Well. Wife wants to pour some small areas of concrete in the back patio area so I decided to take advantage of the local Harbor Freight deal on their small electric cement mixer...Since I have about 25 gallons of mixed range brass that I have picked up from my local ranges over the past couple of years I am going to clean all of this brass (two or three separate loads) using stainless steel pins over this winter....Gonna be noisy but I am watching videos on line and others have successfully used this mixer to clean their brass....It will still be mixed but at least it will be clean.....Now to determine the amount of Turtle Wax Car Wash and Simply Green when mixing in a concrete mixer instead of my Rebel 17 tumbler......Mark

Normally it's LimiShine (citric acid) and Wash & Wax. Simple Green is a good carbon cutter and have used it alone with the W&W on very dirty brass. The citric acid varies depending on the pH of the water. Normally it's added at a rate of 1/2 tsp/gal of water. If your water is very soft like mine I have to double it for it to clean.

You will need to separate the brass by calibers before tumbling. Other wise the different sizes get inside each other and the SS pins will lock them in. Make it at times almost impossible to separate.

Deprime first to keep from trapping water in the pockets. Most cases it's not a problem, but corrosion can happen and make removing the primer difficult (top of cap comes off leaving the sides). Doing so will clean the primer pockets.

Good point about the corrosion of the primers. I hadn't really considered that, have not used pins at all thus far. The brass does get tumbled in a big bath towel to remove much of the water, then dumped into a 1"+ deep oven pan to dry, 160-170* for about 25 minutes. This is for 4-500 9 mm brass. Works very well indeed, no sign of stuck primer wall as yet. Gonna bust out several hundred 9mm 145 gr loads on the 550 here in a bit. Merry Christmas fellas.

Blue - Thank you Sir for your post...I will follow your recommendations and add the Lemi-shine as well as sort and deprime before tumbling...I have about 7k-8k rounds sorted so far with another 20 gallons to go...Thanks again...Mark

Yeah don't use simple green, turns the brass an odd color. My buddy cleans brass once a year in an old cement mixer. Though he mod it to hold a 5gal bucket. The bucket has slats riveted inside to move the brass. Just seems to work better.

quote:

Originally posted by sigarmsp226:
Well. Wife wants to pour some small areas of concrete in the back patio area so I decided to take advantage of the local Harbor Freight deal on their small electric cement mixer...Since I have about 25 gallons of mixed range brass that I have picked up from my local ranges over the past couple of years I am going to clean all of this brass (two or three separate loads) using stainless steel pins over this winter....Gonna be noisy but I am watching videos on line and others have successfully used this mixer to clean their brass....It will still be mixed but at least it will be clean.....Now to determine the amount of Turtle Wax Car Wash and Simply Green when mixing in a concrete mixer instead of my Rebel 17 tumbler......Mark

Wow and I thought I had a lot of unloaded brass. You are talking about 5- 5 gallon buckets worth right?

I have used car polish on occasion but never with pins. Where did your get that many steel pins?

Well - I was mistaken.... I found another 5 gallon bucket that I forgot I had so I ended up with a little over 30 gallons of mixed brass....Now that I am finished sorting and cleaning here is what I ended up with....(rounded numbers)

48,000 pieces of 9mm
9,000 pieces of 223/5.56 brass
7,000 pieces of 45ACP brass
3,500 pieces of 40 Cal brass
A variety of mixed rifle brass (not 223/5.56) - about three gallons