The vibratory case cleaner is, in essence, a plastic bowl, suspended on springs, affixed to a plastic base, hooked up to an electric motor causing the bowl to shake. Fill the bowl with empty casings and case cleaning media, batten down the top cover, turn on the machine; vibratory action causes the casings to rub against the media, and vice versa, therefore powder fouling on casings is transferred to the media, leaving casings clean. Once you’ve decided cleaning casings before reloading is desirable – it is – and you want a fast, easy method of accomplishing that, the next question to ask yourself is: Should I buy the large or small vibratory case cleaner?
Dillon Precision sells two sizes of vibratory case cleaner. The CV-2001 is the large version; according to Dillon specs, it can hold up to 1,300 .38 Special/.357 Magnum casings, or 550 .30-06s. The CV-750 is the small version; its capacity is around half the CV-2001’s.
I’m not even going to pretend to lack bias here, I prefer the large CV-2001 for my own use. Unless space is at a premium – I realize that for some people, it might be – I see no reason to not go large. My most commonly-loaded cartridge these days is 9mm Parabellum, and I load a lot of it. I tend to think it would really suck to clean three-digits worth of casings, and a few days later have to run another load because I’d already used them all, when I could have been cleaning four digits-worth and avoided that.
I will admit, after decanting a bowl of casings from the CV-2001, sometimes it does take me awhile to complete loading them. Alrighty then. There’s nothing wrong with having a significant number of casings, already sparkly clean, awaiting their appointment with destiny instead of having to clean some more first, every time you want to fire up the reloading machine.
Having said that, some people might genuinely not have room to set up the CV-2001, for them the smaller CV-750 would be a better choice. One nice thing about the CV-750, it uses the same heavy-duty electric motor as the larger CV-2001, for a disproportionate power-to-job-it-has-to-do ratio. I’m not going to say the electric motor on the much larger, and, when it’s fully-loaded, heavier CV-2001 is going to burn out. In fact, my personal CV-2001 has been chugging merrily along for 20-plus years without a single issue. I’m also not going to say that, sometime in the history of the world, someone hasn’t had a problem with a CV-750. I will say that, when you combine an electric motor intended to work on a far larger and heavier machine with the much smaller and lighter CV-750, you wind up with a combo that’s almost bulletproof. Pun intended.
Another thing you might want to bear in mind, regarding your level of upper-body strength: When the time comes to dump out the casings and media, a fully-loaded CV-750 is going to be a lot lighter than a fully-loaded CV-2001.
You really can’t make a bad choice here; this is the great versus the great.
Menu
