Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Discussions covering the components and techniques of reloading for your long gun.
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by Macd »

GasGuzzler wrote:I still don't understand how picking dry media out of nearly every flash hole and having dusty cases that must then be washed with liquid then dried is easier or faster than just washing and drying the cases in the first place. I don't use pins. Dry tumbling for 12 hours produced brass 80% as clean as no-pin wet tumbling for 30 minutes.
Honestly I was happy using just a sonic cleaner but I bought the tumbler for my powder coating trials and now use it to tumble brass to give it a bit of a shine. I am using the original corn media that came with the tumbler. What type of media were you using? I did several hundred cases last weekend and maybe had 5-6 with media in the flash hole and no dust. Of course all the cases went into the tumbler clean and dry.
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by GasGuzzler »

As stated I have tried two kinds of Lyman (and not stated one private source).....latter being the best. I clean after I universal de-prime so a hunk of crap in a flash hole is a bad thing.

I have the RCBS thingie like this Image and it gets 95% of the dry media out. The remaining 5% can be dumped from each case one by one which is very tedious or I can ignore it? Then there's the dust....
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by Ohio3Wheels »

I get dust with the walnut and no dust with the corn cob, but I've had bottle neck cases so pack with the cob that it was a pain to get out. I started with pins for my BPCR cases and use them now with most all of my straight cases. I've used them with bottle necks with various levels of aggravation, 35Rem not much, most 30s some and 223 grrrrrrrrrr. YMMV

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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by Ranch Dog »

The space along my garage wall sure shrunk! I had two table to accommodate everything with the wet wash as I don't like leaning over to do the work on the floor. I also don't like setting up equipment as much as I do reload.

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The two benches did extend to the round oil filter magnet stuck to the purling. Now I can get my standby generator out of the way, and moma has her two car garage back.
daboone wrote:Add to that I'm lazy, so the buzz bucket method of cleaning is done to remove the sizing lube after a batch has been completely reloaded.
I was wiping down some 218 Bee cases before bagging them and noticed that the groove ahead of the rim was packed with grease. I suspect those pins had been accumulating the spent bullet lube contaminates for a while, these cases were done before the 32-20 Win cases. So, getting a bit tired of using a paper towel and fingernail, I thought I would chunk them in the Corncob Plus and did so.

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It took me about 5 seconds to hit the kill switch as I remember that these are duplex loads. I guess I will see how well the compression on the BPI Buffer worked!

I like the dryer. I can use it after I quickly was the cases in my garage sink before I decap the cases. I also can use it after annealing. The rest went to the conditioned storage I have here, I bound and determined to empty it of reloading equipment this year. I think I'm going to come up with a list of gun clubs within a two-hour drive of me and see if they plan any yard sales or swap meets.
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by horseman »

Ranch Dog, I seem to recall (maybe) that I either saw or read where you had and used the (new) Lyman pin/brass separator setup. I bought one a while back and have used it once. I'm still undecided whether I would rather use that or the dry media sifter, shaker, spinner, dumper bucket thing. The Lyman is a lot easier separating the pins and washing them off etc; but the "hidden" pin left in the brass seems a bit more likely as you can't really "shake" the brass that well with it. Whereas with the media separator rotating the drum with water in the bucket would seem to be a bit better for pin removal, which is what I was doing before. I may be overthinking this as I said I've only used the Lyman pin separator once and had no issue and it was easy. Is anyone else using this Lyman part and what has been your experience?
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by Ranch Dog »

I can see where that would happen if the rotation was fast, but I only rotate it at a rate that allows it to come up the side past the 3/9 o'clock position and fall back to the bottom. I also reverse it after a couple of turns and run it back and forth.
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Re: Rethinking Steel Pin Cleaning & Annealing

Post by Ranch Dog »

I had another batch of 32-20 Win cases that I needed to clean so I ran a test with my 218 Bee cases to see if they became impacted with the Lyman Corncob plus. When the cleaning time ran out, I shook the cases 45 seconds and none of the cases were compacted with media. About 50% of them had a single piece of media in the flash hole from the inside. None of the 32-20 Win cases had anything in the flash hole. Now remember that the flash hole diameter is uniform across all the primer sizes, and the 218 Bee brass was new Starline without any conditioning, a sampling of the cases had burrs remaining from the flash hole punch on the inside of the case and flash hole uniforming removed them. I've going to see how the decapping rod holds up to another sample, I don't think corncob is as tough as walnut. As a note, my FA walnut is so fine that I've never had a plugged flash hole in the two decades plus I've used it.


Ahhh... case cleaning has become so simple again.
Michael
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