Tarnish, Bumps and Blemishes - Handloader

Guns Magazine, March, 2002 by Charles E. Petty

Many handloaders care almost as much about how their ammo looks as how it shoots. Some go to fanatical lengths to produce handloads that rival factory stuff in shine. Others, however, wouldn't dream of polishing brass. I shoot all the time with a guy like that. Even though somebody gave him a brass tumbler, his brass is dull and tarnished. But his ammo goes bang every time, and it seems to be quite accurate, too.

Another regular guy at the range has ammo that is the envy of all. His cases sparkle, and his lead has a silvery shine that would fool The Lone Ranger. But when it comes down to it, his polished ammo goes bang with the same force and accuracy as the unpolished stuff.

Each of these handloaders can give you a perfectly rational explanation of why he loads the way he does. The guy who never polishes his brass says that it takes too much time. The other one says it takes no time at all because the tumbler does all the work.

So who is right?

It depends on your point of view. Shinier ammo is in no way better than grungy looking stuff, but there is something to be said for cleaner brass. It's easier to load, and it's easier on dies, too. If you've ever sized a piece of tarnished brass, you know that it takes considerably more effort. Even with carbide dies, you can really feel a difference. Cleaner brass is also going to be easier on the dies. It only takes a little grit embedded in the soot on the dirty case to scratch a die. So I think some degree of cleaning is a good idea. My normal practice is to run brass for an hour or two in the tumbler as soon as it's fired and then leave it until I'm ready to load it. I've tried to figure out which is the better cleaning media, and I honestly don't see much -- if any -- difference between walnut hulls and corncobs. Right now I'm using ground corncobs with a touch of Dillon's Rapid Polish added. This does a good job, and while the cases may not be spotless; it works for me.

You also need to be cautious with additives, especially those that contain ammonia or acids. I'm sure you've beard of folks going to inordinate lengths to shine up brass they found at the range or someplace. This is almost always more trouble than it's worth. Brass that has been out in the weather for any length of time is going to be heavily oxidized or corroded. Sometimes it's positively black. No amount of tumbling is going to make that brass look new, and any chemical that will make it shine does so by dissolving metal. That black color isn't something just stuck on the case; it's a product of a chemical reaction between the brass, and something in its environment. This is dangerous and really a false economy of the worst kind. If you remove the color, you remove brass. Since solutions with some form of ammonia are among the best rifle bore cleaners -- which means they attack copper and brass -- they have no place in our tumblers. And I've always wondered if it's worth all the effort to resurrect somethin g that costs so little anyhow.

Bumps And Bulges

If you look closely at a lot of reloads, you'll sometimes see a bulge or line in the case wall that shows where the base of the bullet lies within the case. I get letters about that, too.

Once more, it has to do with your point of view. The guy who has the spotless brass would probably complain about a bump or bulge. I would surely agree that they can be unsightly, but they are often unavoidable, and, more importantly, they are usually harmless.

With a handgun cartridge, we have to expand the case mouth a bit to allow a bullet to be seated. We don't want to do that too much because we must rely on friction and crimp to hold the bullet in place. This raises the issue of bullet pull, which is a term you don't hear mentioned very often in handloading. That's because, for us, it's usually automatic. Die manufacturers take care of that for us in the design of the expanding die. When we adjust the expanding die of a handgun cartridge, we actually do two different things. The first step is to expand a portion of the case body to a size that is a few thousandths of an inch smaller than the diameter of the bullet. This ensures that friction will hold the bullet in place. The second part is to put a slight bell on the case mouth so that the bullet can be started with ease.

If you take the expander out of the die, you can see that it's made to expand only that portion of the case which would normally contain the bullet. But with the variety of bullet weights available to handloaders, sometimes it doesn't work out right. A good example is the 147-grain 9mm bullet, which is much longer than normal and will often result in a harmless bulge of the cartridge case in the area of the base of the bullet. That's why some bullets of that weight tend to have a modified boat tall shape to keep the base of the bullet from contacting the case wall at all.

Sometimes we'll see a bulge on one side of the case but not the other. No, the bullet isn't seated crooked. What we see is the fact that brass cases can't always be perfectly concentric. Variations in thickness of the case wall may be enough to show up as bulges.