Reloading Questions

Dead Horse Bob

How critical is it to clean up your brass before reloading?<br />
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I've tried soaking them in a vinegar and water solution, but the insides don't really seem all that much different to me and the outsides are only a bit less grimy. I've only fired this brass once so far and have checked the dimensions and found them to be ok.<br />
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I'd love to have them be all shiny and new like, but buyin' a new pistol has put a serious crimp in my reloadin' budget, so a nifty brass tumbler is outta the question for a while.<br />
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Obviously, I'm new to reloadin' but the first go around seemed to work just fine.<br />
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Any suggestions?

dd

You shooting black or that new fangled stuff?

Dead Horse Bob

dd wrote on Aug 22 2007, 11&#58;41 AM:

You shooting black or that new fangled stuff?

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I'm shootin' 5 grains of Titegroup, so's I can shoot tight groups of lead... somewhere's on or about the target, anyway...

dd

With smokeless, there is no real need to clean the brass as there is with black powder which will eat away at the brass. I've seen shooters with brass that was almost entirely black - they never cleaned it. I put my brass in walnut shells with jewelers rough (made by Lyman) then in corn cob to finish it up. It comes out real nice and pretty. But the insides are still mostly black from the burnt powder residue - some powders are worse than others, especially the dual base powders like Titegroup which have around 20% nitroglycerine in the mix. <br />
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Bottom line: don't worry about it. Dirty cases will shoot as well as clean ones provided the primer pockets are relatively free of junk and the cases are not so dirty as to cause chambering or extraction problems. Make sure you wipe any sand or loose dirt off them first or it may cause excessive wear on your dies. When you get your tumbler you can pretty them up real nice!

Devereaux

AND while you're at it, you might borrow some Trail Boss and try that. My sense is that it is somewhat cleaner than Titegroup, and it fills the cases better, especially if you are shooting one of those "old" jobs -- like a .45 Colt. I personally like the feel of the powder better also, but that might be just me imagining things. I was a Titegroup shooter but have been migrating over to Trail Boss, even though it shoots a somewhat larger volume of powder (and our measures DO measure volume for charges).<br />
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You might also wander around on the web some. There are other ways to clean brass, and they would be mentioned on some of the forums here and there. One suggestion I remember was from a .45-70 shooter, who never tumbles his brass - I simply can't recollect what it was that he did, though. Also a trick from the 9mm shooters to limit the amount of "dirt" that the medium you clean with picks up is to deprime your cases first. Most of us don't but it is suppose to help clean quicker.<br />
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If you look at the bench rest shooters, most of them use cases that they load at the range. They only have maybe 25 to 50 cases that they shoot at most, so when they shoot for a while or work up a new load, they reload at the range - and you don't get to tumble your brass there. If you can shoot as well as those guys without cleaning the brass, seems cleaning is mostly a cosmetic issue - except like DD said about black.