TL/DR: Works really well if you want to put the extra effort in for aesthetic
So I acquired a Frankford Arsenal rotary tumbler a little while ago and gave it a run this weekend. I was really interested to see how it'd compare to the other methods of cleaning that I have. Those are:
1. Vibratory Tumbler.
2. Hornady Lock N Load Ultrasonic
3. Ignoring the cleaning and loading anyways.
So the main thing I had to figure out to compare against first was what solution to use. Looking on "The Internets" seemed to indicate that the way to go was add some dishsoap, add some Lemishine and add some time to the timer and let 'er ride. So I did that first honestly was pretty disappointed. The results were uniform and gave me a feeling of being cleaner than the vibratory and ignoring cleaning methods and about on par with the ultrasonic. So on the cleaning metric it seemed to be great compared to all methods. I'd give it the edge against the ultrasonic even because I could do a bigger batch, although I think that the ultrasonic is an invaluable tool for small parts, small batches, as well as many other non-gun items.
But the thing that bugged me greatly was that all the results were, well, dull. They didn't have the luster and shine that all them Internets people showed in their videos. So I set out to test that. I used the same batch of brass going through different quantities of dish soap and Lemishine while keeping the brass/media/water counts the same. I never could get it where I wanted.
So disappointed to the point of actually chucking money at the issue, I took one of my ready-made bottles of ultrasonic solution and dumped that in the tumbler and filled it up with water. IIRC I made the solution as directed on the Hornady One-Shot bottle, so it was like a couple ounces solution to like 28-30 ounces water. I don't know, it was whatever was in there and then diluted by about a factory of at least three going from a 1 quart bottle to a gallon-ish.
Anyways, I chucked the same brass/media etc in there and about an hour later I got my "Holy Crap Batman! That is insanely clean and shiny and beautiful" moment. It was simply gorgeous.
Annnnnnd then I proceeded to chase that high again. I had plenty of other brass to process, so of course, why not right? If nothing else I can test how much I can abuse the solution before it fails to perform right? Note that by this point the water was already black as an ex's heart, but hey, I like to try things. Now, this unfortunately involved two important things that start my journey into what I'll call the Abyss of Disappointment. The first was that I had to get all the solution/pins separated from the clean brass. That part sucks to be honest. I mean, maybe I suck AT that part, but I didn't like the first run. Second item in the journey is that I needed to deprime the brass if this was going to be worth it. Boy howdy, that'd be easy I thought!
Well, I was wrong there. First up was a batch of I dunno, 500-1000 pieces of 380 that I got from @mouthpiece a while back and had been too lazy to screw with. They were clean already, but not super "trying my new toy" shiny. Now, this part is not really the fault of the cleaner but it turns out that my old as Moses RCBS dies are super tight, not carbide and have no bevel going into the die. This meant that for the seemingly 10,000 pieces I went through a good amount didn't want to line up and go in. Curses!
I finally get that batch done and running in the tumbler and move on to the next. I dunno, 9mm or something. I think --- this will be easier right? I've got my dies all setup and wonderful! Sure enough they were better but it just took quite a bit of the day to go through the seemingly 20,000 pieces and get them ready. But eventually I was done with them, and got to repeat the whole get brass out of solution, get pins, out, get brass drying, blah blah to finish the 380 and get the 9 in. The 380 though ---- OMG amazing. Like, sooo beautiful.
Next up was 40. I had seemingly 40,000 pieces to go through there. So this time I thought --- "I should be smart. I've got to setup my Dillon 650 with case feeder for this caliber sometime anyways, so I can just set it up with one die to deprime and size, and the case feeder will make life easy and all will be right with the world." So I set the thing up, got everything calibrated and went to town. Which was fantastic until, I dunno the 10th case where the range brass mix showed it's true form of nasty. Basically the case rims of a lot of the cases seemed to be so tight that they didn't want to feed into the shell plate. So I could not go full speed as I had to stop and throw out any that would bind up because I sure wouldn't want them binding the machine later when I actually am trying to do this with powder and bullets and what not right?
So I get in a rhythm as I continue the seemingly 80,000 pieces of brass. And all started to be right with the world again until part of the dang XL650 broke. An important part. Like the one that does the dang automatic index that gives the progressive press the title of "progressive". So now I got to process the seemingly 1,600,000 pieces of remaining brass with the benefit of the case feeder, but having to manually advance my automatic progressive.
So, at the end of the day, and seemingly 3,200,000 pieces of brass processed later, what conclusions did I reach.
1. This method produces AMAZINGLY clean brass. Primer pockets were perfect, the inside was 100% clean, etc etc.
2. Those pins go frigging EVERYWHERE. Everywhere. Maybe not up there with glitter, but I'll be finding them for ages. A magnetic sweeper should be standard kit for cleaning the area you're doing this in.
3. Thank god for the sun, because I'd have been stabbed 37 times in the chest if I tried to dry these in the oven. I suppose a food dehydrator would have worked too, but the sun was free. I put some cardboard down with 2x4 on the edges so they wouldn't roll everywhere and the sun hooked me up. So, would I do this in the winter? Yeah, probably not.
4. The solution itself turned black as sin. The only hints that it was indeed a fluid rather than pure evil incarnate was that there were flecks of brass in there to remind you. I mean, this was so dark that I thought it could have actually magically cleaned some of my childhood trauma as a side benefit. So count on an extreme cleaning of thy hands before touching too much after working with it.
5. The solution lasted though about 8 batches and probably could have kept going but after seemingly 7,400,000 pieces of brass done and needing to call Dillon to get parts sent, I figured I was done with the test.
6. Call me paranoid but I'm going to be slightly paranoid that there are stainless pins in the 223 I did. I'm not as worried on the straight wall stuff, but believing that they all came out of the bottleneck cartridges will take some faith.
Would I ever consider using this method to do small batches? HEEEEEEEEEEEEEECK NO. For my preference, I'd rather just get out the ultrasonic if it was going to be small batches and I wanted the aesthetic. Really, I could just tumble and call it good though because although it may get everything super-de-duper clean, will it make any noticeable difference to my group sizes? Yeah, right...I'm not good enough that it'd matter in the slightest at this point. For big batches, or ones that are probably going on a shelf and ignored for ages like many of my projects, I think this is a super solid tool as I think it does produce a superior clean and results that would hold their luster and really give confidence that you could pick them up off the shelf a decade later and trust the card with them that says they are ready to go.
NOTE: I tried to get a picture to demonstrate how clean and shiny they were, but in the only one I could get it looked like the blinding light of an angel to my camera and the picture was almost all white. When I pointed the camera at the brass too long I think it fried the chip. I'll try to take some more pictures later with a higher level of precaution.
So I acquired a Frankford Arsenal rotary tumbler a little while ago and gave it a run this weekend. I was really interested to see how it'd compare to the other methods of cleaning that I have. Those are:
1. Vibratory Tumbler.
2. Hornady Lock N Load Ultrasonic
3. Ignoring the cleaning and loading anyways.
So the main thing I had to figure out to compare against first was what solution to use. Looking on "The Internets" seemed to indicate that the way to go was add some dishsoap, add some Lemishine and add some time to the timer and let 'er ride. So I did that first honestly was pretty disappointed. The results were uniform and gave me a feeling of being cleaner than the vibratory and ignoring cleaning methods and about on par with the ultrasonic. So on the cleaning metric it seemed to be great compared to all methods. I'd give it the edge against the ultrasonic even because I could do a bigger batch, although I think that the ultrasonic is an invaluable tool for small parts, small batches, as well as many other non-gun items.
But the thing that bugged me greatly was that all the results were, well, dull. They didn't have the luster and shine that all them Internets people showed in their videos. So I set out to test that. I used the same batch of brass going through different quantities of dish soap and Lemishine while keeping the brass/media/water counts the same. I never could get it where I wanted.
So disappointed to the point of actually chucking money at the issue, I took one of my ready-made bottles of ultrasonic solution and dumped that in the tumbler and filled it up with water. IIRC I made the solution as directed on the Hornady One-Shot bottle, so it was like a couple ounces solution to like 28-30 ounces water. I don't know, it was whatever was in there and then diluted by about a factory of at least three going from a 1 quart bottle to a gallon-ish.
Anyways, I chucked the same brass/media etc in there and about an hour later I got my "Holy Crap Batman! That is insanely clean and shiny and beautiful" moment. It was simply gorgeous.
Annnnnnd then I proceeded to chase that high again. I had plenty of other brass to process, so of course, why not right? If nothing else I can test how much I can abuse the solution before it fails to perform right? Note that by this point the water was already black as an ex's heart, but hey, I like to try things. Now, this unfortunately involved two important things that start my journey into what I'll call the Abyss of Disappointment. The first was that I had to get all the solution/pins separated from the clean brass. That part sucks to be honest. I mean, maybe I suck AT that part, but I didn't like the first run. Second item in the journey is that I needed to deprime the brass if this was going to be worth it. Boy howdy, that'd be easy I thought!
Well, I was wrong there. First up was a batch of I dunno, 500-1000 pieces of 380 that I got from @mouthpiece a while back and had been too lazy to screw with. They were clean already, but not super "trying my new toy" shiny. Now, this part is not really the fault of the cleaner but it turns out that my old as Moses RCBS dies are super tight, not carbide and have no bevel going into the die. This meant that for the seemingly 10,000 pieces I went through a good amount didn't want to line up and go in. Curses!
I finally get that batch done and running in the tumbler and move on to the next. I dunno, 9mm or something. I think --- this will be easier right? I've got my dies all setup and wonderful! Sure enough they were better but it just took quite a bit of the day to go through the seemingly 20,000 pieces and get them ready. But eventually I was done with them, and got to repeat the whole get brass out of solution, get pins, out, get brass drying, blah blah to finish the 380 and get the 9 in. The 380 though ---- OMG amazing. Like, sooo beautiful.
Next up was 40. I had seemingly 40,000 pieces to go through there. So this time I thought --- "I should be smart. I've got to setup my Dillon 650 with case feeder for this caliber sometime anyways, so I can just set it up with one die to deprime and size, and the case feeder will make life easy and all will be right with the world." So I set the thing up, got everything calibrated and went to town. Which was fantastic until, I dunno the 10th case where the range brass mix showed it's true form of nasty. Basically the case rims of a lot of the cases seemed to be so tight that they didn't want to feed into the shell plate. So I could not go full speed as I had to stop and throw out any that would bind up because I sure wouldn't want them binding the machine later when I actually am trying to do this with powder and bullets and what not right?
So I get in a rhythm as I continue the seemingly 80,000 pieces of brass. And all started to be right with the world again until part of the dang XL650 broke. An important part. Like the one that does the dang automatic index that gives the progressive press the title of "progressive". So now I got to process the seemingly 1,600,000 pieces of remaining brass with the benefit of the case feeder, but having to manually advance my automatic progressive.
So, at the end of the day, and seemingly 3,200,000 pieces of brass processed later, what conclusions did I reach.
1. This method produces AMAZINGLY clean brass. Primer pockets were perfect, the inside was 100% clean, etc etc.
2. Those pins go frigging EVERYWHERE. Everywhere. Maybe not up there with glitter, but I'll be finding them for ages. A magnetic sweeper should be standard kit for cleaning the area you're doing this in.
3. Thank god for the sun, because I'd have been stabbed 37 times in the chest if I tried to dry these in the oven. I suppose a food dehydrator would have worked too, but the sun was free. I put some cardboard down with 2x4 on the edges so they wouldn't roll everywhere and the sun hooked me up. So, would I do this in the winter? Yeah, probably not.
4. The solution itself turned black as sin. The only hints that it was indeed a fluid rather than pure evil incarnate was that there were flecks of brass in there to remind you. I mean, this was so dark that I thought it could have actually magically cleaned some of my childhood trauma as a side benefit. So count on an extreme cleaning of thy hands before touching too much after working with it.
5. The solution lasted though about 8 batches and probably could have kept going but after seemingly 7,400,000 pieces of brass done and needing to call Dillon to get parts sent, I figured I was done with the test.
6. Call me paranoid but I'm going to be slightly paranoid that there are stainless pins in the 223 I did. I'm not as worried on the straight wall stuff, but believing that they all came out of the bottleneck cartridges will take some faith.
Would I ever consider using this method to do small batches? HEEEEEEEEEEEEEECK NO. For my preference, I'd rather just get out the ultrasonic if it was going to be small batches and I wanted the aesthetic. Really, I could just tumble and call it good though because although it may get everything super-de-duper clean, will it make any noticeable difference to my group sizes? Yeah, right...I'm not good enough that it'd matter in the slightest at this point. For big batches, or ones that are probably going on a shelf and ignored for ages like many of my projects, I think this is a super solid tool as I think it does produce a superior clean and results that would hold their luster and really give confidence that you could pick them up off the shelf a decade later and trust the card with them that says they are ready to go.
NOTE: I tried to get a picture to demonstrate how clean and shiny they were, but in the only one I could get it looked like the blinding light of an angel to my camera and the picture was almost all white. When I pointed the camera at the brass too long I think it fried the chip. I'll try to take some more pictures later with a higher level of precaution.
