Cleaning brass

[6.5 forever]

It's a lotl ike Erik Cortina saying stop chasing the lands it's stupid, but then he recommends lengthening .003" seating depth now and then to see if it shoots better. Same thing.


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
EXACTLY!!

 

[Longtrain]

I’m lucky enough to have a fair amount of brass in the calibers I shoot. I generally batch process all my brass at one time. All I use is Imperial Wax for sizing, if it’s just a few cases a paper towel works fine. For large runs, hot water, splash of Dawn and Lemishine with SS chips for 15 minutes and they’re done. Roll them in a towel and set them to dry and I’ve got enough brass for the season.

 

[dcali]

Don't clean brass. There's no point. Laquer thinner is carcinogenic, and acetone is highly flamable and will evaporate faster than you can use it. It will also absolutely destroy some plastics and finishes. Neither will clean your brass particularly well. If you have brass that is absolutely filthy or just want to remove lube, tumble it in rice with a squirt of car polish.

To wipe of a bit of lube on a small number of cases, a rag wet with some IPA works great. You can use Acetone for that, but like I said, it evaporates very quickly and is murder on your skin. You need butyl rubber gloves to resist it, and they're not cheap.

 

[dcali]

Lots of finger/wrist twisting and wiping and rinsing going on by the guys who "don't clean" their cases. Sooo much easier to just tumble them... Hundreds at a time! But then you wouldn't have the bragging rights to say "cleaning" brass is a waste of time (but you still wipe/scrub every single individual case by hand one at a time).

It's a lotl ike Erik Cortina saying stop chasing the lands it's stupid, but then he recommends lengthening .003" seating depth now and then to see if it shoots better. Same thing.

Nah, there's a difference between cleaning brass and removing lube. Twenty minutes in a tumbler or a quick swipe with a rag will remove lube. Hours of (dry) tumbling won't get it clean.

 

[WIB3]

1 gal of hot water, 3-4 tablespoons of fruit fresh and 5 min standing upright in sonic cleaner. Rinse off with fresh water and blow out with air compressor and they are clean. It’s also very nice for muzzle breaks.

 

[BigBolt]

That stuff is highly volatile and would never use it.

 

[Rickhem]

Worked for years in a pharma development lab. We used Acetone for drying our glassware after cleaning. (this was before a lot of environmental controls were implemented) We'd get the glassware clean and then use a wash bottle with Acetone to rinse it off. Acetone absorbs the water, washes it away, and then evaporates. You have clean, dry glassware in minutes. The problem is that the acetone takes all of the moisture from your skin too. The young guy working with me, who was the one doing most of the cleaning, would have open splits in the skin on his knuckles, especially in winter. And Acetone will either dissolve, or at the very least craze most plastics. It's a very aggressive solvent, so forethought, care, and appropriate PPE should be used when dealing with it. That said, I always have some on-hand. Acetone and IPA, which is very effective as well, are the two most used solvents for me.