Play With Your Food: Clean Brass With Rice
There are many ways to clean brass.
Cleaning your brass is a necessity. Foreign material in or on our cases can cause all kinds of problems. Damage to expensive reloading dies, damage to rifles, and various other issues can arise if proper care is not taken. Historically, shooters tumbled their brass in walnut or corn cob media using vibrator tumblers. This method works fairly well and has long since been the "standard" method. In recent years, a couple new technologies were explored. Ultrasonic cleaning was first, and used the power of ultrasonic transducers to "explode" the surface of the brass clean. Next came using a rotary tumbler, water, dish soap, and stainless steel pins to clean the brass. I have used each of the aforementioned methods, and in each instance I was left with the feeling that there is much room for improvement. A couple weeks ago while researching a completely unrelated topic, I was sent down a rabbit hole on the internet. You know how that is. Well I landed on an old forum post in some obscure corner of the internet, which outlined the use of rice and a vibratory tumbler to clean brass. That particular user hailed it as the best possible solution to the problem. The thought had never occurred to me before. I scooped up a handful of rice we had laying around and just by playing with it for a bit, was convinced that it may have merit. I had to try it. This article is the culmination of that testing.
