My Case (Rifle) Cleaner

[garage nut]

One of the chores the wife had on the list of TO Do's for the December holidays, were clean the pedestal fan. Remember December is our summer so all the visitors would inspect the fan blades to see if there was any dust on them. Well long story short, I managed to break one of the blades off.

Being a hoarder I packed the broken fan away. It had a perfectly good motor in it.

It is almost winter now so that means hunting season. My old case cleaner was a plastic container with a sealable lid on one side of a plank and an old washing machine motor on the other side with a piece of lead attached to one of the cooling fins. This contraption would then be loaded with the abrasion media and cases and suspended from the garage ceiling by means of a few old bicycle tubes. This lot them vibrated to a few hours and I ended up with some nice shiny brass.

I saw an idea on Youtube there a round plastic container was rotated on little casters and a small electrical motor was used to power the casters.

Last week end I jumped onto the CAD and came up with this idea. I am just powering the container directly. I also incorporated the fan's multy speed switch. Not because I think it is necessary to vary the speed, but simply because it was there and the wiring was neatly crimped.



I have glued in some ribs inside the container to ensure the media tumbles and is not just sliding inside the container. The container is an energy drink container. I have lots of them as I do a fair amount of cycling. I can now even store the cases in batches that has been fired the same amount of times in these containers.

[scotts_magic]

Over all it's a nice build however I don't think using Romex wire as a power cord plugged into an outlet would pass a U.L. approval. LOL...Just curious how much weight are you tumbling and how long do you expect that rubberband/belt is going to last.

[ncollar]

Garage Nut
Very nice build and why not incorporate the three speed switching. Now you can adjust the speed up or down. Nice
Nelson

[IAMSatisfied]

Nice build.

As a teenager, I once wanted the noise of a fan to sleep by, but not the airflow, so I replaced the fan blade with a flat ruler and it produced a very nice white noise to sleep by.... but sometime in the night the motor burned up because it was designed to rely on the air movement from the fan for cooling... just something to keep in mind. YMMV

[garage nut]

Not sure of the weight, the container is about 1/4 filled and I have 10 7 x 57 cases in at the moment.

The electric cabling is as I bought the fan and the 3 speed switch is working.

The rubber band lasts about 30 minutes and after an hour I had to switch the motor off as it was getting hot. Nothing too serious but the lack of the fan was also a concern when I put the design together so I might have been a tad over sensitive.

The cases looked ok after an hour, but I think 2 hours will be better.

Fortunately the shaft is quite long so more than enough ace to mount a little fan.

I will be looking at powering this by wing in the future, but then again I only use it once every 3 years.

[DIYer]

Thanks garage nut! We've added your Rifle Casing Tumbler to our Cleaning category,
as well as to your builder page: garage nut's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Rifle Casing Tumbler by garage nut

tags: cleaner, reloading