Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Is this bad - brass discolored after oven drying.

I over annealed some basic Bell cases (well over 2 bucks apiece) forming some obscure BP cartridge cases for a project. Brass will work harden, don't know if that is the right term, but anyway I put them through a 2 week cycle freezer to 140 deg tap water and they slowly hardened back up to 75 to 85 Brinnel Hardness. Estimated with home shop Mickey Mouse tester.

Would these cases not have had to heat up until a low red glow for them to anneal? I'm still of the mind that this condition is accelerated tarnishing due to the heat and residual cleaning solution chemicals. I appreciate everyone's contribution, but without a hardness measuring tool, I don't know that I can proceed loading these with confidence that they are safe.

How clean is your toaster oven now? You would have literally need to be in self clean mode in order to anneal those cases.

Send them to me. I’ll load and shoot them.

I tumbled/washed about 50 pieces of brass one time and threw them in the oven to dry, I don't remember the temperature or drying time because it was a couple years ago. But anyways I turned the oven off and left them In There to cool. My girlfriend at the time did not know they were in there and turned the oven on to like 425 or something to pre heat. She went to go put in what ever she was baking and realized there was a bunch of bass in there. They looked pretty similar to the pictures posted. I didn't wanna risk it and decided to just recycle them because my hands and eyes are more important to me then 50 pieces of brass.

I no longer dry brass in the oven. I put them in the food dehydrator at like 115 for a hour or so untill dry. Works great.

Stammster may well be correct, they probably aren't annealed. But, have they been compromised in any way? Why risk it if you don't know? Just thinking out loud.

Just wear thick glasses when you test them

It terrible when a person gets so old they forget whether there cooking dinner or reloading ammo! Anyways carry on!!! Lol

Tune in next week for why did my Lazagna not go bang when I loaded it in my 30/06

Hahaha!! Good one!
By the way I love lasagna haha.

Reloading is somewhat experimentation so it's no wonder as experimenters we do things like put our brass in ovens among other things....Lol

Yes, there's nothing better than a good Lazagna

Dont know if the above brass cases are still usable or not.... Maybe so. And yes there might be a way to return them to a safe hardness if they are not that way ;now.

Different methods i have used to dry brass which seem to work:

= Air dry, especially if you have a cake tin which is dark on the inside & placed in the sun.

= Oven dry. Brass on a cookie sheet in cold oven. Oven heated to 175 F and then shut off. Brass allowed go cool to until easy to handle.

= Electric Griddle: Rescued old griddle spouse was going to put in garbage. Found heat control setting which provides about 170 F temperatures. [ i used a good quality digital lab thermometer] Ran griddle for an hour or so controlled by an electric timer control.

= Air fryer dry. Used a fancy air fryer with a 'dehydrate' setting. Set it to 175 F. Ran it for an hour which was the shortest time setting for 'dehydrate'. Allowed to cool to room temperature.

All the above worked well enough for me. Helped the process along by working to shake water out of the cases.

The author of the above makes no claim expressed or implied that any or all of these methods will be free of any resulting marital strife.

I'm going to break from the herd here.....

I anneal my brass by holding it in a flame of a plumbers torch and count to six or 7...and then into a small galvanized decorative bucket I bought at Walmart for a $1.00...

Then I let it air cool for 5 minutes or less...

The tumbler shines them up, if they need that.

I run my brass probably a lot more reloads than most do on the campfire...

a little prudence on the reload scale also helps stretch out brass life, quite a bit...

you guys are over thinking this stuff.....what makes ya think you need to dunk them in water? To Cool them?

air drying does that....not even using water eliminates the entire step...

I'm not experiencing brass failures, except maybe once in a blue moon... and that is after the piece of brass has seem 25 to 30 reloads or more...
so I must be doing something right....

When you anneal, you're going to get to glowing red after four or five seconds of a flame that is 1800 degrees. You're actually going to get them well over 750 degrees for the fraction of a second that annealing occurs.

Your toaster oven did NOT anneal the cases. The tarnish is from uneven heating created by the toaster oven element that heats up and cools in cycles to maintain desired temperature..275 degrees will create the tarnish and it is much hotter than it needs to be to dry the brass. In fact, you can airdry them if the tarnish bothers you. When I tumble, I will rinse then dump on a towel and pat dry, then throw them in the oven for 20 minutes at about 160 degrees. I don't get the tarnish to the degree you do, but there is a minor discoloration.

Maybe I misunderstood, but he was tumbling the cases in a wet-tumbler. Not quenching them to cool after annealing.

275F did not damage them; they are just oxidized / tarnished.

If you are spooked to shoot them, I’ll take them off your hands.

Thanks everyone. I was needing some confirmation and instruction if I had missed any consideration. I think I'll load these cases. Now, does anyone know where to get some matching iridescent bullets? :o)

Here is the reason to immediately quench annealed cases…

“ Cartridge brass is only hardened by cold working. The crystal dislocations caused by the cold working lock the crystal lattice and make it harder and more difficult to form more dislocations thus increasing it strength. When brass is heated, new crystals nucleate at the dislocations and the new crystals are small. If the brass is quenched at this point, the brass retains the small crystals and is annealed with very few dislocations and is stress free. This is the condition you want for your case necks. If the brass is slowly cooled, the small crystals begin to coalesce and grow into larger crystals and the properties suffer because the large crystal boundaries are not strong. Also stress corrosion cracking can more easily occur at the larger crystal boundaries.“

copy/paste from the link:
"To Quench or Not to Quench
Notice that there was no mention of quenching the brass. To anneal brass, all that is required is heat and time. Once you have allowed the structure of the brass to transform, it's done. You can cool it as slowly or as quickly as you like and it won't matter.

The myth that you need to quench brass comes from the requirement to do so when heat treating some kinds of steel. Those steels harden by a very different mechanism that has nothing to do with brass or work hardening at all.

Damon Cali is the creator of the Bison Ballistics website and a high power rifle shooter currently living in Nebraska."

https://bisonballistics.com/articles/the-science-of-cartridge-brass-annealing

I do not h20 quench. I allow the case to air cool. I use the method described in link below:
https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbt...7040/dna-candle-case-anneal#Post12607040

The quote is copy and pasted from an engineer who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories for over 30 years performing FEA analysis on different metals and materials and is expert in Metallurgy.

He applied his knowledge to all facets of handloading, rifle accuracy, and barrel harmonics.

the method I described on how I do annealing with my brass's neck EVERY reload....

much of all my brass are broken into lots of 10 for range and field work... varmints, target shooting, load testing etc.

I have lots of brass of 10 count, that I have reloaded up to 50 times and counting with ZERO neck splits..
SO... it seems to work....

I appreciate MR. Camuglia taking the time to post his explanation, and I respect the information put forth...

however the way I've been doing it is rather simpler, and the results I am getting evidently seem to get the job done.

One group of 10 pieces in a lot group, in 223... have been reloaded 110 times now in testing it...Range pick up brass, Remington Head Stamp...
out of a group of 10, in that many reloadings, there has been 3 casualties in that lot #.... each were operator error at the reload bench, with the press or die...

nothing to do with the annealing method...

bottom line, there is more than one way to skin a cat....

I have played with annealing brass, and drop into a small galvinized bucket and put it in the freezer to cool off for 30 minutes, while doing something else...
that had the same results as just letting it air cool...

Sounds good Seafire.

It’s just some information that I uncovered while learning to anneal cartridge brass. Anytime you’re researching a subject you come across different ideas and methods for doing things, but since the information came from a really knowledgeable guy with a unique background, I always quench immediately.

You always have good results and get a lot of loads out of each piece of brass, and that’s the bottom line. I’m sure it works fine, but it may not be as good at it as it could be according to Mr. Harral.

My gunsmith doesn’t quench either. 🤷🏿‍♂️