The Little Things Make A Difference

I first purchased my web tumbler more than 20 years ago, as a ball mill.

It has made more than a few pounds of black powder.

Today, it is used mostly for cleaning brass. I’ve been looking and looking for better ways of cleaning my brass.

There are two different times when I’m cleaning brass, before it is processed, and after it has been sized and trimmed.

For after trimming, the wet tumble does a good job of removing those sharp edges. I like using it.

Dawn and LemiShine were not doing a good job of removing the Imperial Sizing wax. The fix was to use a cycle of Purple Power.

The current method is 45 minutes with Dawn Dish soap, followed by 45 minutes with LemiShine.

After trimming, it would be Dawn, Purple Power, and then LemiShine. 45,30,45.

This leaves my brass looking “like new”. Amazing. If you exclude the LemiShine, it doesn’t stay pretty as long, nor does it get as pretty.

So what is this “little thing”? It is a freaking sieve. Yes, a sieve.

Is it perfect? No. It just works better than other things I’ve tried.

It fits in a 5 gal bucket. I just empty the tumbler into it, rinse the casings, shake a bit and then rinse again.

Most of the steel pins fall through into the bucket. I spend 3 to 5 minutes, stirring the cases and tumbling them to get most of the pins out of the casings. It isn’t perfect, by far. It is very much “good enough”.

This silly little sieve has taken a “I do not want to do job” and turned it into “no big deal”. It takes less than 10 minutes to move to the next stage.

It has improved work flow to the point where I cleaned 2000 cases in a little more than a day.

If you wet tumble, this might be worth the $10 to you.