I cleaned out my truck today and found a speed loader of .38 special HP's in in the bottom of my cupholder, covered in sticky goo, presumably a mixture of soft drinks and melted candy.  There's no doubt in my mind that the ammo is still good, but it's gonna take a serious scrubbing to de-gunkify them.  Is there any type of cleaner/solvent I should use/avoid using on my ammo to avoid corrosion/killing the primers/etc?  Can I windex or 409 them?   

Thanks guys.

I'd be careful about anything with ammonia in it. The ammonia can leech copper out of brass and weaken the cases. Probably not an issue if it doesn't sit on there very long, but something to be aware of.

Is it bad to throw live ammo in the tumbler?

That's a hotly debated question among reloaders.

There's the concern that tumbling could increase the burn rate of the powder by breaking it into smaller pieces or wearing off burn rate reducing coatings. That could have disastrous results when the ammo is fired. I've never heard of it actually happening, but I wouldn't want to be the first either.

I'd recommend against it, but if you do tumble live ammo don't do it for more than a few minutes.

Re: tumbling ammo to clean it.

I don't do it, because of the potential as Jesse points out of some way or another changing the burn rate of the powder inside.

But, for what it's worth, one of the guys who showed me how to reload a number of years back always did tumble the ammo he made, in order to remove the case lube from the completed ammo.  He never had any problems doing that.  However, he also only reloaded 45ACP with W231 powder.  Don't know if that did or didn't have anything to do with nothing happening to him, it's just a possible data point.  His tumbler was also the rotary kind, not the vibratory kind, so maybe it was quite a bit gentler at turning the ammo over in the tumbler media.

The alcohol would be the best, but a quick 15 in the tumbler after the wipe down to make 'em shiny will not hurt.  I've done chrono tests with ammo that was tumbled 1/2 hour hour hour and 1/2 and 2 hours.  No difference in velocity.

Jesse, that may be a possibility, but a few things come to mind-

1.  How do the rounds leave the factories all super shiny?  The get tumbled up all pretty.
2.  With all the viration ammo sees in shipment from the maker to the end user, and then to the range, I think a lot of folks spend time worrying about this, and they really needn't.

Edit:

T.-

CLP at the most I think.

Actually, that's a very bad idea.  You know how CLP has a tendency to spread, and it's hard to get off by just wiping?  Not good on a loaded round, big potential for primer killing.  Basically you need the "C" element, but the "L" & "P" components are detrimental in this case.

LSN, now that we've all thrown in our 2 cents,   Update?  Results?