black brass

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308Loader

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I was looking into ways to color brass for segregation. currently using a sharpie to mark them, a more permeant marking would be nice for loading same cal for two rifles. When googling the topic I see this is not a new idea. their is a product called brass black folks use to blacken brass parts and such. Also a vinegar salt bath looks like an easy way to do this.

Is this a bad thing to do to rifle brass? Will the chemical reaction destroy the brass? As I understand it, its like bluing - controlled oxidation (rust) of the surface of the brass. What if I just blacken the head of the case, leavening the rest of it shiny brass. I'm sure it will eventually tumble off, but not as fast as sharpie.
 
Don't use vinegar on the brass. Vinegar will cause the zinc to leach out and weaken the brass. Suggest you mark the case head with a sharpie and deal with having to redo it.

Don
 
A durable solution would be marking the case head with a center punch.
You can use a automatic one from the hardware store and adjust the force down that it won't do damage to the case.
 
FWIW....

The attached recipies are from the old rec.guns newsgroup and will probably not be very useful because I doubt the chemicals needed aren't readily available to the general public anymore.

A "permanent" marker is probably you're best bet.

Can you just box and label your reloads separately?

Edit: The first attachment mentions a book, The Modern Gunsmith. I believe this is online as a free downloadable pdf someplace.
 

Attachments

I was looking into this the other day as i need to reuse my reduced load cases for only reduced loads. It seems like gun blueing can be used as well, thats what Ill be using but i havent decided if Ill just do the case base or the whole casing. Just another option that you may already have on the shelf
 
I bought a package of multi-colored sharpies. I color the primers rather than the cases so when they're deprimed the color coding is gone.
 
Use the Sharpie. It's a lot less fuss and it's cheaper.
Mind you, there's really no need to separate your brass.
The Modern Gunsmith formulas come out of The Machinery's Handbook. Runs $105US. $125 for the large print edition. Both from Industrial Press, Inc.
Most of those chemicals are readily available, but you'd have to find 'em. Potassium Nitrate comes from Amazon. It's used for curing bacon, et al. Runs $8.95US for 100 grams(3.5 oz.) plus $5.74 shipping.
Just remember that playing with that stuff is a gigantic pain, everywhere. And it's messy. A Sharpie is not.
 
Those little plastic boxes that hold 50-100 rounds of your chosen ammo are about $3. They wont allow rounds to intermingle. :D
 
I work as a chemist and am familiar with some brass staining recipes. I’ve done it once for some 45 brass. I won’t do it again. Too much trouble. I use a Sharpie to mark the bases to help identify mine at matches. BTW-vinegar won’t hurt brass, many of us use it regularly to clean but never use ammonia. It cleans and weakens.
 
I use different head stamps when I need to keep the "same" type of brass separated for different uses - whether that's different rifles with the same chambering getting brass tracked separately, or multiple cartridges based on the same case.

With the .223 family, for example:
I reserve all LC 03, LC 11, Win, and plated brass (regardless of head stamp) for .223/5.56 loads.
All PPU and Hornady brass goes to the 6x45mm.
R-P and some other years of LC brass are reserved for the .17-223.
If, for some reason, I can't identify the different cases simply by neck diameter, the case head tells the story.

It may come to me as factory ammo and need to be fired in a .223 before moving on to one of the other rifles, but the headstamp seals its fate.


During load development, I mark primers in a manner that corresponds to the load notes. My father likes marking bullets with various numbers and types of stripes or rings, as it leaves no trace on the fired case. But I prefer to know what load was tested, after the fact.
(Though, in fairness... His "stripe" method actually allows identification at the target, too, as the bullets mark the targets with corresponding stripes.)
 
The vinegar and salt combination is the old NRA case cleaning formula. If you rinse it off well and dry the cases and let them sit, you can get an interesting array of colors from green to purple, but I don't know a way to control it. Ammonia, as mentioned before, is an absolute no-no and causes "season" cracking, but short of a very long soak, I don't believe vinegar will etch deeply enough to cause structural trouble. 5% citric acid is what the old Frankford Arsenal brass cleaning formula was, and it leaves the brass yellow and seems to be self-limiting. It is a common treatment for brass castings that are to be stored for a long time.

The commercial brass blackening solution is about the same as commercial aluminum cold black. It's a selenic acid surface coloring that is not as rugged as some of the other blacking methods. A more durable one would be black nickel plating, but, as already stated, this is a lot of trouble.

Also, you don't really want anything but brass color if you want to recover a high percentage of your cases from the grass at the range. One year I tried nickel-plated brass to better distinguish my brass from that of the brass hogs at matches and wound up sorry about it. The mirror surface reflected the colors of dirt and grass with such fidelity that I lost twice as many cases as I had lost to the brass hogs in previous years. Black is likely to have the same problem, so, whatever color you use, you want to limit it to the head.

Now, if you come up with a way to color brass a durable fluorescent orange or yellow, that would be of more interest…
 
Unclenick wrote:
Ammonia, as mentioned before, is an absolute no-no and causes "season" cracking
Click to expand...

Season cracking was a particular type of brass deterioration observed when 1) un-annealed cases were 2) exposed to fairly high concentrations of ammonia, for 3) months.

Since all modern brass cases are annealed, metal polishes that contain small amounts of ammonia for which the exposure time is limited (i.e. minutes) do not present a danger for modern cartridge brass.
 
308 Loader wrote:
I was looking into ways to color brass for segregation.
Click to expand...

How many categories do you need to segregate the brass into? I ask because, for aesthetic purposes, I use fingernail polish to put a colored ring around the primer. Dab on some fingernail polish, wait a few seconds and then wipe the excess off with a paper towel. By using different colors (i.e. black, red, green, pink, etc.) you can segregate into as many different colors as your eye can differentiate.

The thing with this method is that when the primer is decapped after shooting, it will take the fingernail polish with it, so if you need to have the color be permanent, you're back to the Sharpie.
 
Plastic bags and labels have worked well for me for 20 years. Plastic ammo boxes from Berrys work well also with a label in or on the box.
 
There are lots of permanent marking methods that are non destructive/damaging to the brass. I tried using a marking pen, but the color came off in my tumbler. I have a couple "automatic center punches" that work well. One is adjustable and it can be dialed down to give a light prick mark on the case head that is permanent, easy to do and only needs to be done only once. https://www.google.com/search?q=aut.....69i57j0l5.7541j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

But I subscribe to the plastic box with clear labels to segregate my ammo...
 
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I color/mark the primer with a sharpie and use the plastic boxes from Cabelas et.al. The sharpie method makes it easy to sort brass at home after bringing it in from my range. Rod
 
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