Monday, November 16, 2009

Reloading Part 3: Cleaning Brass


Cleaning the brass is a rather simple procedure. It requires a brass cleaner(either a vibrating or rotary cleaner), media and, of course the spent brass.

I throw my spent brass in the cleaner with the spent primers still in the casing. I've also tried this with the spent primer removed and the only difference I noticed was that the media needed to be cleaned out of the priming pocket if the primer is not left in there.

I'm using a Hornady vibratory brass cleaner with Lyman Turbo Tumbler media. I put about 3.5 lbs of media in with 100 casings of .270 WIN brass and turn it on for 4-6 hours. One note of safety is that I tend not to leave it running while I'm out of the house...better safe than sorry.

I've heard that that you can leave the brass in the cleaner longer if you want to have more of a shine on it. Personally I don't see a benefit to it. There are also several different kinds of media you can put in with your brass, depending on how pretty you want to make it. I've only tried this Lyman stuff, but it does work so I've kept with it.

Hopefully when you're done the brass should come out clean and ready to go.


-Steven Kipp