You good folks on this board have given me so much useful information, I figured it was time to give something back - a little. Take it for what's it worth...
I just stumbled upon this method of cleaning brass - sort of by accident. It's a two-step process that cuts way down on usual tumbling times. (And you could dispense with tumbling altogether.)
Step 1:
Visiting Sportsmans Warehouse one day, I picked up a product new to me: Birchwood-Casey "Brass Cartridge Case Cleaner." I've had no experience with it, and the salesman hadn't either. But the price was right, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I'd just begun shooting 40 caliber S&W and needed a starter batch of brass, so I bought three pounds of "range" brass from our shooting club. They sweep up and sort what others leave behind, so what you get is a pretty mixed bag. Most of the stuff I got was reasonably clean, but some of it was downright nasty-looking.
The Birchwood Casey concentrate comes in a 16 oz. bottle that will make up two gallons of cleaner. The directions recommend that you start with deprimed cases. That made sense to me, so I put my Lee universal decapping die to work. You gotta love that thing. It doesn't touch your cases; just decaps them, and the way they designed it you'd have to work overtime to ever break the decapping pin.
Then you mix two ounces of the concentrate per quart of hot water. The "hot" part seems important.
Then they say you should completely immerse your brass in the solution for three minutes, stirring occasionally. I'd made up only one quart, so it took about three dunking steps to process all my range brass.
They recommend you rinse the cases (I took that to mean rinse the hell out of them in scalding hot water), then allow them to dry. They suggest you can accelerate drying by wiping the cases and taking a hair dryer to them.
That sounded a little tedious to me, so I dumped handfuls of the rinsed cases on an old terry-cloth towel, folded it over them, rolled them in it, then picked the towel up by the corners and shook the cases real good, like they were in a bag. Then I spread them out on an old cookie sheet and took my heat gun to them. (The heat gun is a glorified hair dryer intended to shrink that nifty heat-shrink tubing used in electronics.) After that, I set the pan in the oven, temp set to "warm," and left them in there with the oven door ajar for about forty minutes. No way could they get to over 200 degrees that way, and they came out bone dry.
And clean. Not shiny-clean like you can get from a long tumbling session with good media and a polishing additive, but definitely clean. Even the nastiest cases were pretty much indiscernible from the rest of the batch. The only thing that didn't come clean was some of the green corrosion in a few primer pockets.
At that point, I couldn't really tell if the insides of the cases had benefitted a bit from the treatment. The insides are rarely shiny on even new brass. The insides of these cases looked pretty much like what you'd expect of once-fired brass.
But! After Step 2, I learned that this chemical wonder had done something about the interior crud.
Whew! Writing that took a lot longer than doing it! With some planning, I figure a guy would take Step 1, from beginning to oven time, les than 30 minutes.
Step 2:
This is probably not necessary at all, but I like shiny brass. So I dumped the dry, chemically cleaned cases in my tumbler with walnut shell media to which I'd added a little of Franklin Arsenal's case polish. I let it run a little over an hour.
What came out were amazingly clean cases; the best I've ever seen. Even the insides were clean. Not shiny, but definitely a dull brass color. Seems the chemical cleaner somehow or other "broke down" or softened up the interior coating of powder residue enough that the mechanical tumbling could finish the job.
After their trip through the Lee full-length resizing die, all the cases positively glistened.
Oh. Those few cases with greenish corrosion in the primer pockets? They cleaned up nicely with the gentle application of a primer-pocket cleaning brush. Even that seemed easier than before.
I have no idea about the cleaning capacity of the diluted concentrate. My first quart cleaned about three hundred cases and still seemed to be going strong. So I saved it in a glass jar for future re-use. I have a hunch it still has a lot of life left in it.
If you're worried about the stuff damaging your brass, I found a secondary use for the cleaner that should put your mind at rest:
As it happens, my wife and I are in a band. My part is mostly to do the sound engineering and drive the soldering iron. But I also play a little harmonica.
Harmonicas are fairly simple instruments that use brass or bronze reeds to produce their notes. Unfortunately, with normal use, those reeds, and the small cavities around them, get gunked up to the point that they'll start misbehaving. I've tried all manner of ways to clean those sticky reeds, but you want to be careful because they're pretty delicate.
One evening during band practice, one of my harps started acting up. It was an inexpensive one, so I wasn't putting much at risk when I put the Birchwood-Casey cleaning solution in the microwave to heat it up, dunked the harmonica in it, stirred it around for three minutes - then rinsed the livin' daylights out of it and dried it out.
The results were amazing! That harp immediately started playing as good as new.
Now, if that cleaning solution had eaten away any appreciable amount of the reeds' metal, that harp would have played out of key by an audible amount. That didn't happen.
I figure that, if it's safe enough to clean my harp reeds without affecting the pitch, it sure isn't going to do my brass any harm.
So there it is.
My former practice was to do all my cleaning in a tumbler; and it worked pretty well. The only real drawback was that I had to tumble a long time.
I'm intrigued by the newer, ultrasonic systems. The potental is certainly there. But, until I hear some better reports, Ill use my two-sted process.
Ah - and it's a lot quicker than it ook you to read it.
I just stumbled upon this method of cleaning brass - sort of by accident. It's a two-step process that cuts way down on usual tumbling times. (And you could dispense with tumbling altogether.)
Step 1:
Visiting Sportsmans Warehouse one day, I picked up a product new to me: Birchwood-Casey "Brass Cartridge Case Cleaner." I've had no experience with it, and the salesman hadn't either. But the price was right, so I thought I'd give it a try.
I'd just begun shooting 40 caliber S&W and needed a starter batch of brass, so I bought three pounds of "range" brass from our shooting club. They sweep up and sort what others leave behind, so what you get is a pretty mixed bag. Most of the stuff I got was reasonably clean, but some of it was downright nasty-looking.
The Birchwood Casey concentrate comes in a 16 oz. bottle that will make up two gallons of cleaner. The directions recommend that you start with deprimed cases. That made sense to me, so I put my Lee universal decapping die to work. You gotta love that thing. It doesn't touch your cases; just decaps them, and the way they designed it you'd have to work overtime to ever break the decapping pin.
Then you mix two ounces of the concentrate per quart of hot water. The "hot" part seems important.
Then they say you should completely immerse your brass in the solution for three minutes, stirring occasionally. I'd made up only one quart, so it took about three dunking steps to process all my range brass.
They recommend you rinse the cases (I took that to mean rinse the hell out of them in scalding hot water), then allow them to dry. They suggest you can accelerate drying by wiping the cases and taking a hair dryer to them.
That sounded a little tedious to me, so I dumped handfuls of the rinsed cases on an old terry-cloth towel, folded it over them, rolled them in it, then picked the towel up by the corners and shook the cases real good, like they were in a bag. Then I spread them out on an old cookie sheet and took my heat gun to them. (The heat gun is a glorified hair dryer intended to shrink that nifty heat-shrink tubing used in electronics.) After that, I set the pan in the oven, temp set to "warm," and left them in there with the oven door ajar for about forty minutes. No way could they get to over 200 degrees that way, and they came out bone dry.
And clean. Not shiny-clean like you can get from a long tumbling session with good media and a polishing additive, but definitely clean. Even the nastiest cases were pretty much indiscernible from the rest of the batch. The only thing that didn't come clean was some of the green corrosion in a few primer pockets.
At that point, I couldn't really tell if the insides of the cases had benefitted a bit from the treatment. The insides are rarely shiny on even new brass. The insides of these cases looked pretty much like what you'd expect of once-fired brass.
But! After Step 2, I learned that this chemical wonder had done something about the interior crud.
Whew! Writing that took a lot longer than doing it! With some planning, I figure a guy would take Step 1, from beginning to oven time, les than 30 minutes.
Step 2:
This is probably not necessary at all, but I like shiny brass. So I dumped the dry, chemically cleaned cases in my tumbler with walnut shell media to which I'd added a little of Franklin Arsenal's case polish. I let it run a little over an hour.
What came out were amazingly clean cases; the best I've ever seen. Even the insides were clean. Not shiny, but definitely a dull brass color. Seems the chemical cleaner somehow or other "broke down" or softened up the interior coating of powder residue enough that the mechanical tumbling could finish the job.
After their trip through the Lee full-length resizing die, all the cases positively glistened.
Oh. Those few cases with greenish corrosion in the primer pockets? They cleaned up nicely with the gentle application of a primer-pocket cleaning brush. Even that seemed easier than before.
I have no idea about the cleaning capacity of the diluted concentrate. My first quart cleaned about three hundred cases and still seemed to be going strong. So I saved it in a glass jar for future re-use. I have a hunch it still has a lot of life left in it.
If you're worried about the stuff damaging your brass, I found a secondary use for the cleaner that should put your mind at rest:
As it happens, my wife and I are in a band. My part is mostly to do the sound engineering and drive the soldering iron. But I also play a little harmonica.
Harmonicas are fairly simple instruments that use brass or bronze reeds to produce their notes. Unfortunately, with normal use, those reeds, and the small cavities around them, get gunked up to the point that they'll start misbehaving. I've tried all manner of ways to clean those sticky reeds, but you want to be careful because they're pretty delicate.
One evening during band practice, one of my harps started acting up. It was an inexpensive one, so I wasn't putting much at risk when I put the Birchwood-Casey cleaning solution in the microwave to heat it up, dunked the harmonica in it, stirred it around for three minutes - then rinsed the livin' daylights out of it and dried it out.
The results were amazing! That harp immediately started playing as good as new.
Now, if that cleaning solution had eaten away any appreciable amount of the reeds' metal, that harp would have played out of key by an audible amount. That didn't happen.
I figure that, if it's safe enough to clean my harp reeds without affecting the pitch, it sure isn't going to do my brass any harm.
So there it is.
My former practice was to do all my cleaning in a tumbler; and it worked pretty well. The only real drawback was that I had to tumble a long time.
I'm intrigued by the newer, ultrasonic systems. The potental is certainly there. But, until I hear some better reports, Ill use my two-sted process.
Ah - and it's a lot quicker than it ook you to read it.
