Looked thru all the 917 pages of Kwik-Way's catalog and apparently they don't have a parts tumbler any more Ken. Of course being a dealer in oils, Varsol is a proper name for one of your products, but isn't that just another name for one of the various grades of mineral spirits or Stoddard solvent or white spirits??? I’ve used Kerosene in my gunk tanks for three or four decades now ever since it became unpopular to wash parts in gasoline, which was all any of us used back in the 50’s or 60’s.
I've been looking into making one out of a five gallon bucket rotated on rubber wheels mounted on a couple of shafts in pillow block bearings. I've collected a bunch of old electric motors and boxes of pulleys to choose from. If I play my cards right I might even be able to design it so it would take a one-gallon buckets or a PVC pipe with end caps on it, that might even be a better option. Different sands and small crushed gravel or a combination of both makes for a good cheap abrasive. A lot depends on how large of an item you plan on tumbling and how many cracks and crevices you need to get into.
HF carries a lot of different abrasives; I just picked up a box of walnut shells that I thought would be good for polishing or in retaining detail in softer materials like alum or plated parts.
And Tiny, that thar wire brush gets my vote, it's my favorite for most of my restoration work also. Why….99% of my '50, 3600 has been cleaned up with the old Sears pedestal grinder and a fine wire wheel. I especially like the brush because it doesn't take any of the tooling or surface forming details off the parts as the more abrasive cleaning does. When the parts are repainted they look just like they came from the factory, sharp edges and all. Each form of cleaning carries it’s own special advantage and even though not everything demands the sort of attention wire brushing offers, I can certainly see a place for sand blasting, tumbling and chemical cleaning in a well equipped shop also.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
