Fellow Shooters
Here’s wishing you and your family an early Happy Thanksgiving. We hope you have received the 2009 Sinclair Christmas catalog that was recently mailed. If not, you should be receiving it in the next few days.
I spent some time at my own reloading bench this weekend organizing and planning my reloading for this winter. I took advantage of the time and cycled several batches of brass through my tumbler in preparation for reloading. I briefly experimented with an ultrasonic cleaner to clean some pretty dirty 308 Winchester brass because I had read a little bit on the internet about some reloaders using them to clean their brass. I was impressed mainly how well it cleaned the inside of the case but the case necks didn’t clean up to my satisfaction. I will continue to experiment with some different cleaning solutions and possibly a different ultrasonic unit to see if I can get some better results. I thought the process was a little more complicated than compared to what I am used to with the tumbler. Feel free to chime in your thoughts if you have had success with an ultrasonic cleaner.
We are starting to see a few primers arrive on our dock. Wolf primers are slowly making their way to our doors each month. We do expect to see a decent amount of Wolf large rifle primers in the next couple of weeks. Remington and Winchester primers are trickling in but no word yet on delivery of Federal primers. Easiest way to check inventory status on primers is to check out our website (look under Components & Ammunition).
Keep warm, enjoy Thanksgiving next week, and give thanks to our soldiers overseas who are doing without while protecting our freedoms.
Good Shooting,
Bill Gravatt
President – Sinclair International, Inc.
November 18th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Hello, Im glad to see you tried the ultrasonic cleaner. I have had good results with using ultrasonic. I have totally removed the tumbler from the process since I did not get good results inside the case. I am using a cheap solution of 50% white vinegar and water with a dash of liquid dish soap to remove the sizing lube. If the case necks are really bad you can
up the vinegar a bit. I only run about 30 cases at a time. I let that run for around 25 minuites, drain and run them again in baking soda and water for around 8 minuites. After that I use heated distilled water for 8 minuites. The primer pockets, inside and outside looks new..
Hope this helps..
November 18th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Bill, This last year several of us in the St Louis area have experimented with tumbling our dirty brass, about a hundred rounds at a time, with about a cupful of very small pieces of stainless steel and a mounded spoonful of dry soap and a small amount of liquid burnishing material. Water is added to this mixture until the brass is completely covered and then tumbled for 6 to 10 hours. When done, rinsed and dryed even very dirty brass looks like new, inside and out. There are some significant drawbacks with this process. The SS media is very expensive – so much so that it must be strained out and used again and again. Also, it must be tumbled for relatively long times. And finally it’s a real pain to get the media out of those cases that retain it. Each reloader has to determine for himself if this method is worth the effort. We have compared it to ultrasonic cleaning and we all agree that tumbling (as above) is far superior.