Do not buy a Harbor Freight "rock tumbler"

Maybe it was designed for Chinese potatoes.

Pennies? Then your corncob media is what you want to use. Ceramic media will give you either badly beaten up but very shiney pennies..or copper disks with barely visible features on it.

Frankly..Id use crushed walnut hulls for the job, with a teaspoon of Brasso tossed into the batch..and checked REGULARLY.

Gunner, who cleans firearms brass in a vibratory cleaner about 2' in diameter....with walnut hulls

Why are you bitching?

You got exactly what it said.

POTATO french fry maker

Not POTATOES

:)

jk

I use aquarium gravel to clean my metal detector finds coins that I want to spend, they look at you funny when you give them brown quarters, dimes, & nickels!

RogerN

I think that ceramic media would simply grind the pennies to dust.

I have maybe 5 lbs of pennies, it should be fun polishing them.

I will see, I think that I will give then an hour with fine corn cob media.

That's huge! Mine is only 17 inches in diameter.

Do you get any bad silica dust from it?

I don't know, there was water in it too. No dust, just bubbles.

RogerN

Lucky man.

I got my corncob from the pet store for $6/ 1.8 kg. Enough to fill the bowl and have a lot left over. I run some brass in it but it has limitations. Right now I have a batch going in rouge-treated walnut shells. Somebody mentioned adding Brasso - I wonder how much per batch.

As I said I tried a silica crystals cat litter on some steel parts. The results were surprisingly good but if run dry, the silica dust is awful and if wet, clumping occurs (duh, it's cat litter!)

I want the ceramics for steel parts and also plastics for de-burring brass - I am not sure the nut shells will do that job well.

There is more than one reason Im called Gunner...shrug

Gunner

Try a tablespoon full. It spreads rather well and is simply a media compound that is carried by your media.

Yes..they do a pretty fair job, though for steel, it takes a while. Soft non ferris stuff goes pretty quick

Gunner

HOME PAGE:

Thanks. What do you do when you finish? Do you re-use the same media?

So far I am more impressed with the nut shells than with the corn cob. As far as I can see the corn cob will polish clean brass but will not remove stains. The treated nut shells removed most but not all the stains, did a great job polishing the pieces (up to 3") but did little or no deburring (minor scratches still apparent after about 8 hours).

The next batch I shall put some steel in the nut shells. What compound do you use for steel? There is a ton of proprietary compounds out there. I hear some people just put in a bit of turtle wax. I run the silica with just water and dish- washing liquid with the predictable result of good cleaning but flash rusting. I wonder if dumping in a bit of Evaporust would work.

But of course. Brasso wont hurt anything and it adds a bit of polishing action to whatever you put in there. More for the softer stuff, less for the harder stuff.

I tend to reuse walnut hulls for many years. Its not so much the sharp corners..which after a while..are gone..but its a great carrier for Brasso, etc. even when rounded off. Brasso is nothing more than a very fine media in a liquid carrier.

Ayup. It has little or no ability to remove burrs in anything hard. Add a bit more Brasso..another table spoon and it will likely remove the last bit of stains..which generally are etched into the material..just a heads up. Might not be deep..but walnut hulls have little ability to actually remove much metal.

Are you trying to deburr, destain or what? Walnut hulls are really not much good for anything as hard as steel, other than for putting a nice almost matt finish on it. Ceramics are what you need for steel.

What are you trying to do with the steel? Let us know and Im sure you will have a lot of suggestions..some even good.

Gunner

Well, after appx. 3-4 hours of polishing, corn cob media did remove stains from old coins (whole layer of oxidation). It did work very well, just slowly.

What kind of Brasso are you guys talking about?

OK, more exactly, do you use liquid brasso or some kind of powder? I have the liquid brasso at home.

The liquid. Simply fill up a tablespoon with the stuff..maybe two..and dump it into the media if its walnut hulls, corn cobs etc etc.

Works great, less filling!

Gunner

I am running it with Brasso now... thanks for a great tip...

Give it a couple hours at the least. Its a very fine abrasive, but it works pretty damned well.

Gunner