Annealing Brass

[Bonz]

Do you have to wash brass cases before you anneal them ( wash, anneal, wash, swage ) ?

Or can you anneal dirty brass that you are going to swage into bullets using the BTsniper dies and wash that brass after annealing ?

[khamill2000]

Wash after anneal

[bullet maker 57]

I dump the hot brass from the heat into a bucket with hot water, citric acid, and Dawn. They come out clean and yellow.

[MUSTANG]

I wash mine before annealing using a harbor freight sonic cleaner, lemi-shine & some Dawn dish detergent. I anneal in the oven on Self Clean cycle, so do not want the possibility of lubes, oils and other items of trash in the brass smelling up the stove and house as it cooks.

Mustang

[Zymurgy50]

Pick up fired brass, rinse with garden hose to get most of the grit off.
Sonic clean with lemishine (gets the rest of the sand off and removes the ground glass in priming compound)
De-rim
Rinse for 5 min in running hot water to remove draw lube
Anneal- and quench in lemishine solution about 1 tablespoon per gallon water
Rinse 5 minutes under cold running water, a bit of agitation here removes whatever scale is left on the brass.
Seat cores
Form points,
At this point you have a couple choices to get the remaining lube off the bullets, wipe them off with a solvent soaked rag, tumble them in corncob, or sonic clean them again.

[Nickle]

I'm pretty much doing the same thing Zymurgy is.

Wash, sort, derim, wash, anneal, wash, seat core, point bullet, wash/clean again.

[Lizard333]

This depends in the brass. If its 22lr brass I wash, derim, anneal, than wash again.

If its 9mm or 40 brass, I anneal the brass with the cores so they are core bonded, finish in the point form die, then wash.

By wash I mean I tumble in SS media. I think the results speak for themselves.

76836

76837

😎

[DukeInFlorida]

I derim the 22 LR brass, and then anneal in my 20 pound Lee dipper type pot, on highest setting. Takes about 10 minutes to get them all glowing. I dump into Lemishine/detergent bath, and then tumble with SS pins in my tumbling system. I want them bright and shiny when they get to my point forming die. Any nasty stuff on the outer surface of the brass will possibly cause a stuck bullet in the point form die. Nay, nay... not in my point form die! So, bright and shiny (almost mirror finish) is what I get from the SS pin system.

After forming in the 224 point form die, the resultant bullets get another cleaning, this time in a ceramic pin vibratory tumble in my vibratory tumbler with the ceramic pins just barely wet. Again, Lemishine with detergent. There's no standing liquid. This is a trick I learned from BT Sniper. He recently shared it with the world, so I feel OK sharing it here.