So the desire is to have clean brass, even if it degrades accuracy and precision?
Well remember I'm not telling people what to do or not do. I'm just stating that each method has its pros and cons.
When you post instructing others to do do a method that's been working well for others for years, you might see some differing opinions posted.
So can you show some literature or proof that wet tumbling with SS pins degrades accuracy and precision? I'm not trash talking, I'm genuinely interested if people have done controlled studies/experiments that have consistently showed better and worse cleaning techniques. There's a lot of opinions, haven't seen solid evidence though.
Here's where wet tumbling shines for me. I hate my presses and floors getting dirty. When I started reloading years ago, it was in a room with carpet. I would put down a towel or garbage bag under the press and after a while carbon and dirt would be visible on the towel or trash bag, and carbon would collect around the shell holder. This was after vibratory tumbling with crushed walnut media. This is a bigger deal when cranking out ammo on one of my Dillon progressives vs one of my single stage presses.
I'm picking up pistol cases off the ground at my range and some of it had been on the ground for a while so it can be pretty dirty. So I run all this dirty brass through a universal decapper/deprimer off my normal reloading bench. It's dirty and can be a bit time consuming but usually it's done by my teenage sons to earn some trigger time at the range and hunting.
The dedicated depriming press gets filthy as you can imagine. Once deprimed, the brass in cleaned with wet tumbling and SS pins. It comes out perfectly clean so my presses on my reloading bench stay perfectly clean. Especially important to me on my progressive presses with the rotating shell plate, more moving parts.
Now I've found a few real downsides to wet tumbling with SS pins that I've had to overcome.
First, the brass comes out so clean that resizing straight walled pistol cases with a carbide die (usually a process done without lube) becomes a bit more of an issue. The very clean brass has more resistance to sizing. This can also cause a problem with seating bullets in very clean case mouths/necks.
Second, the brass will tarnish over time if that bothers someone.
The solution for both of these is after I tumble with Dawn detergent, I rinse and do a short tumble with Armor All Wash and Wax. After rinsing and drying, the brass has a slight almost imperceptible wax coating on it inside and out. This allows easy resizing of straight walled pistol cases in carbide dies on a progressive press and solves any issues of seating pistol bullets in straight walled pistol cases.
For rifle brass, I do the AA W&W treatment, then after lubing and resizing the body/pumbling shoulder/resizing the neck, I then use Redding dry neck lube with a Redding inside neck sizing mandrel. This imparts enough lubricity for consistent bullet seating in rifle cases, for me anyway.
Another downside is that the case mouth can theoretically get a bit dinged up by the pins and other cases. I just run a light inside chamfer on all my rifle cases before seating bullets.
The other day I needed some additional rounds loading up for a hunt and used dirty brass out of a bolt action rifle. Didn't do any cleaning whatsoever because brass shot at the bench out of a bolt action rifle doesn't get that dirty.
I shoot suppressed rifles almost exclusively for hunting and my 6.5 Grendel and .20 Practical cases come out of the rifle nearly black when shooting suppressed out of ARs. Even with adjustable gas blocks tuned correctly, the brass just comes out dirty compared to unsuppressed shooting.
So being able to get this brass perfectly clean makes things so much better for me when I'm working at the reloading bench.
Sorry the novel, but just wanted to share what works well for me and why I choose to wet tumble even though I recognize that there are pros and cons, just as there are pros and cons to every cleaning (or not cleaning) method.
