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

I tumbled 140 30-06 cases with a bit of citric acid (not a lot at all), some Dawn dish liquid and the saved liquid I previously used that had whatever Frankford Arsenal gave as a free sample when I bought the tumbler. They came out after two hours looking pretty good. I rinsed them briefly and dumped them onto a towel to remove most of the water. Then I put them into the toaster oven for one hour at 275*. They came out with a dark, iridescent blue/purple color to them. Other than looking odd when loaded with a bright brass bullet, they look kinda cool. However, I'd like some reassurance that I didn't harm them in any way that makes them unsafe. What thinks you?

My pictures were too big to upload, but I'll get to work on that and try to get them posted here for reference.

I think 275 is too hot. Try 130-160 degrees next time.

Thanks, Dinny

The ones on the top of the pile were discolored the most while those more covered underneath the pile were less affected.

But did I harm them? I can deal with the color, and yes, I'll go a lot lower next time. Thanks.

They look…annealed?

My same thought. As far as damage, I don't know for certain but there's gotta be a reason why serious reloaders only anneal the shoulder/neck portion of the case.

Check out these cartridges loaded in Lapua brass. Note the color in the neck/shoulder area. That's the only place you want to see that color.

275F isn’t going to hurt anything.

Retumble. Use less Citric. Rinse thoroughly immediately after tumbling. Air dry.

The problem is the cycling of the toaster oven and proximity of the heating element may have exposed some of the cases to a good bit more than 275.

To what? 350F? 400?

Still isn’t hurting anything other than accelerating surface oxidation due to residual citric acid.

You have to get up around 700* to anneal brass, They're just tarnished.

^^^ Actually you only need to get to the high 400Fs (482F ish) to start annealing rifle brass, but would need to be there for a long time to do enough damage to the case head (ie reduce strength).

Example below of a brass alloy (copper/silver). Caution: this is not be same composition of your brass (copper/zinc). for illustration purposes - but get the point

They may have just needed more rinsing. Also don’t let the brass sit in a wet tumbler for long after a tumbling cycle. The contaminates will drop out of suspension and coat the brass. If you ran it in a timer and it finished 20 minutes ago run it again for a few minutes then rinse it right away. The reason it’s helpful to use a squirt of Dawn or wash and wax car wash is to hold the junk in suspension better.

After a cycle I dump the liquid out then fill it back up with the hose and rinse it a few times. Then I drop the brass in a bucket with a gallon of distilled water and swish it around, then I dry it. I reuse the distilled water.

I would be hesitant to use a toaster oven to dry brass. I use an old food dehydrator. It holds a lot of brass and dries it well without overheating it or having any hot spots around a heating element. They are cheap at places like Goodwill.

I know that the cleaning solution that comes with it can be reused but I wouldn’t add any more citric acid as it may already be acidic and you don’t want to overdo it and leach too much copper out of the brass.

I thought I had messed up some cases after tumbling once but I retumbled them for 30 minutes with just a squirt of Dawn and they came out great. They just had a film to them. You might try that, then rinse it real good and dry it again at a lower temp and see how it turns out.

I'd keep a close watch on them when I shot them.

Yep, from top to bottom........

Here’s a general question - What does annealed look like?

What your “seeing” in the above Lapua cases is oxidation caused by the annealing process. You can’t see annealing unless you look at the grain structure under a microscope. I.e. Brass would look the same if you could somehow heat the necks only to 300F for a longer period of time - but there would be no annealing at that temp.

My Lapua cases have never looked like that....I guess I got ripped off.

I put mine in the Sun on a cookie sheet when it’s hot, oven on lowest setting for 30 minutes if sun isn’t out.

This is what I thought too. I was pretty sure that the temp was not harmful otherwise I wouldn't have set it there. Ordinarily, I dry things as 150* so I guess I was just a little impatient that night.

Did you preheat the toaster over before placing the brass in to dry? If not you just may have ruined that brass. Just placing them into the oven cold without the preheat means the oven has to reach the preheat temperature before "cooking" whatever was placed in the oven. To do that it get way hotter that the set temp for a while, just hot much hotter I don't know. However, an example. I use a toaster over to oven treat cast bullets. IO put a bunch of carefully cast bullets on the tray and placed then into the oven, turned it on and then set the temp. After letting the bullets bake at the proper temp for the four hours, I pulled the tray from the oven and there were the 200 bullets. All had slumped and were useless That temp had to have gone over 550 degrees as the oven preheated itself and was high enough to ruin the bullets.

What you might try as a test is if you have some "good" brass on hand and a fine file, run the file across the rim of the "good" cartridge lightly and note the amount of drag. The try one of the tarnished cases. If the drag is greater, there's a good chance the brass is ruined. I can't think of any other way to test them and shooting them without some kind of test is a gamble I wouldn't take. your choice.
Paul B.

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. 🤷🏿‍♂️