Tumble brass before decapping?

[bsa1917hunter]

I never let my brass get dirty enough that I need to tumble it first. Just isn't going to happen. I don't even pick up range brass, unless it's somewhat clean. Here's about 800 pieces of .223rem that I picked up the other day:


Here's some 6.5 creed I shot over a weekend. This is after being fired:


Absolutely NO need to tumble that and get that damn media all in your dies and all over your bench. No need...

 

[RVTECH]

Absolutely NO need to tumble that and get that damn media all in your dies and all over your bench. No need...

I take it you dry tumble and do NOT rinse and dry after tumbling?

 

[jeffdpdx]

For whats it worth.

I wet tumble after de-capping using the Lee universal de-capping die.
I also use a food dehydrator to dry the brass, a hair dryer and the brass spread out on a towel also works well.

It works great for me and you will be pleased with the results.

Also 45 acp brass can be large or small pistol primer so make sure you sort them before priming.

 

[Tilos]

Tried yet something else over the weekend.
I came back from shooting and needed to clean some brass so I dumped the pile in my tumbler, added dawn & lemon juice and a bunch of SPENT PRIMERS as media. I had read about this before but never tried it.
Well after about an hour the cases were like new but since I considered this a 'pre clean' only I had not yet deprimed them.
Because these cases had a previous, full deprimed cleaning with pins I sized and deprimed a few and the primer pockets were still pretty clean so I am going to load these without a secondary cleaning.
Also primers (as media) are free and easier to handle than the small pins and I don't get too bummed if I loose a few!

Good info
Yeh, I've heard of people using 22LR cases as media too, wouldn't do much for the primer pockets though.

 

[11Charlie]

I guess a lot of this depends on tumbler? Wet or dry? If dry clean first if you like it wet (ya ya I know!) then deprime first.

My .02