Storing dirty brass, or clean it up ASAP?

Soon(R) I will be getting my first rifle, my wife will be getting her first handgun, and I'm already eyeing what my second handgun is going to be. That's a lot of brass that, so far, we're just leaving behind at the range.

I quite frankly lack the funds to get into reloading just yet, but thought I might start collecting our spent brass in the meantime anyway. However, I think I read/heard somewhere that the residue left behind on the brass by firing a round is corrosive, although now that it may matter I'm unable to find anything about it.

So my question is a pretty basic one: Will I need to clean this brass in the short term, or can I simply just dump it into the spare ammo cans I have lying around (with those moisture-absorbing thingies that I can't offhand remember what they're called) and keep them as they are for the medium-to-long-term?

Allowing brass to be stored uncleaned will certainly speed up the corrosion process... in most "case's" (pun intended ) it will still clean up pretty well even after being stored dirty, especially if you intend to wet-tumble with stainless media... but the longer you put off cleaning your brass, the more likely excessive corrosion will set in and your percentage of cases corroded beyond use will increase exponentially IMO.

For reference, I recently cleaned up a small lot of once-fired 44 Mag brass I had been saving over the last 3 or 4 year's, and after wet-tumbling all but 3 or 4 cases cleaned up nicely... had I cleaned them sooner I would probably not have lost any.

Clean 'em if you got 'em

I would pick up and store the brass.
I would even pick up other brass the you don't even shoot yet.
Worst case is you have to sell it down the road.

This right here, I've stored dirty brass for 20 years w/o a problem.

Thanks guys, that's exactly the info I'm looking for!

Even if I lose a couple of cartridges, I'm not all that concerned about it, especially since that's still a big improvement over losing all of them!

Just think of every single case you leave behind as a dime you have already paid out and willl have to pay out again in order to reload. I love going to the range and finding the ground littered with dimes (or quarters for rifle brass).

Pick them up. Put them in a coffee can (or whatever) and save them. You don't need to clean them if they are dry.

I'll shake mine off first, to get rid of any dirt and then throw them in plastic buckets. When I get bored, I'll go ahead and clean the brass.

you should definitely get a tumbler. It shouldn't hurt anything to store your brass dirty but go get a tumbler one less thing to buy and one less step once you take the plunge. Get a reloading press to store your clean brass in too

Fired brass can be stored clean or dirty.

What you don't want to do is store it wet in a sealed plastic container.

Just store in a cardboard box for now.

I'm in the home stretch right now of processing (I'm going to guess) close to 3,000 pieces of .30-06 brass that I've kept over the last 10 years. It was my winter project. It's all final-tumbled except for about 500 cases, and it's all come out as shiny as new.

Worst case, use some (near) boiling water and lemishine. It'll clean them up real nice for storage.

You can go ahead and wash them in Dawn and Lemishine in a bucket. Agitate them a couple times with a paint stick. Leave them in for about 30 minutes you'll be surprised how well just that works.

I had a large box of range .233 I didn't even want to de-prime (universal) without some cleaning so I tried it.

Tom

I clean them up and then seal them up in baggies, freezer bags, plastic jars/containors. I've had them stored like that several months and they are still shiny and bright.

I wouldn't use a Lemishine wash without depriming the cases. Trapped solution under the primers will cause corrosion.

Knock the worst of the dirt, sand, and gravel out, and save it in a bucket, box, or what ever you want. What you can do to get way ahead is to simply get the brass sorted by cartridge. There may be cases you can sell or trade, and if you shoot at a productive range, you can pick up enough cases to buy your reloading equipment. Really.

Save all the rifle brass you shoot yourself separate from the brass you pick up. This brass will be cleaner, and you will know it's fired 1 time, to start out anyway.

A friend gave me a bucketful of brass he'd picked up at the range one day when he wasn't shooting.
He wasn't shooting because it was raining, so he picked up brass instead. (It didn't make sense to me, either).
Anyway, he stored the wet brass in a bucket in his open pickup for a few weeks before he gave it to me, and it rained often enough to keep the bucket half full of water.

It made it harder to get some of those primers out intact.

Pick up the brass, but make sure it's dry before you store it.

I agree with the others. At least pick it up, if you get in to reloading later you already have your brass. If you decide not to get in to reloading, there's a market for once fired brass.

Thanks, everyone! Now my only concern is to hope that my wife won't kill me having yet another box just hang around in our too-small apartment...

I pretty much always clean any brass I bring home. I'll get the dirty work over with first and then it's ready to reload at a later date.

I do have some old Midway bulk milsurp 556 that I got back in '95 which needs cleaning, but those are differing years and I just never got around to cleaning all of them.

If I have a box of 50 9mm that I just fired, I'll wait until I have a few hundred and then clean them in one batch, so my OCD is not as bad as it is for some here.

Chris

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