I clean with acetone after all case work and before I prime. They come out of the gun without the tarnish that used to be there after firing. I might tumble a cpl times/year.
Acetone!?!? That stuff just keeps showing up as a useful tool in the kit. I use it as part of my bore cleaning regimen now AND as a way to apply hex boron nitride to the inside of the cleaned bore, making a suspension of hbn in acetone, soaking a patch, running it through as the acetone just evaporates away leaving a thin film of the hbn behind. Acetone, pure alcohol, either or. Someone has suggested mineral spirits work even better, I'll have to see.
I know I mentioned this elsewhere once but my wife confronted me (in a good natured way) the other day…
I had a bottle of her nail polish remover (which is acetone), an old hair dryer that I had been using to apply heat to a vibratory tumbler when tossing projectiles in hbn (might also work for the chicken tumbled rice I mentioned earlier
), a nail file with that I had "borrowed" to smooth down a part on something EVER SO SLIGHTLY, all of my conventional tools seemed like they'd be too rough for the job, and I had stolen her tweezers to get some very tiny springs back inside something, I can't even remember what now, but my ape fingers as she calls them kept dropping the spring…tweezers worked great.
Anyway, she was
a) a little peeved at me for "borrowing" all these things without putting them back and
B) genuinely curious, concerned perhaps
, about what exactly it was that I had beEn doing in my "gun room" with a nail file, tweezers, a hair dryer, and nail polish remover!!!