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Cleaning Brass


D.Hayden

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I just got a fair amount of 38 Special Nickel cases. I usually tumble brass for about an hour with untreated walnut, then 1-2 hours with corn cob, treated with Dillon's Brass polish. With nickel, do you still use brass polish, or use untreated corn-cob?

Thanks, Dave

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The only thing the polish will do is an abrasive to your media, which will help scrub the crud off - if you have crud that needs scrubbing. Chemically, it will do zip. If your nickel cases aren't really gunky, you can pass on adding the polish.

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I know folks who tumble their brass for hours, occasionally days, and if you do it enough, especially with polish added to a coarse grit hard medium like walnut hulls, you can actually polish off the plating. This isn't a big deal functionally, but you can tell your brass has gone a lot of reloadings when nickel looks like regular brass :D .

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Actually, I got started a bit on this in another 'tumbling-and-polishing' thread, as I just bought a quantity of really, really fine grit corn-cob media and speculated that mixing it with the coarser corn-cob might kill two birds with one stone and put a nice polish on casings as well as continuing to clean them in their Step Two cleaning phase. Well, I tried it and it worked really well. Kind of like a laundry enhancing additive or something... it put a nice polish on 'em but increased the cleaning level and shortened tumbling time. Or, in this case, I got more cleaning/polishing effect out of the same tumbling time.

Worked for me. :)

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