Play With Your Food: Clean Brass With Rice

[orkan]

Play With Your Food: Clean Brass With Rice

There are many ways to clean brass.
Cleaning your brass is a necessity. Foreign material in or on our cases can cause all kinds of problems. Damage to expensive reloading dies, damage to rifles, and various other issues can arise if proper care is not taken. Historically, shooters tumbled their brass in walnut or corn cob media using vibrator tumblers. This method works fairly well and has long since been the "standard" method. In recent years, a couple new technologies were explored. Ultrasonic cleaning was first, and used the power of ultrasonic transducers to "explode" the surface of the brass clean. Next came using a rotary tumbler, water, dish soap, and stainless steel pins to clean the brass. I have used each of the aforementioned methods, and in each instance I was left with the feeling that there is much room for improvement. A couple weeks ago while researching a completely unrelated topic, I was sent down a rabbit hole on the internet. You know how that is. Well I landed on an old forum post in some obscure corner of the internet, which outlined the use of rice and a vibratory tumbler to clean brass. That particular user hailed it as the best possible solution to the problem. The thought had never occurred to me before. I scooped up a handful of rice we had laying around and just by playing with it for a bit, was convinced that it may have merit. I had to try it. This article is the culmination of that testing.

 

[Plant.One]

have you tried any .20 caliber brass with the rice yet?

i found the same problem with stainless pins jamming in the cases with my .204 brass as you did with rice in your .17 caliber stuff. the neck was too small to allow for easy removal.

 

[orkan]

Nope, I haven't used it with .20 cal. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would end in the same failure.

Perhaps if a guy hit a batch of rice with a food processor... making it more granular? That's my next step. If it works, I'll just keep a separate batch of it for my .17 stuff!

 

[GLShooter]

I used it for years 35 years ago on my pistol cases. It left a nice patina on the 45's. Nice and cheap. The mice loved my stash of extra when they could get in it and the cats loved the mice.(VBG)

Greg

 

[pahntr760]

Originally Posted By: orkanNope, I haven't used it with .20 cal. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would end in the same failure.

Perhaps if a guy hit a batch of rice with a food processor... making it more granular? That's my next step. If it works, I'll just keep a separate batch of it for my .17 stuff!

Try Quinoa for the small cases. Just a hunch.

 

[Plant.One]

Originally Posted By: pahntr760

Try Quinoa for the small cases. Just a hunch.

does it have to be fair trade, free range, gluten free, organic certified, non gmo quinoa?

 

[Varminterror]

Neat article, and even though I've used Rice for other cleaning, I've yet to try it for brass.

Originally Posted By: orkanNope, I haven't used it with .20 cal. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would end in the same failure.

Perhaps if a guy hit a batch of rice with a food processor... making it more granular? That's my next step. If it works, I'll just keep a separate batch of it for my .17 stuff!

Did you try using brown rice yet? Looks like you used white rice for the article, but white isn't as abrasive as brown rice. I'd expect brown rice would clean better as well as last longer, since the exterior bran is the more abrasive part of the kernel. Besides some stints in grain processing (not food) industries, I've also used rice hulls and brown rice for parts polishing.

Processing/milling/cutting/crushing white rice probably won't make much difference in polishing performance, and should help your plugging issue, as it's essentially just a thinly wrapped piece of starchy endosperm. Swapping over to brown rice, you'd get better cleaning performance as whole rice, but then cutting it will make it less effective, basically bring it in line with white. I'd expect a little more dusting with processed rice also, since you'll be exposing the starch.

Interesting to see the sticking issue in 17cal necks vs. 22 cal, must just be a magic combination of the dimensions.

I've also used milo/sorghum for polishing, just gotta screen it for cracks and to pick the right size for your application. Works well too.

 

[pahntr760]

Originally Posted By: Plant.OneOriginally Posted By: pahntr760

Try Quinoa for the small cases. Just a hunch.

does it have to be fair trade, free range, gluten free, organic certified, non gmo quinoa?

Of course...what are we, heathens?

 

[fw707]

Originally Posted By: pahntr760Originally Posted By: Plant.OneOriginally Posted By: pahntr760

Try Quinoa for the small cases. Just a hunch.

does it have to be fair trade, free range, gluten free, organic certified, non gmo quinoa?

Of course...what are we, heathens?

Anything less would be....

uncivilized.

 

[stickbow_hunter]

Orkan, Kind of curious what the downfalls are when utilizing stainless steel media w tumbler? My experience has been nothing but great. Brass comes out looking like new and primer pockets are clean as a whistle.

 

[venatic]

From what was written the fact that the stainless tumbling was dinging the case mouths along with the necks being too clean which can create neck tension variability.
Varmint Al on his Blog page wrote about the fact all tumbling can ding up your case mouths years ago so I would guess Rice would cause the same problem unless your brass batches were very small. I have not tried it. When I tumble I assume I will have to trim or I should say unless I plan on trimming I never tumble just wipe cases with diluted Ballistol to remove carbon.