case cleaning

I have an FA wet ss pins case tumbler with the usual recipe of dawn,and lemi-shine I have been getting an oily black residue on the cases, does anyone have an idea what might be going on

Sounds like you just need to add more soap, or run it twice to finish breaking down the oil.
Also, soap works better with warm water.

Not in a wet tumbler, but I've had a similar issue with stubborn oil when I first was brass.
A good sized bump of 409 in the soapy water solved that for me.

are your pins new? they come with water soluable oil on them and it takes a few times to get all of that off the pins.

If I remember correctly mine said to run the tumbler a couple of times without cases to get most of it off.

As an aside: I use a wash & wax Wally World product in place of the Dawn and the cases don't tarnish as quickly. Have some over 2 years old that, while they have darkened a bit, are still shiny.

Wash & wax is good stuff, but the soap in it isn't nearly as strong/concentrated as dish washing detergent.
If it was, it'd eat & break down up the wax part.

That's why 'they' tell ya not to use dish soap on your car. It will strip off any wax on it.

thanks for the suggestions I will give them a try

The new pins do come with a processing lubricant and should be run for a couple of cycles before tumbling brass. The comment about the strength of Dawn defeating the wash and wax is true, so what I do is tumble with Dawn and citric acid, then when I strain that tumble wash mixture, I rinse the cases in a bath of water with Wash & Wax added, then give them a final rinse in clear water. It only takes a minute of so more time and I get the most of both "soaps".

Wash and wax... i feel some sperimenten comin.

I dont wet tunble with pins. But i do a soak in lemishine and dawn. Let em sit for a bit. Then dump dump on a rack and rinse. Once dry I tumble with nufinish. Sometime my brass sits for a while. I noticed that the ones tumbled in nufinish dont rust here in Florida. It doesnt take long for range brass to rust. I make it a point to clean and polish brass quickly to protect it from corrosion.

Never thought of a wash and wax. Used to use that stuff on my car as teenager.

Never knew that about dawn. Oops have used it more than once on my car.

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I use Armorall Wash & Wax with citric acid. That is the active ingredient in Lemishine and is a lot cheaper. I got 2 pounds from Amazon for about 10 bucks. Armoral comes from local auto parts store.

I had the black oily residue on occasion before I added liquid Dawn DW soap to my pins / citric acid / Blue Corral. The Dawn cuts grease, maybe it doesn’t help the Blue Corral wax but since I dry & lube my brass right away, it still stays shiny for years.

I would add it is important to thoroughly dry the cases afterwards too. This can be accomplished by leaving them out in the sun, or an old oven or food dehydrator works too.

I have found the issue to be extremely dirty brass, the solution becomes saturated preventing anymore crud from being suspended by the soap. This is exasperated if you let the brass sit in the tumbler after it stops tumbling allowing more dirt to settle back out of solution. I have corrected this by doing an initial tumble for about 1/2hr then I just pour off most of the solution without dumping the brass or pins and tumble a second time with what ever soap combination you like. I've been using Dawn & citric acid for the initial wash then I use car wash soap with wax & citric acid for the second wash. I also found something like Simple Green will clean up those greasy/black residue cases better than soap if it does happen to you.

I use the lemishine, dawn and wash/wax mixture. Sometimes I use it without the pins and it does a pretty good job, not as good as with pins, but still, pretty good.

thanks for the replys