you cry. The big one is crimped primer pockets. Basically, once the primer has been seated in the manufacturing process, the manufacturer stamps around the rim of the pocket, kicking up a ledge that locks the primer in place. Your decapping die will probably press the primer out (but not always) but when you go to seat the next primer, things will come to a crashing halt. Sometimes the decapping pin will press it out, but the old primer is “speared” onto the decapping pin, and gets pulled back to the case. Things get stuck, you get out of sequence, and it takes a minute or two to disassemble the press, solve the problem and get back to work.
Once the primer is out, you can swage or cut the crimp. In the early days, I’d read of writers who suggested that a common pocketknife could be used to cut the crimp. They were sadists, or were not dealing in any kind of volume whatsoever. When I was really into volume loading, some friends and I built a contraption that locked a case deburring tool into a power drill, and affixed a shield over it. The whole thing was basically an electrical motor in a box, and you worked it by sitting down in a comfy chair, nestling the gizmo in your lap, and pressing the primer pockets of deprimed cases against it. You used the nose end of the cutter to power-ream crimps off at the rate of 30-40 a minute. But, the thing was so loud, at several thousand rpm, that you had to wear eye and hearing protection. The Dillon 1050 press has a station for swaging crimped primer pockets, but if you don’t load on one, you don’t have this option. (We did it because we couldn’t wrestle whatever brass it was into the 1050, I forget which. Probably .308.) For most of you, sorting the crimped brass out to be batch-processed later is the only option.
Brass cleaning can be quick and automated. The Hornady power cleaner makes them shiny.
The Hornady Sonic Cleaner allows you to set time and temperature.
Does mixing brands matter? Sometimes. If you are loading right to the limit, yes. In that instance you want all your brass to be the same. If you desire the absolute highest accuracy, you’d be well-served to use just one batch of one brand, and that would be the one your gun tells you it prefers. If you are loading to the maximum safe pressure, yes, you want to be using all the same brass.
If you are not doing any of those, then whatever you pick up, find at your gun club, shoot and save, will be useful. Now, there will be “brass” you won’t want. All the steel and aluminum stuff , toss in the trash. If you are scrounging up a motherlode of empties at the gun club (and your club allows it), look at the headstamps as you start grabbing. If it doesn’t look familiar, turn the cases around and look inside. If it is Berdan-primed, ditch it. Boxer-primed brass has a central flash hole, and your decapping pin will punch the old primers out. Berdan-primed brass has two or three holes, off -center, and cannot be reloaded. Well, at least not with the common tools you’ll be able to acquire. Given the price of scrap brass on the metals market, it might be worth picking it up anyway, but not for reloading.
Other than specialized needs, you don’t have to do much sorting. One that I do sort is the Remington (or R–P headstamped) brass out of my .38 and .357 bins. One of my re-The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass. volvers uses full-moon clips (yes, in .38/.357) but it only works with Remington brass. The other brass doesn’t have enough of an undercut in front of the rim to accept the moonclip. So, R-P for the ICORE guns, and everything else for all the others.
The Hornady Ultrasonic cleaner buzzes through dirty brass.
Once your brass is clean, you should store it in a way that will keep it clean. Closed, clear plastic boxes work well.
Other than that, you can easily find out what the “crap-du-jour” brass of your caliber is by doing a quick internet search. The list changes regularly, and anything I put down here will be out of date by the time you read it.
CLEAN & INSPECT
Cleaning is pretty easy. Unless you’ve stumbled on the mother lode that has been out there in the rain and snow too long and turned chocolate color as a result, you just have to clean brass in a tumbler. If it is muddy or really sandy, you might want to do a bit of dry “sacking.” Use a mesh sack and slosh the brass around in the sack, letting the dirt and mud bits fall out. Or, rinse muddy/sandy brass in hot water. Dry in the sun, and you’re ready to tumble.
Tumbling is easy. Take your brass cleaner and wipe the bowl clean. Windex and paper towels will do. Then fill the bowl halfway or so with the cleaning media of your choice. I’ve always been a fan of ground corncobs. Some like ground walnut hulls for a finer and faster “cut,” and some advocate rice. Halfway full, then cover the surface with brass. Dump a capful or two of polishing solution on top of the brass and turn it on.
If you get the proportions just right, the contents will swirl in the bowl and you can see them surfacing and submerging as they rotate about the bowl axis. Too much brass, or too much brass and media, and they just sit there, vibrating up and down. Too much doesn’t clean as quickly. How long? It depends. Clean media, with relatively clean brass, will be clean in an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Grubby brass and heavily-used media can take two hours or more. Once you have the proportions figured out for your tumbler and caliber, just bolt the lid on, start and let it run for the time needed.
Vibratory cleaners come in various sized bowls. Buy the biggest your wallet and bench can take.
A timer to turn it off after a certain time period is a nice addition. Otherwise, you can end up like a friend of mine. He went on vacation, having started a brass tumbler the night before and forgetting about it. Sometime in the two weeks he was gone, the tumbler vibrated itself off the table, crashed to the floor and thrashed itself to pieces. Two hours is about right. Two weeks is longer than needed.
Next, you have to get the brass out. One trick I learned is to take the screen that came with your tumbler, place it over the opened tumbler, then invert and plop the whole thing onto a clean and empty five-gallon bucket. A quick shake or three, and the brass is separated from the media.
Set it down, lift the tumbler and put it on the bench. Take the screen with brass and set it aside. Now, spray the inside of the bowl with Windex, wipe it clean, let it dry, pour your media back in, add more brass, and turn it on again. Pour your clean brass onto a cookie sheet (not the one your wife/girlfriend/whoever uses to bake cookies) and inspect. What are you looking for? Obvious “not the same” brass. Once you get tuned in to a given caliber, anything that looks different will jump out at you. Some are easy, like the stray 9mm mixed in with the .45s. Others are a lot harder, like .380 brass in with 9mm, or 40 and .45. The better job you do here, the fewer situations where the wrong empty goes up into your sizing die,
