Has anyone ever used a thumbler to polish small aluminum parts?

[jmax857]

the stuff i used looked like this.
http://www.eastwood.com/media/catalo.../6/p6854_1.jpg
i was wondering if using sandblasting sand would work. thers not alot of people that use tumblers for aluminum, theres alot of reloaders that use them for brass but brass is really easy to polish. it would be nice if someone had a guide to tumbling aluminum i have scoured the web and cant come up with a whole lot.

[jeswinehart]

Judging by the gearing you have there it should be turning fast enough. Here are some of the things I found out while making mine for rust/paint/crud removal (required to prep for nickle chrome coating) and for polishing up the stainless parts for a buddy.
The container should be half full of the media you are using.
Don't over load the drum with lots of parts (don't look like you did)
It takes time, lots of time (but it is so easy). The stainless parts took about 20 hours using the walnut shells to give a nice chrome look (not mirror polish) from basically a really dull finish.
I think you are very well along with your set up, it looks good. You might not want to mix steel with alu parts though. I would think the steel parts would the softer alu parts.
The 2 main reasons I upgrades my drum was for size and the other being so I did not have a rod like your running the length inside.
I could hear the stainless parts hitting the rod alot and when I up sized, that did not happen.
In fact by having the bigger drum actually slowed things down a bit inside to where ZI could envision the walnut shells and parts just sliding/tumbling up one side constantly and not falling back onto them selves which made it whole lot noisy and produced much better results.
When do the nuts and bolts and the sand blasting media, it was god awful noisy but I did not much care since I was metal coating them anyway.
With the stainless parts is when I realized they was beating the crap out of each other by the clanking noise.
I started off with a rotisserie motor but it was not enough and went to the fish scalier tumbler set up.
Keep at it, you will get it !
john

[jmax857]

why did you decide to go away from the rotissery motor? i myself think that it is much much too slow. on the first video, that speed was much much too slow. the parts i tumbled were in the coarse media for around 17 hours with little or no effect. the drum was approximately half full, although i should have took a picture. i never tried it with the second setup yet, the chain skips a little and i have to replace my bolts on either side with a more reliable solid rod. yesterday was basically my first attempt ever at tumbling. its trial and error i guess. i can see myself running into the problem of needing a different motor. the problem is that i dont want to dump a bunch of money into this, and second of all i dont want to burn my house down. i thought about using a 12v cordless drill and attaching it to a power source, but it would overheat waaay to fast. i thought about using a dremel and gearing it down, but they just dont have enough torque. the rotisserie uses a nice 120V synchrounous motor, which can spin both directions, and doesnt overheat. i just wish it would spin a little faster.
jeswin what motor is used in this video?
http://www.youtube.com/user/sisterma.../1/DxXKCpXoxms
i thought that looked like a good speed and i was trying to replicate that, or is that a little too fast?