is the chocolate-colored brass.
The top brass goes right to the next cleaning step – into the tumbler. The other stuff needs some attention. The muddy brass is easy; drop them into a bucket (wait until you have enough to warrant the effort) of water as hot as you can get it from the tap and some dishwashing soap. Stir it with a paint stirrer or similar tool until the brass does not have caked mud clinging to it, then decant the soapy water into the laundry sink (filter, to avoid brass in the drain trap) and rinse with hot water right from the tap into the bucket. Decant again and then spread the brass on an old bath towel in direct sunlight. Leave there until dry. Do not be impatient, or clinging moisture will spoil your fun later.
The chocolate brass is oxidized and requires chemical cleaners. Birchwood Casey makes a chemical cleaner, and I find my supply of “chocolate” brass is so small that using it once a year or so is all I need. I mix it twice as strong as the directions call for and soak the brass twice as long. I then decant, and treat the brass to the same hot-water process as above. Indeed, you can, if you stockpile enough brass in a caliber, make it an annual mud-and-oxide cleaning session.
You can also use a power cleaner. Hornady makes a couple of powered cleaners. They use chemical solutions and heat to accelerate the cleaning process. Depending on your range conditions, you may find that power and chemicals works better than just sorting and a tumbler.
Cleaning
On to the tumbler. Curiously, even cleaners that vibrate and swirl the brass are called “tumblers.” Basically, you pour dry and ready-to-be-cleaned brass into the bowl, add a cleaning medium and some polisher (some people skip the polishing goo) and then seal and turn on. The vibrating/swirling action rubs the media against the brass, scrubbing off the dirt. The polish scuffs the oxidized layer of brass off, leaving you with brass gleaming as if it were new.
How big a tumbler should you get? As big as you can afford and have bench room for. This is not the place to economize, as brass cleaning is most often the bottleneck that slows down loading. When I started reloading, I had a tumbler (that actually tumbled) and it cleaned 200 empties in two hours. It was just too bad that I could load 200 rounds in about 35 minutes. I was running that tumbler day and night, even when I wasn’t loading, just to keep me in clean brass. Something like the Dillon 2000 (and you know how they named it) will clean brass in two hours, but at the end you have up to 2,000 clean, empty handgun cases.
The tumbler usually takes ground corncobs or walnut hulls, but I have heard of people using rice. It just goes against my grain to use a food product to clean brass, so I’ve never tried it, but there are those who swear by it.
The polish is easy; just dump a capful or so into the mix before you start it up, and your brass will be cleaner.
While we’re here, let’s take a moment to discuss lead. It will be in many of the components you’ll be using. It is the densest common metal, and on the periodic table it is noted with the symbol Pb from the Latin plumbum.
Some will tell you lead is evil, and nearly as lethal as plutonium. No. One of the first things we learn in chem lab (and, apparently, med school) is the old adage “dose makes the poison.” Lead, being a metal, washes off. It is not absorbed “through the pores of your skin” and it certainly (as I was solemnly assured by an FBI agent) does not pass through your skin and directly into your brain if you used your hat to collect brass at the range.
You get lead into your body in the simplest and most prosaic way by ingesting it, usually from your hands or food/drink. Or you inhale it from fired powder smoke or on the cigarette you smoked at the indoor range. The bullets you handle and the brass you are cleaning will probably have lead on or in them. So, don’t eat while you load, don’t suck your fingers while you load, and after you wipe the tumbler clean, wash your hands. Smoking? Smoking is verboten for this, as well as, another reason; you’ll have powder and primers close at hand, and a burning anything is contraindicated while reloading.
Once you’ve cleaned your brass, place it in clean containers, not the same boxes the ammo came from, that is not at all useful. You’re going to be loading hundreds of rounds. You do not want to be individually placing fifty empties at a time in a box. The only reason to save the box is if you plan on flying to a match, and then you’ll need “factory ammunition boxes” in which to schlep your ammo in your checked luggage.
RELOADING PRESS
Presses come in two flavors: single-stage or progressive. Each have variants, but for the moment we’ll consider those two. The single-stage press only holds one loading die (the cylindrical tool that performs some operation in the loading stream) at a time. So, to size all your cases, you screw the sizing die in, and pull the handle down-and-up once for each and every one of them. You then unscrew that die, screw in the next one, and continue.
With a unit like this, to reload a single round requires that you pull the handle (down and up) on a single-stage press five to seven times, depending on just how many steps you can double-up in dies. For instance, the sizing die can also de-cap, that is, press out the expended primer, and seat the primer in one step. So, 100 rounds means 500-700 handle cycles.
Police departments do not reload, if you have an “in” you can quickly acquire a lifetime supply of brass.
If you shoot Glocks, or your buddies do and you often end up with their brass, get this die.
Redding makes a storage bottle, to catch your .40 brass once it has gone through the GRx die.
A progressive arranges a full set of dies in either a circular or straight-line array, and each time you pull the handle you process and then move all of them one step. Each die performs its operation, and once the press is fully loaded, you produce a loaded round with each pull of the handle. Some progressives require that you move the rounds between handle pulls, and some (known as auto-indexing) automatically move the array at the beginning or end of each handle stroke. Start to finish, loading 100 rounds requires 105 to 110 handle cycles.
Here I’ll deviate from the orthodoxy, and suggest that you start out with a single-stage, and then buy a progressive once you know how reloading works. That might happen quickly, in a few weeks. It might take longer, even a couple of years. The idea is simple; with a single-stage press you learn each step by itself. Then when you are comfortable, you put them all together in the progressive. Advocates of each will tell you (and for various reasons) that you do not need the other. Me, I figure that the single-stage press doesn’t go bad on the shelf, and can be used for other purposes later on.
DIES
First things first. Do not succumb to the “savings” of buying uncoated, steel dies. Get either carbide dies (they have carbide insert or inserts in the wear areas) or titanium nitride-coated dies. Hardened steel dies require lubrication, or you will get a case stuck in them. Lube is messy and can add problems of its own. If, and only if, the caliber you absolutely have to load is not available in either carbine
