Need to clean a bucket or box full of nuts, bolts or other small hard parts? Standing at the wire wheel for an hour is a pain in the back and boring. Get a sack of black magnum or black beauty blasting slag, pour it into a cement mixer and add your small parts. Let it run a couple of hours and check the results. Depending on how baked on the crud or whatever, it may take longer. I decided to try this after watching a rock shop polish rocks in a tumbler. Head bolts clean up really well, look like new ones. If your parts are really oilly or greasy, soak in a commercial soap overnight, hose them, then in the mixer. For the volume of hardware that I clean in my mixer I try to make the blasting media last as long as possible by soaking first. One other way that works really well is a mix of sand and a 1:1 ratio of liquid soap and water, to a soupy consistency, the only drawback here is washing off the sand and drying to prevent flash rust.

When cleaning is done dump the mixer contents through some 1/8" hardware cloth ( heavy screen with 1/8" squares). Media is in a box and parts are on the screen.

I don't limit this to just nut and bolt hardware, brackets and other small items go in. Don't mix iron or steel parts with aluminum parts, they do bang into each other and the aluminum parts show it.

The best part is a lot of pieces get cleaned while you do other things.

 

This will strengthen the fastener as well. Well, not actually strengthen it but prevent crack failures.

 

Since I don't have portable mixer I user Lacquer Thinner and a metal pail with holes in the bottom & sides that I swish round in a parts cleaner.

 

I have never used it but ultra-sonic cleaning sounds very promising. I wonder what it takes to build one? I saw Jay Leno has one in his restoration shop - just put the parts in water ( or liquid of your choice) and sound does the rest.

Had another thought - a brass polisher for reloading is just like a rock tumbler for polishing rocks. I have one and think I will try it out on some bolts...

 

That brass polisher would probably work well.

Here is some more tumbler info:
http://www.metalsmith.org/edu/equipment/tumblers.htm
http://www.metalworking-forum.com/me...er_466097.html