16ga.com ~ View topic - How to clean old REM "EXPRESS"green hulls?

Joined: 16 Nov 2006 Posts: 367

Acquired 30 old REM EXPRESS green hull, five are solid plastic bas wad, using the 209 style primers. The others are paper base wads and use thee 157 primers.

How to quickly to wash without soaking the base wad??

WIll leave on the furnace to dry.

Thanks

Joined: 10 Jul 2011 Posts: 31 Location: St.Louis, MO

If they have the fiber base wad I wouldn't get them wet at all. I washed some AAHS hulls in 28 ga an let them dry for a couple of weeks. They appeared to be dry so I loaded them and had several duds so I have stopped washing hulls all together other than to wipe them down one at a time.

Hate to admit I have done this but.........put them in a vibratory tumbler with corncob and an ounce or so of Hoppe's #9. Leave them in there for awhile, like 8 hours or so.

I had some real nasty AA hulls that the brass was tarnished on and it cleaned them up really well. I clean any hull using this method if they are dirty, muddy, tarnished etc.

Dry swab them out w/ a test tube cleaning brush or something similar and let it go w/ that. wetting them will ruin them.

For only 30 hulls,

on the outside,use a rag with armor-all

Inside Q-Tip to clean out spiderwebs and feathers.

Mike

All of the obsolete polyformed (not one piece plastic) Remington hulls w/ compressed fiber base wads take the obsolete 57 size primers which are smaller. These obsolete hulls might or might not have brass rims.

All the newer polyformed hulls which take the bigger 209 size primers and even some of the obsolete ones have brass or copper washed steel rims and not brass rims. It's not a good idea to force bigger 209 sized primers into smaller 57 sized primer pockets. Damaging the fragile compressed fiber base wads is likely. Don't do it. It's not worth the risk.

Any polyformed hulls w/ noticeably corroded rims are not safe to reuse. Corroded rims can split which will allow the plastic tube body to separate from the rim and base wad when the load is fired. This is bad even with one piece hulls, but it's unacceptable w/ polyformed hulls since there is nothing left to contain the hot gases and seal the breech. The uncontained hot gases can and will wreak havoc to you and your gun.

Hulls w/ corroded and rusted steel rims are especially not safe to reload. The damage to the steel rim is both inside and out in all likelihood. Toss them and move on before you end up making what could be a very costly mistake. A word to the wise-- the cost of replacing these corroded old hulls w/ good ones is money well spent. Good luck and stay safe.