Today I've got a little bit of 7.62x39 brass that
somebody gave to me. It's really in pretty rough shape, filthy inside and out.
There's old powder burned to the inside of it really crusty and there's
leaves in it, I think I saw a dead spider in one of them.
You can see they're just a mess, they're all beat up and dented up.
So I'm going to go ahead and try to breathe some life back into these.
First thing I've done is that I went ahead and deprimed them using the
Lee universal decapping die
and that way I won't mess up my sizing dies with these really nasty cases.
I use the universal decapping die most of the time, I like it because the rod
that holds the decapping pin
is just a thin rod, it doesn't touch the inside of the case.
Such as one of these, the traditional,
has a mandrel
that resize is the inside of the case neck.
by decapping this way
you get to clean your cases before they go into your sizing dies.
So the next
thing I'm going to do is tumble these
to get them clean.
I'm going to be wet tumbling them
in stainless steel pins...
which look like this.
So the stainless steel pins do a
really good job of getting the inside and outside clean,
primer pockets all the little sections.
I tumble these wet, so in warm water with a little bit of dish soap
and a little citrus cleaner.
I'm going to show you how this works.
So i'm going
to go ahead and dump my brass into the drum.
This drum has a rubber lining on it.
I'm also going to go ahead and throw some 30-06 brass in there with it that
I'd like to clean.
Now one thing that's important when tumbling is you can tumble different
types of cases together
but you don't want to tumble cases that will fit inside of each other like
7.62x39 and 44 magnum
because they will get stuck in there and then you will have problems.
Allright, here's our brass in the drum, I'm going to to share with the you a secret recipe
that my grandma passed down to me.
She always had the cleanest brass out there. Lemi-Shine, this is a powdered
dishwasher detergent and it's primarily citric acid, that's what's important here.
So, one 45 ACP
case full of that.
Warm water...
and a squirt of dish soap.
I filled it sothe water level is
approximately 3/4 full.
Put our top on and we're ready to go!
Ok, usually tumble stuff for about two hours.
I have a timer I'm going to set it for four hours just in case a forget it about it it won't run all night.
This is a Thumlers Tumbler with stainless steel pins.
And here's our brass after the stainless steel cleanup.
Looks nice and shiny
but we still have these bent-up case mouths.
I'm using a pair of needle nose plyers, I chose to use some that have a smooth
face on them.
And i'm just going to bend some of these case mouths open a little bit,
make some adjustments so that they go into the die a little bit better.
A lot of them don't need it
they should
correct themselves in the die.
But you can give them a little bit of help on the really bad ones.
Here is one of our cases with the dented up mouth.
I've got the cases here, been lubing them up.
I'm using the Lee full length sizing die...
and what we end up with here looks pretty good!
Here i'm trimming the case with the Forster trimmer.
After timming I'll debur using tool like this one from Lee
or this one from Lyman.
And here's our product.
So we went ahead and we cleaned them, and we lubed them,
we sized them, we trimmed and deburred them.
Ready for action here.
There's fewer cases here than I started with because I
already went ahead and loaded a bunch of them up with these Lee
lead cast bullets
and fired them out of the AK.
If you'd like to watch that video go ahead and click here...
and see what happened.
Thanks for watching and have a great day!