How I Collect, Sort and Clean Range Brass - improved method
Welcome back to Jim's Armory. This time Jim steps away from the bench to tackle a different kind of project: turning a nearly full five-gallon bucket of range brass — mixed with rusted steel cases, rocks, twigs, and assorted trash — into clean, sorted components ready for the reloading press. He's incorporated several viewer tips since his last video on the subject, and this update focuses specifically on the trickier problem of cleaning and drying bottleneck cartridges. Here's how the process went.
Picking Up Brass at the Range Jim's range surface is crushed aggregate, which defeats most commercial brass-collection tools since they scoop up as many rocks as cases. His solution is a dethatching rake with thin, flexible tines, followed by a kitty litter scoop. The light, quick raking motion causes brass to fly toward you while heavier rocks tend to drop sooner, naturally separating the two. Jim says the whole collection process took about 20 minutes.
Sorting by Caliber Back at the bench, Jim uses a three-tray graduated sizing system from Shellsorter.com — yellow (largest), blue (medium), and black (smallest) — to separate cases by size. Yellow stops .45 and .308/7.62 brass; the next tray catches .40 S&W and similar; the smallest tray stops 9mm, 5.56/.223, and .380, letting rocks and true trash fall through into a separate bucket.
Pro-Tip: 9mm and .380 are close enough in size that some .380 will slip through with your 5.56/.223. Jim doesn't waste time chasing every one out at this stage — he says it's faster to pick them out later when loading the dryer.
Discarding Steel, Aluminum, and Trash Once sized, Jim runs a Frankford Arsenal media magnet (normally used to pull stainless pins out of the tumbler) through the pile to pull out steel cases, which can't be reloaded. From there he hand-sorts by weight and color, tossing aluminum and keeping nickel-plated brass. At this stage, only 9mm, 5.56/.223, and stray .380 should remain, and he separates those further using the same graduated trays before bagging the final sorted piles.
The Results From this haul, Jim ends up with a small amount of true trash, over half a five-gallon bucket of sorted 9mm, and roughly a quarter bucket of 5.56 — brass he's excited to load once his equipment arrives.
First Tumble: Soap Only For the first cycle, Jim fills each drum about halfway with water, then adds roughly a tablespoon of dish soap — no polish yet, since it would just get wasted on the initial layer of dirt, dead bugs, and grime.
Pro-Tip: Add water before soap. Several viewers corrected Jim's previous method of putting soap in first, which caused suds to overflow the top.
He runs the first cycle around 30 minutes, then dumps and refills with plain water for a rinse pass before moving on.
Second and Third Tumbles: Soap and Citric Acid For the following cycles, Jim adds a small amount of Armor All Ultra Shine Wash and Wax (about a half teaspoon per drum) along with a touch of Lemi Shine citric acid polish. He addresses viewer concerns about Lemi Shine leaching zinc out of the brass and making it brittle, noting that in his own testing he hasn't seen cracking, though he still recommends using only a small amount as a precaution.
Jim has moved away from single long tumbling sessions. In his experience, shorter runs with fresh water each time get brass cleaner than one marathon cycle, which he found left the brass looking dull.
Pro-Tip: When dumping the dirty tumbling water, don't pour it down a storm drain or into the yard — lead residue can be harmful to children and pets. Jim disposes of his in a drain that runs off away from the house.
By the third tumble, the water runs noticeably clearer and the brass comes out shiny, even visibly clean on the inside.
Sifting Out Media and Final Rinse With cleaning done, Jim floods the tumbler drum with water and uses the Frankford Arsenal media separator to sift out the stainless pins, checking that none remain before moving brass to a rinse bucket. During this pass he culls out any obviously bad cases — pieces that look overly copper-colored from long sun/soil exposure, which signals zinc erosion. For low-pressure 9mm, Jim says he isn't too concerned, but he tosses questionable cases when loading higher-pressure rounds like 5.56.
The Towel Trick and Drying Following a viewer tip, Jim addresses a problem he ran into previously — 5.56 brass holding water inside the case long after 9mm had dried. The fix is what he calls the towel trick: laying the brass in a towel, gathering the corners like a hammock, and rolling the cases back and forth to tumble and agitate them, letting the towel's surface tension pull moisture out.
From there, brass goes into a Frankford Arsenal dryer set to 180 degrees, run for six hours using an outlet countdown timer for peace of mind. Jim spreads the cases in a single flat layer rather than piling them, believing airflow matters more than he originally thought.
Pro-Tip: Double-check for live rounds before loading the dryer — Jim pulls several stray live 9mm and .380 rounds out of the pile during this step.
Final Results The next morning, Jim checks the brass by flicking pieces against his arm to feel for any trapped moisture. Everything comes out dry and shiny, yielding roughly a third of a bucket of finished 5.56 brass along with the sorted 9mm.
Final Thoughts Jim walks away from this session with a refined process — better tray sorting, shorter tumble cycles with fresh water, safer disposal of dirty tumbling water, and the towel trick to finally solve the bottleneck-brass drying problem. He credits viewer feedback for several of these improvements and encourages more of it going forward.
Thanks for reading along — subscribe and stay tuned for more from Jim's Armory as he keeps building out his reloading setup.
