When there's a pile in the jar I put the lid on and shake it, dump it, and repeat once or twice, depending on the number of cases, then drain and spread the cases out in the back of the truck to dry. This cleans them out well enough that when I get home I can throw them in the tumbler to get them ready for resizing. Resize, trim any that need it, and then I usually run them through the Lyman Turbo rotary tumbler. That cleans everything, including the primer pockets and flash holes, and leaves them nice and shiny(most stuff I just worry about clean, but those cases just look nice when they shine).
Downside to the rotary: you have to use water so it's more mess.
Upsides: no dust, great job of cleaning the cases out, and- until you lose some of it- the media is stainless steel pins and they never wear out.
*it's a sports drink bottle with a wide mouth
3 comments:
What’s the process for the gun cleaning? I’ve only played around with a 44 cap & ball, no rifles.
Does a windex spray down really work followed by water? That’s what I remember reading decades ago.
With single-shot breechloaders, it's easy:
Wipe the bore with a wet patch. I use a mix of Ballistol and water. Then a second wet patch, then a dry patch. If it looks like there's still some fouling, repeat. Then dry and oil, and that does it. I use a cloth wet with the Ballistol solution on the breech face and other places fouling may have deposited on, dry, and light oil. The cartridge case pretty much seals the fouling into the bore.
Mike Venturino wrote of using the Windex with vinegar, diluted, to clean black powder fouling. Yeah, a cap & ball revolver is more complicated to clean.
I shot Cowboy Action for a few years and saw quite a few different processes for dealing with black powder. The most effective seems to be a windex patch between stages for the short term on all guns. For handguns and brass, on shooter kept a large container of 50/50 water and ballistol that he dumped his brass in, and at the end of the day he'd take the grips off and drop the pistols in with the brass. By the time he got home, he said all he had to do was rinse with hot water, dry, and lube everything. He'd spray the long guns down with the water/ballistol mix to clean them, rinse with hot water, dry, and relube them, too. Windex was used between stages to keep fouling from locking things up, but the ballistol seemed to be the magic ingredient for pretty much all black powder shooters.
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