Poor man's brass cleaning ?

Citric acid can be plain white vinegar.
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No. The led farmer is right. Vinegar is acetic acid, not citric acid.

If you meant the vinegar will substitute for the acetic acid, that's misleading as the results are not the same. Both clean the brass, but citric acid is used in the brass industry as a preservative treatment for brass parts that are to be stored for extended periods. Acetic acid is not. As I explained, vinegar leaves the surface activated, so it will oxidize further and change color over time if you leave it sitting around long enough. I've had vinegar cleaned brass turn green and purple over time from ongoing oxidation.

If you are going to shoot it right away or are going to polish the brass afterward, using vinegar doesn't make a practical difference. But if you want to let the brass sit around before loading it or if you are going to load and then store the ammo for any length of time, or if the brass is to be exposed to the weather, the citric acid treated surface is significantly better.


06shooter,

The carbon in a case mouth does not substitute for inside neck lube. Its hard cubic form carbon, and it gets harder and more abrasive with age. Thinking it is like graphite isn't much better than thinking diamond is like graphite. Both are made of carbon atoms, but that's where the similarity ends. Graphite is layered, low adhesion sheets of carbon that lubricate by the sheets slipping against each other. Diamond dust is used as a lapping abrasive and is harder and stays sharp far longer than silicone carbide.

Carbon left as fouling residue hardens with age. As an illustration, take a decapper to the range with you and decap a rifle case immediately after firing. The carbon falls out. Do it hours later and you have a hard crusty residue that is a lot more work to remove. Do it a week later, and it is even harder to remove.

Board member Hummer70, who was an Aberdeen Proving Grounds test director, has become convinced that hard carbon particles not removed from brass contribute to throat erosion by adding an abrasive quality to the materials moving down the bore, and has some borescope evidence to back it up. He has an article about why, other than politicians, carbon is a shooter's worst enemy.

Cold soldering and cold welding are the two processes I am aware of that can act on a bullet in a case mouth. The first term is likely not proper, but I am referring by it to corrosion bonding where oxygen and moisture act on the case mouth and bullet simultaneous and intermingle their results. Cold welding is an actual weld that forms over time. Hummer70 said that cartridges they measure bullet pull for at Aberdeen had a 60 lb pull spec when new, but it took as much as 600 lbs to pull bullets from some old ones. The still fired, but you can bet peak pressure and velocity were raised.

That last effect is the reason SAAMI standards allow for average pressures of a randomly selected 10 round sample from an ammunition lot to increase with age to a level called the Maximum Probably Sample Mean (MPSM). The Maximum Average Pressure (MAP) that we are accustomed to think of as The SAAMI maximum is actually only for newly loaded ammunition and is actually only for a single 10 round sample from that lot. A higher number, called the Maximum Probably Lot Mean (MPLM), is the number they are actually trying to avoid exceeding, and it is two standard errors above the MAP. The complete set of SAAMI pressure limits for .308 Winchester are below, both in CUP and in psi, for copper crusher and conformal piezo transducers, respectively.

308%20SAAMI%20Pressures_zpsuyzjppse.gif



Griz12,

We had a member post awhile back that he'd had a friend who worked with lead detecting gear. His friend tested all around his loading equipment and found no excess at his loading bench or even the casting bench. The only place he found it, and where it went sky high, was around his vibratory tumbler' and media separator.

So, launder if you must, but I would not let small children wear the clothing or eat off the table cloth until I had it tested. I'd test some lint from the drier exhaust hose, too, just to be sure it wasn't making it that far.
 
We had a member post awhile back that he'd had a friend who worked with lead detecting gear. His friend tested all around his loading equipment and found no excess at his loading bench or even the casting bench. The only place he found it, and where it went sky high, was around his vibratory tumbler' and media separator.
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Richard Lee tells the same story right in Modern Reloading 2e chapter 2 page 31.
 
Thanks Unclenick ! WOW !!!!
I have no experience in this but it makes a lot of since and I have read that someone had wrote " the carbon cuts like diamonds " and I had no idea why.

Citric acid has a natural oil right ? To preserve ?
I seen some of the items at Wal mart
that was mentioned on this thread but the ingredients were not listed.
Call me weird, I really don't like ordering online !
But like you say , citric acid is the way.
I thoroughly understand now !

Does the citric acid break up the hard carbon ?
 
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Get one of those sealable 5 gal buckets from HD, fill it halfway full of brass and enough of you favorite cleaning formula to cover the brass. Close it up tight and put it all in the trunk of your mother-in-law's car. Let her drive it around for a week or two and voila! - clean brass.

If she asks about it tell her it's a new thing to increase her gas mileage or something.
 
I did not discover case cleaning, I did not discover vinegar, I am a collector, not "THE COLLECTOR", I am a collector. I have used vinegar on rusty tools, vinegar is slow, not a problem, it is not necessary to watch it clean, it is not necessary to check often, it is not good to forget about tools that are being cleaned in vinegar.

Moving up, when cleaning case iron pots and pans time can be saved with a different acid. I have had the option of cleaning tools and cast iron in minutes.

Before the Internet: Acid was used, not a good time to get distracted. The time limit for cleaning in the acid was 2 minutes. Then the immediate part, remove the cases from the acid and immediately submerge the brass in boiling water to rinse, not once but twice and, there was a time factor applied to the rinse time. Cases cleaned using this method turned black.

I started using vinegar for the worst of cases to save tumbling time, I reduced tumbling time from weeks to 2 hours max. I still use the boiling water to rinse, and there is the advantage to using hot water. When the water is poured off the heat remains in the case, heat dries the case. Then there is tumbling. Like the song about a traffic jam. "It hurts my motor to go so slow", and it hurts my tumbler to run for days.

F. Guffey
 
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