Black Powder Cartridge cleaning.

Skinny 1950

Skinny 1950

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I have been loading and shooting black powder 45 Colt cartridges quite a bit lately, and was wondering what to clean the empty cases with. I have a vibratory cleaner and am using walnut medium but this only does a superficial job of cleaning the brass both inside and out.
Some kind of liquid that would clean the brass but not make it brittle or otherwise damage it would be great.
Anyone have any recipe that they could share or even suggestions as to what might work?
 
Take a small bucket/jug of warm with water and sunlight dish soap with you to the range. Place your spent brass in the solution. When you get home boil a couple of cups of hot water (enough to cover the brass) put an ounce or two of vinegar in boiled water then place your drained brass in the solution. Stir around for a few minutes, drain and dry at low heat 225F in the oven. Once dry place in your tumbler.
 
Remember, clean does not necessarily mean shiny!!
My cases are spotless after I put them in the ultrasonic cleaner, and even after tumbling for 12 hours they are really sparing, but they are clean!
Tumblers with stainless pins are supposed to get them super shiny but I have never seen it with BP , only smokeless.
Cat
 
I drop them in windshield washer fluid at the range, then hot soapy water at home. MCC's practice works just as well, I just don't usually feel like packin' water. Adding vinegar does seem to clean the brass a bit better. I can't stress enough though not to clean your gun with too much vinegar...learned that the hard way after I dropped a cylinder into my vinegar solution I was using for brass thinking "this'll be a good idea". Took the blueing right off :sok2

They still tarnish and seem to not polish up as well as brass only loaded with smokeless but it helps. Just don't leave em for days in anything you use without washing them up. It always seems to turn into a mess.
 
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When I first started shooting BP cartridges, I used a product called Citriclean which was soap used by commercial cleaning agencies. It worked although a person was wise not to leave shells in indefinitely because it did attack the brass slowly. For many years now, I don't polish or clean the tarnish off my shells. I put them in hot water with a bit of Sunlight liquid soap in it and let them soak for an hour or so then a couple of rinses with hot water and finally dry them on top of the hot water tank. Any further cleaning and polishing is just cosmetic

cheers mooncoon
 
I switched to stainless tumbling media and it works great for black powder cartridges. A quick rinse to get the bulk of the crud off and then straight in the tumbler with some lemon juice and a few drops of dish soap in the water. In two hours, the brass looks like new.
 
Here's a key point to remember.

Vinegar = Acid
Lemon juice = Acid
Citric = Acid

It's not strong acid in the sense that it fumes and tries to eat it's way through the bottle, but it's still acid.

FWIW, I bought a kilogram of Citric Acid crystals from a home brew shop for around $10 a while back. Kool-Aid unsweetened drink crystals are essentially citric acid crystals and some colour and flavour. I'd suggest a couple packages of the lemonade ones, as having the least objectionable colouring in them, if you need a source for a small qty to try the stuff out. Sometimes sold as Sour Salt at the grocery store, too.

The guys that started with the wet tumbling to clean their brass all seemed to settle on using Lemi-Shine in the tumbler with the steel pins.


Cheers
Trev
 
But acid doesn't always eat at everything. It has to have something it wants from the item for a reaction to occur. Which is why muriatic acid works well on rust but doesn't bother the good solid steel under the rust. And why it won't bother a rock but it'll foam and spit if a concrete item is put into the acid bath.

Acetic acid, vinegar, does remove the blueing. But it doesn't harm brass even if left over night. But using other acids might. It just depends on the active elements in each and if the combinations want to dance together and leave their other partners. As I recall my 50 year old memories of high school chemistry I recall something about electron energy levels for elements of one compound to another. Acids and things that they eat away at are just compounds with elements that would rather be partnered up with something from the other one. And when that occurs you get a reaction. But the elements in brass and vinegar don't have the right recipe for swapping partners.
 
I bought a small ultra sonic jewelry cleaner,ten 45/70's is one layer in the plastic basket.
I decap then soak brass in hot soapy water while I mix up 1tbls lemishine and a bit of dish soap,hot water in a gal jug.
Then 10 into the ultrasonic ,fill with lemishine/water for 8 min cycle,rinse,and do next batch.
Its slow due to the small machine,but I find it easy to do (if I've got dirty brass,I have a gun to clean while cycling brass) and the results are good.
Sooner or later I will get a larger machine but this is working well for me,and isn't as much of a pain as it might sound
 
First step is to punch out the spent primers. Then, in addition to soaking a few hours in hot water and dish soap with a few squirts of vinegar and/or Windex-with-Vinegar, I spin a bore brush in each case while rinsing under a warm water tap. I spin the brass bore brush with an electric drill and lots of black crud washes out. Then I place them on my drying board (inverted on 3" finishing nails) for a day or so by the furnace or in the sun. After every second or third firing, I polish them for a couple of hours with crushed walnut shells in my vibrator cleaner. I am using 45-90 and 38-55 cases shot with real BP, not any of the substitutes..
 
just some water when im shooting and the I boil up some water and use a small brush to clean out the brass(I only shoot big cartridges with BP) other people go to extremes water works good enough on my $5 a piece
.577-450
 
Thanks for the suggestions, I think for now I will soak in water/dish-soap/vinegar solution then use a brass bore brush to clean the inside of the case. Dry and vibrate for a few hours, this will get the worst of the fouling off the cases and I am not worried about the brown staining on the outside of the brass as long as the crud inside is gone.
 
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