Have the exact same tumbler, agreed it's a good tumbler for the price. But, drying the brass....no need to build anything. Just use your oven. Here's my tumbling routine. 1. Decap all the brass to be tumbled. 2. Tumble brass in tumbler - fill to neck with tap water, use a teaspoon of citric acid powder (food grade off Amazon, in case you want to use it for making candies or something). Citric acid powder is way cheaper than "Lemi-Shine" and the active ingredient in Lemi-Shine is citric acid, sooo. Add a squirt of dish soap and tumble for an hour to an hour and a half depending on load. 3. After tumbling, use the Frankford Arsenal wet/dry media separator to separate the brass and pins. 4. Place brass in a large bowl (or use the box half of the FA separator without the screen), fill with tap water, agitate the brass by hand to get a good rinse to get any soap and acid residue off. 5. Lay brass in a bath towel, scrunch up each end in a hand so brass lays in towel sort of like a hammock. Then, cascade the brass back and forth in the towel a few times. This gets a lot of the water out. 6. Place brass on cookie sheet(s), put in oven on 195 for about an hour. While the brass is in the oven, I put the separator box half with the screen in the sink, dump all the pins out of the tumbler drum into it, then rinse them well, and also rinse out the inside of the tumbler drum. I then scoop the pins back into the drum by hand (as much as I can) then use my magnet to get the rest. I then just put the tumbler drum away and leave the one end open. The little bit of water on the pins due to the rinse won't hurt anything and they will dry quickly. Total time from decap to ready to size and load is 2.5 to 3 hours. Actual hands on work only takes about 20-30 mins, the remainder of the time is waiting on the tumbler and the oven.
The thing I like about this is that there is no need for a heating element. I dry two layers of brass and a cookie sheet of my wet tumbler stainless steel pins under the dryer, during operation. Then the next day, everything is dry. I use low setting on fans and just check a few cases before you stop the process. I then put my dried cases in tuperware containers with a desiccant (from Amazon) to absorb any moisture that might get in while stored.
How Funny is this... I built something very similar to that last year but I'm using a 20" Box Fan and it works great. Great idea!!.. I showed the video to my wife and she still laughing.. :-)
Neat idea for a dryer. So far, I've just been blotting most of the water off and then letting the sun dry the brass...Works OK. We are always open to better ways to do that drying...
Great idea. I've been trying to figure out how to dry mine as well. I ended up doing something similar but on a smaller scale. I might try and build something similar to yours to dry more brass.....and I might try to incorporate a heating element to speed the process! Cheers
