*Brass Polisher Media Separator*
By serger

I’ve started the fall reloading sessions today an am doing .223 ammunition. As I was cleaning the brass It occurred to me you might want to see the separating device I made to allow me to get the polishing media(walnut shells) away from the brass. Years ago I took a colander and shook it and shook it. The reloading peddlers sell them and I never had the money to just go out and buy one. One weekend I got the bright idea the media separator is nothing but a cage that allows the polishing stuff to be spun from the cartridge cases leaving them inside the cage. It’s real simple but sometimes I’m thick and the thing never occurs to me.

With the idea in mind, I went to the garage and started looking at my junk box of wood scraps. I found some 5/8^th inch particleboard I thought would work. We had some 1/4^th inch hardware cloth left over from the plant protectors out of the garden. The size of the separator was going to be about the size of a coffee can and I used one to line out the circles. The hardware cloth made the walls of the cage and I used the spiral wire out of one of my son’s discarded school notebooks for the hinge on the hardware cloth door. The axle for the separator is a piece of pipe. I stapled the hardware cloth to the pieces of particleboard after cutting out the circles with a jigsaw.

Here’s a pictorial of the device

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The polishing media is mixed with the brass in the polisher. Depending on how dirty/tarnished the brass is I leave the polisher on for an hour or more. But that’s another article.

I dump the mix into the separator and then the door is shut. I use a wash pan to catch the media as it comes out when I spin the separator.

Here’s a picture of the separator sitting on the washing machine. The whole thing cost about an hour and a half of my time and about 3 dollars in parts. It sure beats trying to get the media out and off the brass by using the old way I used to do it.

Thanks for the read.
serger