Cleaning Brass with Stainless Tumbling Media
On our main Accurateshooter.com website, you’ll find a comprehensive review of the STM system for cleaning cartridge brass with stainless media. To clean brass with stainless media, start with five pounds of small stainless pins sold by StainlessTumblingMedia.com. Place these along with a gallon of water, a little liquid cleaner, and two pounds of cartridge brass in a rotary tumbler, and run the machine for one to four hours.
CLICK HERE for Stainless Media Brass Cleaning System Review
Forum Member Tests STM System
Our reviewer, Forum member Jason Koplin, purchased the STM media and a new Thumler’s Tumbler. He then tested the STM cleaning procedure on his own brass, including some extremely dirty and tarnished “range pick-up” brass. Jason was thoroughly impressed with how well the STM process worked — as you can see from the “before and after” photos below. Brass which looked like it was ready for the scrap heap was restored to “like-new” appearance. The process works equally well on both rifle brass and pistol brass. Jason observed that one surprise benefit of the STM cleaning procedure is a big reduction in noise. Jason said the water-filled rotary tumbler was much quieter than his vibratory tumblers.
You’ll want to read Jason’s full review which shows more before and after images. The full article features a “how-to” video created by Forum member Cory Dickerson, the young man who pioneered the stainless tumbling process and founded STM. The video shows how to load brass, media, and cleaner solutions into the tumbler, and how to separate media from brass once the tumbling is done.
Similar Posts:
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Tags: Brass, Jason Koplin, Reloading, Stainless Media, Stainless Tumbling Media, STM, Thumler's Tumbler, Tumbling
Have been using it for over two years now in conjunction with annealing. Works perfectly for me.
One key I found: Use only COLD water for cleaning and rinsing.
Using hot water doesn’t clean any better (contradictory to everything else I clean….) and will leave discoloration/tarnishing/odd colors.
Also beware of peening on turned cases with tight neck barrels. Deburring and/or trimming may be necesaary after spinning in the stainless media.
I use and swear by STM but it is not without its frustrations. The pins are loo long and are the perfect size to jam in the mouths of sized 6 and 6.5mm cases. removal scores the inside of the brass and it means each case must be properly inspected.
If thise pins could be made th half the length, they would be perfect.
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Used this stuff for several years. Not worth the headaches the peening on the case mouth causes, particularly in tight chambered precision guns. There are ways to minimize it, but once it happens, it’s very hard to get rid of. Trimming works the first couple of times, but the peening also reduces the case length, so after a couple of cycles, you need to either neck turn/re-turn the necks or trim below minimum length to get rid of it.
A simple test to see if its present is to try and drop a bullet into a fired case. It should drop in freely. If it doesn’t, it basically means that you have case material being pinched between the bullet and the chamber. While this didn’t always affect velocities (SD’s), the traces recorded by my pressure trace system were erratic and bullet exit times were inconsistent. Loads never shot as well as they did when the traces were tight and bullet exit times were uniform.