Question about drying cases after tumbling wet. biggie.

[wallacem]

OK guys, need your advise. Best friend, just called me. He had wet tumbled 50 30-06 cases and put them in the oven to dry. Forgot to turn oven down and off, let them bake for over an hour at 350 degrees. Said they turned a darker color. Do you think they are ok or would that temp destroy the cases integrety. Wallacem inGa

[phantom22]

I'm not an expert and I'm sure other will chime in, but they should be completely fine. People anneal cases at much higher temps than that. I don't think 350F is hot enough to anneal the cases and the dark color is likely from residue left over from the tumbling process. If anything I would think that it would make the cases closer to new (post-annealing) condition, but likely it hasn't done anything to them except darken them.

[Silvercreek Farmer]

Not very scientific, but use a pair of pliers to crush a dark case, a non baked case, and see if you notice a difference.

[Winger Ed.]

I've done that.
I just ran them in the polisher again so they'd look pretty.

When the 2nd .45ACP stowed away in a batch I washed, and cooked off in the oven-
All reloading activity was banned from the kitchen.
Now days, I lay wet brass out on a towel for a day or two for them to dry.

[hoodat]

I absolutely don't trust anything except for the oven to dry my cases. I go 200 degrees for an hour, and know they're dry. jd

[Sasquatch-1]

If you can crush the case fairly easy with your thumb and fingers, they are probably too soft.

As for drying, I take mine and separate the pins out and then dry tumble with lizard litter and New Finish for about an hour. Dries the cases and leave a slight protective coating.

[atr]

I don't use the oven....I prefer to stay married!
I have a board with lots of 12d finish nails pounded in upright and I set the inverted cases on each nail. Then I turn on my dual 500 watt construction lamp and pretty quick the liquid is drained and dry. On a cold day to speed the process I air-blow the excess moisture off/out of the cases before I turn on the lamp.
best
atr

[popper]

Annealing temp is much higher. Go ahead and use them.

[BamaNapper]

A couple years ago I tumbled a hundred or so 223 brass, then tossed them in a toaster oven to dry quickly. I probably had it set for 250-300. I regretted it. The brass took WAY TOO MUCH effort to size. I re-lubed and tried a few of them, but decided it was not worth the gamble of breaking something. I mean these were HARD to size. In the end I chose to toss them to the scrap bucket. And yes, they were a different color. More red than usual.

I'm thinking the problem was because I tossed them in a cold oven, then turned it on. The elements were running full bore to get the oven up to temp, and there's just no way of knowing how hot the brass got. I assume by the time the entire oven heated to 250 the brass may have been twice that. It would depend on where the heating elements were and where the temp sensor is. I still use the oven to dry brass, but I heat it up to 250 and turn it off before putting the brass in. Never had a problem doing it in that order.

[405grain]

To anneal brass you need to heat it to between 500 and 800 degrees F, then quench. If the brass only went to 350 degrees it might still be OK, but personally I wouldn't trust it. Generally we anneal the neck and shoulder of a case. But, if the head of a case gets soft it can lead to a catastrophic failure. With cast bullet load pressures it's hard to get into trouble, but with jacketed loads it can be a different story. If there were any possibility that these cases might get used later for jacketed bullet loads I'd toss them. It's just not worth the risk. If they will only ever be used for cast bullets, then they may be safe, but ultimately the choice to use them or not is your friend's.

[almar]

Same happened to me many years ago with .308 brass and I just wasn't 100 sure about them so I tossed them. They were on their final stretch anyways. I'm not saying this is a definite no go, I'm just saying that was what I chose to do at the time. The thing about ovens like that is that 350 is just an average...the brass might have been hotter for a time. I just adjust to letting them air dry now. They turn out nicer anyways.

[BLAHUT]

I tumble with, SS pins, simple green, lemi shine, hot water, air dry a couple days on a towel, then into the corn for an hour or so..

[Mk42gunner]

50 .30-06 cases shouldn't be enough to break anybody replacing them, why take a chance?

With that said they may be alright, but I wouldn't risk it.

Robert

[fredj338]

Annealing temp is much higher. Go ahead and use them.

^^^THIS^^^
Why I dont wet tumble my brass, drying, tumbling dry to polish, why. 2-3hrs in dry media with a bit of polish works just fine.

[stubshaft]

350 degrees shouldn't be enough to harm the cases. Load and shoot them.

[Silvercreek Farmer]

Makes me wonder how hot the last case out of a semi is after a mag dump or two.

[BK7saum]

Annealing of brass is not a certain temp. It is temp and time dependent. 650 degrees for a few seconds will anneal. A lower temp at a longer diration will also anneal.

Cases subjected to 570 degrees for one hour did exhibit case head softening. https://www.ampannealing.com/articles/40/annealing-under-the-microscope/

Quenching of brass in water does nothing in regard to brass annealing except cool the brass and stop the annealling process. Does not harden or otherwise change the anneal of the case neck shoulder.
I personally would just toss the cases, I do not subject my brass to a potential softening situation that would make them suspect.

Just realize annealling is time and temp dependent. Leaving cases overnight in the oven (350⁰) would probably anneal them, but five seconds in a torch flame also anneals them.

The research is out there.

[rockrat]

I often wet tumble my cases, but then I dump them on a towel to take off the worst of the water, then put them in a food dehydrator the other half was going to get rid of.

[Half Dog]

I hear many “Should be” statements. However, purely guessing; I agree with them.

Wet tumbling is a summertime sport for me. Sunshine is the perfect dryer in Texas.

[Silvercreek Farmer]

Saw a suggestion to warm the oven up to 350, put the brass in, then turn it off. Probably not a bad idea.

[gwpercle]

An hour at 350 degrees ... that may or may not have softened them .

Annealing is only done to the neck - shoulder area ... not the complete total case .

I would at least do a crush test on the body of one or two to see if they were softer than an un-baked case . You don't want any head seperations when firing these .

30-06 are just too common and easily available to run the risk that the whole case , including primer pocket , has become too soft .

I'm not the brightest bulb on the tree but I wouldn't risk shooting them ...
Gary

[charlie b]

The oven temp only needs to be above the boiling point of whatever liquid they were immersed in.

I rinse my brass in water so the oven temp is set to 220F. I set the timer for 20min.

The change in color is oxidation. Higher temp and longer time more oxidation. The zinc in the alloy is the problem. From a metallurgy web site.

"The first sign of dezincification of brass is a change in colour, from the yellow typically found in brass to the salmon pink of pure copper metal. The pink colour may then turn reddish and then brown if the surface copper corrodes to form cuprite. More severe dezincification produces a porous, weak metal, which is mainly copper (Dinnappa and Mayanna 1987). "

[hoodat]

The oven temp only needs to be above the boiling point of whatever liquid they were immersed in.

I rinse my brass in water so the oven temp is set to 220F. I set the timer for 20min.

The change in color is oxidation. Higher temp and longer time more oxidation. "

I'm with charlie on this. Water pretty much boils/vaporizes at a little over 200. Get the brass up to temp, let them cool and load away. jd

[Budzilla 19]

wallacem, I’ll send your friend 50 30/06 cases to keep him from a potential disaster. Pm me if you find this acceptable.

[poppy42]

A couple years ago I tumbled a hundred or so 223 brass, then tossed them in a toaster oven to dry quickly. I probably had it set for 250-300. I regretted it. The brass took WAY TOO MUCH effort to size. I re-lubed and tried a few of them, but decided it was not worth the gamble of breaking something. I mean these were HARD to size. In the end I chose to toss them to the scrap bucket. And yes, they were a different color. More red than usual.

I'm thinking the problem was because I tossed them in a cold oven, then turned it on. The elements were running full bore to get the oven up to temp, and there's just no way of knowing how hot the brass got. I assume by the time the entire oven heated to 250 the brass may have been twice that. It would depend on where the heating elements were and where the temp sensor is. I still use the oven to dry brass, but I heat it up to 250 and turn it off before putting the brass in. Never had a problem doing it in that order.

Something else must’ve been going on with the brass. No way heating it up and letting it slow cool made it harder! The only way to harden something is to heat it up to a temperature and then quench it! What you described would only have made the brass soft if it changed at all. Not harder! Besides that I seriously doubt by raising your brass to 300° it would’ve been hot enough to harden it! It gets hotter than that just firing it from your weapon! Depending on how calloused your hands are you can probably hold a piece of brass that’s 200° in your hand for a second or two. Try picking up a piece of brass immediately after it’s been fired! It’s possible that your oven was way hotter than two or 300° but unless you quenched it after you heated it it still wouldn’t have gotten harder.

[mehavey]

Brass does not "quench" harden.

That said, toaster ovens can reach lead "slumping' temperatures
before settling back to the temperature you set it for at the beginning.

https://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6809137&postcount=10
https://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6809157&postcount=11
https://thefiringline.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6809282&postcount=13

[ddeck22]

I often wet tumble my cases, but then I dump them on a towel to take off the worst of the water, then put them in a food dehydrator the other half was going to get rid of.

I do the same and for the temp comparison, the food dehydrator is running at 150 degrees F, so no concern if they are in there for an hour or two

[Land Owner]

Long-long time ago, when brass was readily available, easy to find, and cheap (think range pickup), I used a gas grill to cook off the water after washing 500 x 223 cal. cases, which did not go well. Red hot is far too hot. Brass changes color in stages from yellow, orange, red, to black in time (oxidation). Turned out, every primer pocket was TOO SOFT.

Not knowing, I loaded a half dozen. Primers blew out of the first three when fired from a single shot Handi-rifle, which OPENED the action on less than hot loads! I scrapped ALL of them. Lesson Learned. [pre-dry below]

https://i.postimg.cc/J4NhWrDN/Reloading_002.jpg

[charlie b]

What I like about sites like this is it makes me do some research :)

If you have heated up brass and it 'feels' hard or brittle then you have basically removed the zinc and created a copper oxide. The brass is permanently destroyed. If you heated it up and it 'feels' soft then you have annealed it. If the case head is soft you have destroyed the case.

You cannot harden brass by heating and quenching. The only way (maybe) to harden brass is by work hardening. We notice this when we repeatedly resize and fire cases. The brass is being work hardened. Enough times (especially if sizing down a lot) and the case necks can split. That is why some folks anneal the case necks. Soften them before sizing.

Annealing cartridge brass has been documented for over a decade. Tons and tons of info out there. Basic info is, you need to be above the recrystallization temp for significant annealing to take place. Below that temp and you will see some softening. A couple papers showed temps as low as 480F will result in some softening. Does not take much time for that to take place.

Finer points. There are differences based on how the brass is worked and/or annealed prior to any measuring. If it was formed and then not fully annealed then the brass can harden very slightly at a very specific temp (between 300 and 400F). Then above that it will start to soften again. Various techniques of slightly work harden and 'partial' anneal give different results. And brass that sits for a long time does not age harden. Brass is also affected by some common chemicals, like ammonia. For example, if you clean your brass with something like windex and don't get all of the ammonia off, the brass can crack over time. There was one article that claimed the brass could be hardened by ultrasonic treatment but I could not find any info on frequencies or time or actual hardness testing.

[wallacem]

Just to finalize this discussion, my friend put the 50 cases back in his tumbler and they turned back the original color. He loaded them and shot some and they worked fine. I guess they are ok. I would have scrapped them but I guess they are ok. Wallacem in Ga.

[WRideout]

Just another alternative: after I wash my cases in citric acid, they go in an aluminum pie plate, on top of the water heater. By morning they are completely dry.

Wayne

[LabGuy]

I have access to a rather large thermonuclear device that I use to dry mine. I’m in North Florida, only works on non-cloudy days, which we have a lot of.

[TNsailorman]

I use an old dried fruit dryer that I have had for eons. I cleaned it up and now use it to dry brass. The brass does not get too hot to handle with bare hands and it only take a couple of hours or so for the wet caes to dry. works for me, james

[ioon44]

I have access to a rather large thermonuclear device that I use to dry mine. I’m in North Florida, only works on non-cloudy days, which we have a lot of.


This my favorite method of drying brass also.

[725]

Like atr, I made a nail board with hundreds of very long finishing nails on which to hang my wet brass for drying. I do this way in advance of any plans to reload. They may stay on that board for days or weeks before I get around to using them. Rarely do I have to do a beginning to end processing for a reload. I have the various components in various stages of completion.

[rintinglen]

I use a board with nails, an old towel and a hair dryer. I tumble the cases in an old towel to remove much of the water drops and then place the cases on the nails, fire up the old Remington Hair Dryer and heat them for about ten minutes. By the time they are cool to the touch, they are dry and I can reload them. I am leery of using my toaster oven (those have a very poor temperature control when starting up) and am denied the use of the kitchen oven by SWMBO, so this is what works best for me.

[OS OK]

https://i.imgur.com/kIuTEEEl.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/loxCDK2l.jpg

Make a hammock out of a large bath towel, dump your brass in the middle and then grab both ends of the towel and work them back and forth making the brass tumble in the towel from side to side...the 'wash & wax' makes the brass shed any water whether inside or out and the towel pulls it away...
Lay the towel out in the Good'ole sunshine that dries the brass in less than an hour.

https://i.imgur.com/LO96VLbl.jpg

Use your magnet to pick up the spilled SS-pins...pins that might have stayed in a case will be in the dark colored towel and you can retrieve them there.

[Bmi48219]

Make a hammock out of a large bath towel, dump your brass in the middle and then grab both ends of the towel and work them back and forth making the brass tumble in the towel from side to side...the 'wash & wax' makes the brass shed any water whether inside or out and the towel pulls it away....

I do the same but made some drying boards out of synthetic 1 by. Instead of nails I drilled 1/2” deep holes into which I glued plastic pins. Trick is to make sure the pins are longer than the brass so water drains off. I set the cases on pins and let the sun finish drying them. Thought about using finish nails but didn’t want rust stains on otherwise clean brass.

312299
I try to tumble, dry, sort and lube on sunny days but in a pinch (and if the wife isn’t home) I can set the boards on the sneaker drying shelf that came with our front load dryer. Run for < 20 minutes at low temp does the job. The sun works great but air movement gets them dry.

[dondiego]

Couldn't you just dump them onto a screen and let them dry?

[dale2242]

I place mine on a dark towel on the sidewalk in the sun in the summer.
I place them in an old dehydrator in the winter.

[Bmi48219]

Couldn't you just dump them onto a screen and let them dry?

It can take several hours of hot sun to dry the water out of inside the brass, if they’re laying on a towel or screen.
After going through the entire cleaning process I’d just as soon not have water spots on or inside my stored brass.

[kevin c]

No spots if you remove most of the water and towel off the exteriors. My wet cleaned brass gets rinsed then tumbled in a media separator or shaken vigorously over a screen to get most of the water out, slung back and forth in a towel hammock to mostly dry the exteriors, then air dried outdoors. If I’m in a hurry screen trays of brass go over a floor vent at home where my furnace makes them comfortably warm.

Water doesn’t have to be at boiling temp to evaporate. I process too much brass to use a kitchen oven, but one set at a couple hundred degrees (or even hotter but turned off) should dry small batches.

If 350° over an hour doesn’t anneal the cases, I’d guess they’re OK, but I don’t have the experience or the understanding of materials science to know for sure: I’ll defer to those who do.

[charlie b]

There is no reason to go higher than 250F in an oven. That is above boiling and all of the moisture will be gone in a matter of minutes, even if you have 'pools' inside your brass. This works even on buckets of brass as long as the temp at the center of the batch goes over boiling temp. Convection ovens do better at getting the entire batch heated. FWIW, most of the brass will be dry before it even gets the entire batch up to temp.

If you are below boiling then it becomes a time/temp curve based on humidity. If you don't mind waiting you can just leave them on your bench for a few days. As many have posted just direct sunlight works well. Again, time depends on ambient temp and humidity.

Annealing brass takes a LOT hotter, 700F or so. Your oven cannot do it.

[reddog81]

I leave mine on a towel in the basement. During the winter the humidity is low and it usually takes about a day for them to dry. In the summer when humidity is higher it takes about 2 days. With bottleneck cases you must make sure all loose water is dumped out otherwise it can take much longer.

If for some reason I need to reload cases right now, I use a heat gun and can get them dry in a few minutes.

[nanuk]

I use a dehydrator I bought cheap at a yard sale

lay cases out one layer deep, stack the trays, turn it on to high, go to bed, wake next day, if I feel like it, I'll turn off the dehydrator and put cases into containers to keep clean

my problem is not drying, it is running them through the SS tumbler and not having them come out all black and greasy.

[charlie b]

Forgot one thing. Where I live the water is VERY hard. If left to dry on stuff there is a lot of calcium deposits. I do a final rinse with distilled water.

[Bmi48219]

…..my problem is not drying, it is running them through the SS tumbler and not having them come out all black and greasy.

I had that happen once when using a HF tumbler. I tumbled just the pins for two hours with Dawn DW soap. That got rid of the greasy tar-like stuff.
Since then a couple teaspoons of Dawn in every batch (FA rotary tumbler) with Lemishine & Blue Coral car wash.

[Rockindaddy]

I wet tumble with stainless pins. A 1/2 teaspoon of Citric Acid and a couple drops of Dawn then 1/2 fill the tumble container with water. Spin for a couple of hours. Empty out the cases on a black towel in the sun. About a half day and done! I like the idea of placing the tumbled cases on nails pounded through a board. Rifle cases take longer to dry than pistol empties.

[OS OK]

Forgot one thing. Where I live the water is VERY hard. If left to dry on stuff there is a lot of calcium deposits. I do a final rinse with distilled water.

Have you ever tried rinsing in your hard water with a cap-full of Armor-All 'wash & wax' in the rinse? That stuff sheds water as I explained in post #37..

(Make a hammock out of a large bath towel, dump your brass in the middle and then grab both ends of the towel and work them back and forth making the brass tumble in the towel from side to side...the 'wash & wax' makes the brass shed any water whether inside or out and the towel pulls it away...
Lay the towel out in the Good'ole sunshine that dries the brass in less than an hour.)

I wonder what your local car wash does to combat water spots?

[charlie b]

Don't know about all car washes. The good ones have crews to do a final drying. I have had water spots after going through some of the cheaper car washes.

At car shows many of the folks would carry a couple gallons of distilled water for their final wipe down to get dust off. I used to rinse my motorcycles with it.

RainX is my go to for water shedding. But, I don't want to put anything like that on brass. Just isn't any need for it.

Kinda like using lemishine with a pin tumbler. The pins give the brass all the shine possible. To me lemishine tones down the shine a bit. I do use a little bit of Dawn to help break up the powder fouling. The pins do the rest. If not tumbling (such as with an ultrasonic clenaer) I do use citric acid cause it is simply a chemical reaction with the brass.

[porthos]

i roll them in a towel; then put them in a large "dollar store" plastic bowl and stir them around while using a heat gun.

[dale2242]

One more thing about drying SS tumbled brass.
Deprime it first.
Depriming has 2 benefits.
You get spotless primer pockets and the brass dries faster.

[Rapier]

I do not wet my cases anymore, but when I did do so, I had a stairway into the attic, runs about 130 on a sunny day, dries wet cases quick.

I start with the cases in the middle of a towel, fold both sides in then the ends, roll the cases end to end arms out straight, pour onto cookie sheets, up into the attic.