I needed a way to clean *lots* of brass. I tried a bunch of different approaches, and settled on the following.
I took an old gas-fired clothes dryer whose heating mechanism had failed, & removed the "paddles" on the sides of the drum. (Just pop the top off the dryer and you can access the screws holding the paddles to the drum.)
I took a 5-gallon bucket from Home Depot or Lowes, with a GASKETED lid. Fill with 4 gallons of brass. Add a 2" layer of stainless tumbling media on top, plus a healthy squirt of Dawn. Fill with water, seal the bucket with a rubber hammer, lay it in the bottom of the dryer drum, and turn the dryer on. The bucket rolls along at the bottom of the dryer drum. 2 hours cleans once-fired brass. 4 hours cleans the nastiest range brass. There's a $2 tool for popping open bucket lids that you'll want to get. They'll have it in the paint department.
Some folks also add lemishine to the bucket. I'll probably try that sometime.
You can use smaller buckets for smaller amounts of brass, as long as the lid is watertight. In my experience, that means it has to be a gasketed lid. I bought "watertight" buckets without gaskets, and they leaked. I now own several sizes of gasketed buckets.
I thought I needed more agitation than simply a rolling drum, but I was wrong. All that extra agitation did was beat up the case mouths.
I'm not sure how many 9mm cases it takes to fill 4 gallons, but it's a lot (8,000?). It took me a week to sort & decap them. I'll post pictures when I can.
I'm embarrassed to think of all the more complicated things I tried before I settled on this solution. It's far cheaper and simpler than anything else I tried, and it works at least as well. I've seen other, more complicated dryer-tumbler solutions on the net, but I've not seen this one, so I figured I'd post.
I took an old gas-fired clothes dryer whose heating mechanism had failed, & removed the "paddles" on the sides of the drum. (Just pop the top off the dryer and you can access the screws holding the paddles to the drum.)
I took a 5-gallon bucket from Home Depot or Lowes, with a GASKETED lid. Fill with 4 gallons of brass. Add a 2" layer of stainless tumbling media on top, plus a healthy squirt of Dawn. Fill with water, seal the bucket with a rubber hammer, lay it in the bottom of the dryer drum, and turn the dryer on. The bucket rolls along at the bottom of the dryer drum. 2 hours cleans once-fired brass. 4 hours cleans the nastiest range brass. There's a $2 tool for popping open bucket lids that you'll want to get. They'll have it in the paint department.
Some folks also add lemishine to the bucket. I'll probably try that sometime.
You can use smaller buckets for smaller amounts of brass, as long as the lid is watertight. In my experience, that means it has to be a gasketed lid. I bought "watertight" buckets without gaskets, and they leaked. I now own several sizes of gasketed buckets.
I thought I needed more agitation than simply a rolling drum, but I was wrong. All that extra agitation did was beat up the case mouths.
I'm not sure how many 9mm cases it takes to fill 4 gallons, but it's a lot (8,000?). It took me a week to sort & decap them. I'll post pictures when I can.
I'm embarrassed to think of all the more complicated things I tried before I settled on this solution. It's far cheaper and simpler than anything else I tried, and it works at least as well. I've seen other, more complicated dryer-tumbler solutions on the net, but I've not seen this one, so I figured I'd post.