I saw in an Eastwood catalog, a tumbler that was priced way to high for me. I was on the Amazon site and they had tumblers cheaper. Eastwoods $250. Amazon $39.99 without media. I ordered the Tumbler from Amazon and media from Harber Freight. The Tumbler I got was made for reloaders to clean brass from bullets before reloading. Most of the media is stupid expensive. I got the green pyramid and walnut shells. It works great on bolts. I had oily engine bolts and rusty body bolts. Overnight in the Tumbler cleaned the oil and rust off and I haven't used the walnut shells to shine them yet. Used it for some small body parts to remove paint and even my wire wheel on my grinder didn't take off the original paint easy. The Tumbler has saved me a lot of time.
Wonder how chunks of styrofoam would work to polish the metal? Baking soda might work too? Glass bead is expensive.
I cleaned and saved a lot of small metal parts using Evaporust to get rid of the surface rust. It's about $25 a gallon. I think it's magic. If you keep it in a sealed container, it will last a while. Uncovered it will evaporate. .
I sort of "inherited" a home made tumbler from an amature rock hound. It'll hold a three pound coffee can of bolts and hardware. I load it up with anything steel that will fit in the hole, fill it with hot water and 1/2 a cup of Tide, let it spin for an hour and everything in it is ready to rinse, dry and paint. The evapo-rust is a good alternate, but gets used up pretty fast at $20/gl and you still need to wash the stuff to prep it for paint.
For just plain greasy stuff, think of the dishwasher. I've put hardware and small parts in those mesh bags meant to hold bras in the washer so they don't get hooked on everything. They come out very clean. Hint.. do it while the wife is out of the house. Bob
I got a inexpensive tumbler from Midway Shooter's Supply years ago. Even 12-15 years ago it was under $50, and it's run thousands of hours with no problems. You will find that you'll go through media much faster if you don't do a basic cleaning before putting things in the tumbler. The media gets dirty fast, and then it wont work well. I soak all my parts in solvent first, then lay them on a rag to dry and put them in the tumbler for final cleaning. It makes my media last much longer.
I've got one of those little Brass or rock tumblers that you throw some media in with things and turn in it on that works pretty good. Purple Power in a coffee can works great for getting the grease and oil off small parts without a lot of effort if you have the time to just drop a batch in and let them soak. I've used a bucket of carb cleaner with the basket for the same thing usually saving my old carb cleaner for greasy bolts after I got a new bucket for carbs.
I have two... like this: http://www.harborfreight.com/5-lb-metal-vibrator-tumbler-67617.html I've had one in use for about 5 years, it's been left on all day for several days throughout the years. No complaints. One I keep a light abrasive in, the other I have Walnut shells with Flitz polish.
I wash the bolts in a degrease first then use my brass tumbler from my other toys , I use a combination of the walnut shells ( extra fine) and aluminum silica powder ( used as abrasive for air blasting ) and the bolts come out nice , but you have to check the threads and the bolts for bottlenecking and wear on the tread pitch . for engine bolts I just degrease and run a thread cleaning die over it as I do not want to ruin the threads .
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