference is to continue cleaning and polishing with my Thumbler's Tumbler and treated walnut shell media. I am not anal enough to use corn cob media for a brighter finish. And wet tumbling adds another dimension to the cleaning stage that I've decided is not enough juice for the squeeze.
If you want jewelry shine looking brass, as mentioned above, any non-ammonia product squirted into the dry media once in a while will get you there. Those products are much cheaper than what the reloading industries offer you as additives (which is probably the same stuff, rebottled and with a higher price tag added). Ditto for the cleaning media: walnut is available bagged for pet cage liner, etc at a fraction of the cost Lyman et al offer it for. Places like Harbor Freight sell 25# boxes of walnut media to use as blasting media for cleaning is also very inexpensive.
One of the reasons some reloaders get less impressive results with dry media is they're too cheap to throw their used media away and replace it with fresh media. You guys out there who do this know who you are. You're probably spending more money on your electrical bill running your tumbler four or five times longer to eventually clean your brass than changing the media would cost you.
Raid the wife's canning supplies (or get a lifetime supply of your own for a few bucks) and grab the citric acid powder. A couple of tablespoons or so per gallon of boiling water and you will not only have gleaming brass inside and out, but you will passivate your brass at the same time - meaning it is far more resistant to developing surface tarnish and verdigris over the years. And if you do want to try rehabilitating grungy range pickups, whether tumbling wet or dry, run it through a citric acid bath first. If you haven't tried citric acid before, the change in the brass from just a couple of minutes of being dunked into a boiling water citric acid bath is impressive. The reason for using boiling versus tap water is chemical reactions are accelerated by heat.
My workflow is the fired brass gets deprimed only first, using another one of Lee's few useful tools - their universal decapper. I have come to prefer resizing as a separate stage to decapping for many reasons, although with pistol brass going through the Dillon progressive, I sometimes don't bother. With rifle cases - always.
If I picked up a bunch of dirt covered range brass, it gets hosed off first, run through the media separator to get most of the water out of the cases, and set aside to dry before depriming. Then the decapped brass goes through the Thumbler's Tumbler. Resizing after cleaning removes any media in the flash holes or primer pockets, because the decapping pins are still in the resizing dies.
If I'm bothered by any primer residue remaining in the primer pockets and/or I want shiny brass sitting in the dark in the basement until I head to the range and/or the brass may end up sitting in storage for years before it gets reloaded again, then it gets dunked in a citric acid bath.
It has been turned into a pretty efficient work flow with minimal time and muss and fuss involved. So far it has worked for me for pretty close to 50 years now, and I expect it will continue to work until I go for the long dirt nap. If my Thumbler's goes TU to the point I can't economically replace it, I'll probably buy another one.
BTW, back in the early 70's, on a lifeguard's pay of $.85/hr (that's federal pay boys, lifeguarding at Banff and Kootenay National Park hot springs), until I saved enough money to buy an outrageously priced Thumbler's Tumbler, I tumbled my brass by throwing it in a canvas bag full of rice, and then into the dryers in the shacks with a few sheets to keep the thumping noises down, and ran the dryer for a few hours on the taxpayers' dime. It worked just fine, hillbilly tech or not.
