Walnut shell blasting?

No experience with walnut shells but baking soda works really good. You can buy a cheap gun from Harbor Freight.

The walnut media is more expensive than soda, and unless you plan on using it in a cabinet, it goes pretty quick. I have never used walnut. the soda is cheaper and works pretty good on bare cast aluminum parts, such as brake calipers, hangers, cases, triples and wheel hubs. You can buy a complete soda setup from harbor freight for pretty cheap. I like soda because it can be used while keeping sub assemblies together, like complete brake systems and wheel assemblies, just tape off what you don’t want the soda to hit. The soda has just the right amount of abrasives to clean good but not harm other surfaces. You want to use the least abrasive as possible to get the desired effect, I always start with soda, then if soda does not work, it goes into the fine glass bead cabinet. I have used my harbor freight soda blaster often on my builds, the results are pretty good. If I had a trust worthy local guy performing vapor blast, and I had everything fully disassembled for a 100 point resto, I would use the vapor blaster.

Get it vapor blasted. Walnut and soda are a thing of the past and frankly dont do a good job as of todays standards.

not to far away from ya, i have a vapor blaster if you want to blast it

Before
After soda blasting

I attempted to scrub, scotch brite and wash my cases and had very little success. I eventually bought a cheap Harbor Freight cabinet for $140, an air compressor for $250 and three bags of media for $70 and started blasting parts. I eventually gave up, the walnut shells did very little and the black oxide left my cases extremely rough. I ended up paying a local dude to vapor blast everything and I was super impressed with the results.
Progression of the pictures: scrub, scotch brite and Eagle One mag cleaner, black oxide blast, Vapor Hone

Sorry the pictures uploaded out of order.

This is vapor blasted.. far superior to soda.

my number is 704-202-4887