Vibrating Loaded Cartidges

[HangEmHigh]

I took someone's advice and applied a very small amount of spray lube to my straight walled pistol cartridges before reloading. It was a huge improvement in terms of cycling the progressive press. It did however leave thin black smudges on the cartridge bodies. They are easily removed with a shop rag, but I loaded ~500 rounds and dont want to spend all evening removing smudges by hand.

So my question is --- is it safe to put loaded cartridges in a vibratory tumbler. My guess is yes and that's what Ive heard in the past. Id like to get a wider opinion on the safety of this.

Thanks

 

[Manomet]

Yes

 

[Patriot]

I took someone's advice and applied a very small amount of spray lube to my straight walled pistol cartridges before reloading. It was a huge improvement in terms of cycling the progressive press. It did however leave thin black smudges on the cartridge bodies. They are easily removed with a shop rag, but I loaded ~500 rounds and dont want to spend all evening removing smudges by hand.

So my question is --- is it safe to put loaded cartridges in a vibratory tumbler. My guess is yes and that's what Ive heard in the past. Id like to get a wider opinion on the safety of this.

Thanks

What press are you using? Are your dies carbide dies?

 

[HangEmHigh]

What press are you using? Are your dies carbide dies?

My reloading setup is at a family member's house and I don't have access to them right now. Its a good question. They are Lee brand dies, but I'm not sure if they are carbide or not. The press is a Lee 1000.

 

[Patriot]

I would vibrate them to clean them and if I remember correctly Eddie Coyle stated that
ammunition manufacturers routinely do this.

 

[Marty]

I believe only Dillon makes 3-piece carbide rifle die sets. I use their's for reloading .223 and .308 in a 650 press and you still have to use case lube.

 

[Kaos116]

I am a complete newbie to reloading, but I thought I read that vibrating loaded rounds breaks up the powder inside and changes the way it burns.

Again I am a complete newbie at this, so take it as such.

 

[Patriot]

I believe only Dillon makes 3-piece carbide rifle die sets. I use their's for reloading .223 and .308 in a 650 press and you still have to use case lube.

He was talking about pistol rounds which he is lubing. Lots of manufacturers make carbide
dies for pistols.

 

[SemiAutoSam]

Wait just a minute.

Where are you plan on placing the cartridges while they are vibrating ?

Are you over the age of consent in your state ?

 

[6hold]

I grabbed this from "The Firing Line": http://www.thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=287501
He gave a decent account of this in his post. He also has a few decent and true things to say in the “trailer” at the end.

TexasSeaRay


Tumble or no tumble your reloaded ammo? A new twist.

I've been doing this experiment on "To tumble or not to tumble . . ."

For the most part and the majority of the time, I do not tumble my loaded ammo. Instead, I make sure my brass is polished and clean before I load it up.

But, over the past few years I've been reading about all the ills, evils and catastrophic world-ending probabilities that are just waiting to happen if you tumble your loaded ammo.

So I decided to start doing a little experimenting. There are already a few threads on this in the Handloading and Reloading area of TFL--what I'm posting now is simply a continuation of what happens when you have too much time on your hands and way too curious of a mind.

For this latest round, I loaded 52 rounds of .38 Special 158 gr Lead Round Nose (LRN) with 4.3 grains of Accurate Arms #2 and used Winchester Small Pistol primers. The cases are mixed.

I chose AA#2 because it is an extremely fine powder in terms of makeup and grade. It's a ball powder and my thinking was that a fine, small ball powder would be less affected by a long tumbling session (if it would be affected at all) than would a flake or extruded powder.

The previous portion of this ongoing experiment had an unexpected incident. The lead bullets took on a dark luster from the tumbling. At first glance, they appeared to have lost some metal compared to the untumbled rounds.

The tumbler I use is a Thumler's Tumbler and it is a rotary-style tumbler as opposed to a vibratory tumbler. For this round of experimenting, I tumbled 24 rounds for six hours in treated walnut media, then another six hours in untreated walnut media. This is my standard cleaning process for brass before I reload it. I like clean, shiny, like-new looking brass.



Prior to heading to the range, I pulled a bullet after the tumbling was complete and put the calipers to it in order to compare it with the untumbled bullet. They were identical at both the base of the bullet and the front of the bullet. I then weighed the tumbled bullet and compared it with the untumbled bullet. Identical.

At the range, I shot several cylinders of normal wadcutters just to get a little powder and fouling in the barrel to level the playing field.

Next, I taped up two 3"x5" blank notecards to my target, then ran the target to 75 feet instead of my normal 50 feet. I wanted the extra 25 feet to help expose any differences there might be between the tumbled and untumbled rounds.

I alternated cylinders between tumbled and untumbled. I started with six rounds of untumbled, firing handheld at one notecard, then switched to six rounds of tumbled loads and fired at the opposing notecard.

Here are the results.

The untumbled rounds at 75 feet handheld.




And the tumbled rounds at 75 feet handheld.



Quite honestly, I couldn't feel or tell any difference in how one set of rounds fired over the other. The gun I used was my Smith & Wesson Model 686 with a 6-inch barrel.

Next phase in this thing, I guess I'm gonna start trying flake powders and see if the tumbling process affects the large powders. It sure didn't affect the AA#2.

Not sure what to make of all this, and I'm NOT recommending anyone tumble their loaded ammo, nor am I discouraging anyone. Just trying to draw some conclusions based on firsthand experience rather than third-person reports.

Jeff
__________________

If every single gun owner belonged to the NRA as well as their respective state rifle/gun association, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today.

So to those of you who are members of neither, thanks for nothing.​

 

[EddieCoyle]

I am a complete newbie to reloading, but I thought I read that vibrating loaded rounds breaks up the powder inside and changes the way it burns.

Again I am a complete newbie at this, so take it as such.

You read this because somebody wrote it once and other people now mindlessly repeat it.

Every factory metallic centerfire cartridge you've ever purchased was tumbled in a vibratory bowl after it was assembled. Every one.

Tumbling doesn't break up the powder. At all. I loaded a couple of cartridges with Blue Dot (big flakes), W231 (small flakes), and H110 (ball powder) and placed them in the bowl every time I used it for a couple of months. They were in the tumbler for at least 100 hours and when I pulled the bullets and compared the powder to new samples, you could not tell the difference.

 

[Kaos116]

You read this because somebody wrote it once and other people now mindlessly repeat it.

I agree that peoples opinions are sometimes taken as gospel once put into writing. IMHO, not so mindlessly, that article had made some sense to me. I could see the grains of powder vibrating against eachother and breaking down, like rock polishing.

I certainly concede to those that have actually done some testing to see if this happened. My common sense has been fooled again by real world testing.

 

[Jasper]

as a rule, i dont tumble loaded rounds....but yesterday, i accidentally did!

i bought ~900 pieces of .38sp brass off craigslist, and proceeded to toss them in the tumbler, box after box. as i was sorting everything (by headstamp, i know my winchester/federal brass is 2x fired so thats in a different bin), i noticed an unstruck primer. i was like "hmm, that's odd". much to my surprise, it was a +p LDEWC! live rounds! the guy gave me one full box of live ammo with the rest of the brass! (unknown to him, as i offered him my permit before the transaction and he said "oh, you dont need that, these are empty shells! (AFAIK, empty cartridges=ammunition in MA, or at least enough to get you into some trouble if you were caught with them and unlicensed)

ended up sorting the rest 1 by 1, and ended up with ~56 loaded rounds.

 

[IPSC_DRL]

(snip) (unknown to him, as i offered him my permit before the transaction and he said "oh, you dont need that, these are empty shells! (AFAIK, empty cartridges=ammunition in MA, or at least enough to get you into some trouble if you were caught with them and unlicensed)

Per a strict reading of the law, yes. By any sensible person's reasoning, no.

 

[BillK]

I've dumped loaded cases into a vibe to clean up the brass, no loss of performance as noted by Jim.

 

[bigbird34]

Vibratory tumble

I have been using a vibratory tumbler for 20 years to clean loaded cartridges,no cartridges have gone off yet ,But I keep trying...BB34

 

[T3andme]

As far as the power breaking down while tumbling: Think about it, that powder was manufactured, boxed, warehoused, transported by land in a bumpy truck over bumpy roads, shaken, kicked, stacked, unstacked, transported, home, loaded, carried to the range or stuck in your pockets and hiked over rough terrain, or bounced around in a humvee, and it still went bangy consistantly. I think a few hours in a tumbler is the most gentle it has been handled. Not likely to change performance.