Quigley Shooting Association
NEWCOMERS GUIDE TO CASE CLEANING.
Ken Hall
Black powder shooting can be very hard on brass cases and without proper care their useful life can be shortened. This article looks at just one way to return your expensive cases to top condition after a gruelling day at the range.
Your fired cases come under attack from the instant the primer is struck, various complex salt compounds are deposited which will attack the brass, the first priority after a shooting session is to arrest this action. One of the best products for this happens to be available almost everywhere and at a very reasonable cost; soapy water, hot or cold, liberally applied as soon as possible after firing will stop the corrosive effects of powder residue and salts. If the cases are first de-capped the primer pocket and the case interior can be cleaned with the aid of a brush or scraper, the whole thing rinsed, dried and stored ready for re-use. The only drawback being that the case, although clean and suitable for use, will tarnish and discolour unless regularly polished. This is a relatively simple task, requiring the use of a piece of equipment known as a tumbler, or polisher, along with some polishing media. Most shooters who reload their own ammunition will already own some sort of polishing kit, most probably a vibrating or rotary type with a container in which a media such as crushed walnut shells or corn cobs is used to polish the cases after cleaning. This brings me to a system that I have used for the past few years, I don’t know who to credit as the originator of this system but I must thank the members of the Single Shot Black Powder Centrefire Rifle Club of Great Britain for passing it on and providing the media used.
My tumbler is of the vibratory type, made in the United States but available in the UK through Midway and other suppliers, importantly, the bowl is completely watertight, some variations have a removeable section to aid in sifting the cases after polishing, these would not be suitable for this method. After shooting, I do not treat the cases in any way at the range, but as soon as possible after returning home the cases are de-capped and placed in a wire basket which fits inside a plastic container (formerly containing emulsion paint), hot water with a dash of washing-up liquid is added and the basket agitated until the water turns black, then the murky water is replaced with clean cold water and the cases agitated again. After drying, I store these cases until I have enough to clean and polish. As .45-70 cases are quite large I normally would only want 40 to 50 cases to polish at one time. Then I am ready to start, first I take the tumbler and add the media consisting of small pieces of ceramic material slightly larger than a grain of rice and shaped like angle cut cylinders, to this I add about 800ml of clean water, just enough to cover the media. Next, a dash of washing-up liquid, a teaspoon of Cream of Tartar and a squirt of lemon juice, both available from the home cooking section of most supermarkets. The pre-rinsed cases are then added, the lid attached and the tumbler plugged into the electric supply.
Experimentation has shown that 30 mins to one hour is all that is needed, indeed, longer than this tends to reverse the action as the solution will be saturated and only results in duller cases. All that remains is for the cases to be removed from the tumbler, rinsed and dried. I use a wire basket designed for deep frying food to hold the cases, a good shake and the basket can be placed on a radiator to dry the cases, or a few minutes in a warm oven, to speed up the process. The media is emptied into a sieve and rinsed with clean water ready for use again, over and over, it will last virtually forever. One of the main advantages of this system is that it cleans and polishes in one go. A bonus is the thoroughness of the cleaning, even the primer pocket gets cleaned enough so that no further action is required before re-capping.
The one drawback to this system is its’ unsuitability for bottleneck cases, due to the media having a tendency to wedge itself into the case neck with obvious results, fortunately most blackpowder calibres used in Quigley type shooting are of the ‘straight wall’ type and so this is not a problem. The same system works equally well with my .38-55, .40-65, .44-40 and even .45 Colt cases used with either black or nitro powder.
Update 2018
The first stage at the range and rinsing is still required. Numerous wet media tumblers are available now along with different types of media. I use stainless steel needle media, water, washing-up liquid and citric acid. This works well on any case, not only the blackpowder cases.