How to clean range brass for reloading - easy technique for shiny brass!
Welcome back to Jim's Armory. This one's a departure from the usual pistol content — Jim recently got into reloading, and after cleaning around 8,000 cases he's sharing the wet tumbling process he's landed on for cleaning range brass. His early attempts left cases dull and still dirty inside, so this video walks through what actually gets them shiny, using a rotary tumbler with stainless steel pins and a dedicated brass dryer.
Filling the Tumblers Jim starts with about 5 lb of stainless steel media per drum, one for 9mm and one for 5.56. He's found the sweet spot is filling the drum a little more than halfway with media, especially when the brass is really dirty. To that he adds Armor All Ultra Shine Wash and Wax, which leaves a thin coat of carnauba wax on the finished cases — something he hasn't independently confirmed, but that lines up with common recommendations and advice from a friend who's done this for years. He eyeballs the amount rather than measuring precisely and hasn't noticed a difference from being exact about it.
Pro-Tip: Fill the drum with as much water as possible. Jim's take is that water only has so much capacity to hold dirt and grease before the soap loses effectiveness, so more water means more cleaning capacity per cycle.
Soap, Lemi Shine, and Leak-Checking Before running a cycle, Jim dries off the outside of each drum with a rag and looks for drips at the seal — a steady drip at that point means a leak. He keeps his tumbling cycles short, 30 minutes to an hour, rather than running long marathon sessions. In his experience, spinning brass for hours in the same dirty water doesn't clean it further — it actually starts to look dull and filthy again.
Changing the Water, Repeatedly This is the core of Jim's technique: dump the dirty water into a bucket (so you don't lose your steel pins), add fresh water, more soap, and more Lemi Shine, and run another short cycle. He repeats this two to three times for heavily soiled brass, checking after each round. Cases that looked "already cleaned" from a prior long tumble still came out filthy on a fresh wash, reinforcing his point that changing the water matters more than total tumble time.
Media Sifting Once the brass looks clean, Jim uses a media sifter filled with water so the pins don't fly everywhere, rocking it back and forth for a few minutes to separate pins from cases — longer for bottleneck 5.56 cases since pins can get lodged inside them. He follows up with a magnet to pick up any stray pins, noting it can lift them from about an inch away.
Corroded Brass and the Lemi Shine Question Jim points out a batch of 5.56 cases that had turned copper-colored instead of brass-colored — a sign of dezincification, where zinc leaches out of the brass (which is a copper-zinc alloy), leaving brittle copper behind. He calls this brass unsafe to reload and tosses it.
This leads into a mini-experiment on Lemi Shine, which is citric acid. Rather than trust internet claims about exact dosing, Jim soaked a couple of 9mm cases in a tablespoon of Lemi Shine in a small glass of water for over a day and saw no visible damage. His own dosing is a couple of dashes per 7-liter tumbler (roughly half a teaspoon), close to the commonly cited quarter teaspoon per gallon for his roughly 1.8-gallon drums. He keeps cycles to 30 minutes–1 hour max, though he mentions accidentally leaving one batch overnight with no ill effects the next day.
Pro-Tip: Don't leave brass soaking in Lemi Shine overnight as a habit — use good judgment and stick to short cycles.
Drying: Oven and Dedicated Dryer Jim loads cleaned brass into the Frankford Arsenal brass dryer's multi-tier tray system and runs it at 160°F for 2 hours. For the stainless pins, he found the dryer itself too small, so he dries those in the oven instead, around 180-200°F. He notes some water spots on the 5.56 cases from residual moisture — a wrinkle he plans to solve by tumbling or dumping the water out more thoroughly before drying.
Handling Waste Water and Sorting Brass Jim disposes of his used tumbling water in a natural drainage area rather than down the sewer, cautioning that the water contains lead from primer residue and shouldn't go into a water supply. For sorting, he uses a magnet to pull steel cases, and shows how to visually and physically distinguish aluminum (dull, very light) from nickel (shiny, heavier) — aluminum and steel cases get thrown away since they can't be reloaded.
Final Thoughts Jim's recap: multiple short wash cycles beat one long one, use the wax additive and a modest amount of Lemi Shine, don't overfill the drum, and invest in the cheap media magnet and a timer to keep the process manageable. He's still learning this process himself and is gearing up to go deeper into reloading with a Mark 7 Apex 10, likely running it manually for now rather than automated.
If you're getting into reloading and want to see how Jim's process evolves, subscribe and stick around for what's next.
