STM trial has begun, 2 pm

My Stainless Steel Tumbling Media arrived today from Utah.  Good service.  Weighed it to see if I have any loss over time.  An oz short of 5 lbs.  I guess I can live with that.  The day before I located the special cleaning stuff.  Lemi-Shine.  You can buy it from STM which is a nice thing to do or you can buy it from Walmart.  It exists in both crystal and liquid form.  I opted to stick with what STM sells which is the crystal concentrate form.  Under $4 for a bottle, UPC 7 03074 22874 4.

I was scheming with John B. as to what nasty brass I should throw at it first.  We found some very very beat up 30-30 brass which I decided to throw in with some 30-30 brass I shot a few weeks back.  This gives us a test of "normal" cleaning vs. "extreme" cleaning.  All brass had been decapped and FL sized.  I did not count the number of shells I put in.  Total brass weight was 1.5 lbs which is shy of the 2 lbs suggested by STM.  Keep in mind you have 1 gallon of water or 8 lbs, media 5 lbs so these 15 lbs capacity tumblers can only hold 2 lbs of brass or approx 100 pcs of 308 or 230 pcs of 9mm per STM.  At this stage I am less concerned about capacity and more interested in whether it truly cleans the inside of a rifle case.




And an real close up showing some ultra nasty range brass and one normal piece in need of cleaning before reloading.  The relatively clean piece was last cleaned by corn cob and is R-P.  The others are either FC or Winchester so I can separate them in the unlikely chance that they all look the same after 4 hours in the tumbler.

Click on image for a close up look at this brass pre tumble with STM media.

For a seemingly endless discussion about STM, go here.  Over 41 pages of posts on this forum....with better pictures than I am able to produce.