The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass.
Once your brass is clean, you should store it in a way that will keep it clean. Closed, clear plastic boxes work well.
Other than that, you can easily find out what the “crap-du-jour” brass of your caliber is by doing a quick internet search. The list changes regularly, and anything I put down here will be out of date by the time you read it.
CLEAN & INSPECT
Cleaning is pretty easy. Unless you’ve stumbled on the mother lode that has been out there in the rain and snow too long and turned chocolate color as a result, you just have to clean brass in a tumbler. If it is muddy or really sandy, you might want to do a bit of dry “sacking.” Use a mesh sack and slosh the brass around in the sack, letting the dirt and mud bits fall out. Or, rinse muddy/sandy brass in hot water. Dry in the sun, and you’re ready to tumble.
Tumbling is easy. Take your brass cleaner and wipe the bowl clean. Windex and paper towels will do. Then fill the bowl halfway or so with the cleaning media of your choice. I’ve always been a fan of ground corncobs. Some like ground walnut hulls for a finer and faster “cut,” and some advocate rice. Halfway full, then cover the surface with brass. Dump a capful or two of polishing solution on top of the brass and turn it on.
If you get the proportions just right, the contents will swirl in the bowl and you can see them surfacing and submerging as they rotate about the bowl axis. Too much brass, or too much brass and media, and they just sit there, vibrating up and down. Too much doesn’t clean as quickly. How long? It depends. Clean media, with relatively clean brass, will be clean in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Grubby brass and heavily-used media can take two hours or more. Once you have the proportions figured out for your tumbler and caliber, just bolt the lid on, start and let it run for the time needed.
Vibratory cleaners come in various sized bowls. Buy the biggest your wallet and bench can take.
A timer to turn it off after a certain time period is a nice addition. Otherwise, you can end up like a friend of mine. He went on vacation, having started a brass tumbler the night before and forgetting about it. Sometime in the two weeks he was gone, the tumbler vibrated itself off the table, crashed to the floor and thrashed itself to pieces. Two hours is about right. Two weeks is longer than needed.
Next, you have to get the brass out. One trick I learned is to take the screen that came with your tumbler, place it over the opened tumbler, then invert and plop the whole thing onto a clean and empty five-gallon bucket. A quick shake or three, and the brass is separated from the media.
Set it down, lift the tumbler and put it on the bench. Take the screen with brass and set it aside. Now, spray the inside of the bowl with Windex, wipe it clean, let it dry, pour your media back in, add more brass, and turn it on again. Pour your clean brass onto a cookie sheet (not the one your wife/girlfriend/whoever uses to bake cookies) and inspect. What are you looking for? Obvious “not the same” brass. Once you get tuned in to a given caliber, anything that looks different will jump out at you. Some are easy, like the stray 9mm mixed in with the .45s. Others are a lot harder, like .380 brass in with 9mm, or 40 and .45. The better job you do here, the fewer situations where the wrong empty goes up into your sizing die, possibly wedging things to a complete halt.
Pick up a double handful, shake it in your hands, and toss into storage bins. Why not just pour it in? Because that way you can’t listen. Each caliber of brass will have a distinct frequency of “clink” or “chirp” to it. A cracked case will have a different, higher-pitch chirp. When you hear that, split the double handful, one to each hand, and shake each separately. One will chirp higher than the other. (Unless, of course, there were two cracked cases, and you have one in each hand.) Dump the non-chirping handful into the storage bin. Divide the other handful and repeat. Do this until you have winnowed out the cracked case, toss it into the scrap bucket and continue.
Why do this? Because it is faster than visually inspecting each one as you go to load it.
What bins to use? I’ve found that plastic storage bins, commonly found at big-box stores, work just fine. The size meant to store shoes will hold a useful amount of brass (and loaded ammo, once it gets that far in the process). Bigger bins will hold more, but there gets to be a limit of how much brass you want to have in a bin. Once you get more than a handful of them, label the bins so you don’t have to pop each of them open to find out what is inside.
An afternoon spent sorting, cleaning, inspecting and storing brass can leave you with a couple of thousand empties in bins, ready to reload. A weekend, if you have that much brass, can have enough brass on the shelves to load for many months.
CARTRIDGE CLASSES
Not all cartridges are made the same. They differ almost as much as the people who load and shoot them. We can divide them into several classes and sub-divide them again.
High-pressure/Low-pressure
The first sort we have to make is between high-pressure cartridges and low-pressure cartridges. The top one in pressure today is the newest of the lot (big surprise there, eh?): the .327 Federal Magnum. It has a pressure ceiling of 45,000 psi, more than the .44 Magnum, .38 Super or the 9mm+P. Of course, helping it do so safely is its size. In any revolver, it is going to have very thick cylinder walls, and the small case head means less surface area for the case to thrust against the breech. Despite being a “mere” .32, the .327 can match the performance of a 9mm+P load. Definitely not your grandmother’s mild .32 pistol for home defense.
If properly loaded, the level of brass and media has an actual wave shape inside the tumbler.
At the other extreme is the .45 Colt, all 14,000 psi of it, less even than the .38 S&W. (Not to be confused with the .38 S&W Special, please.) That it operates at such a low pressure should come as no surprise, since it was designed at the very dawn of big-bore centerfire handgun cartridges. What is surprising to some is how much horsepower you can get out of it, if you’re willing to put up with the recoil. It is possible to get a 250 grain hard-cast bullet up to almost 1,000 fps, and still be well under the pressure limit.
In-between we have all manner of cartridges, with .38 Special and .38 Special+P at 17K and 20K psi respectively, but both just behind the lowly .380, at 21K. Curiously, there is a band, and a gap. The band is cartridges with pressures from 15K to 21K or so. Then, we have a very few in the gap between 21k and 35K.
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