View Single Post
Old July 14, 2012, 11:07 AM   #4
Ike666
Senior Member
 
Join Date: October 10, 2009
Location: SW VA
Posts: 491
The drum size does require some prior planning. Essentially it has a 15# capacity. The first 5#s are the steel pins (a little less now for me - they float away ), 8#s for the water, leaves just 2#s for the content. I usually fill the pan on my triple beam to a shy less than 1 kilo. I don't actually bother to count but with the .308s I'm estimating 80 to 82 cases per run. The LCs run about a 172 to 173 grain average and that works out to about 81.4 (82) per run.

All in all, I really like the results. Clean and shiny inside and out. Primer pockets are cleaned as well. But I only use it for heavily stained brass. These cases came from a lot of M80 Ball from 2005. I bought it in bulk from Cheaper-than-Dirt and it was pretty heavily stained. I didn't bother to pull the 147 grainers, instead decided to shoot them up. This will be the first prep for these cases.

Scott, I dump the detergent water off first. It comes out black as ink. I then flush the contents with running water for about 5 minutes, pour most of that off, and then pour it a strainer. I then run fresh water over the cases as I pluck them out and rinse, case mouth down, to flush any residual pins out. The pin floaters occur in the fresh water when I'm pouring it off before dumping the pins back in the tumbler for storage. So, you're probably right about the detergent knocking down the surface tension some, but it is long gone by the time I observed the floaters.

On the red tinge, I'm guessing that at the stage I stopped it there was some copper leeching out. The golden batch ran a little longer IIRC, about 18 hours. But I really don't know.
__________________
___________________
"I'm your huckleberry."
Ike666 is offline  
 
Page generated in 0.02818 seconds with 8 queries