Cleaning hulls
Oldnamvet--First of all, kudos for tidiness. I'm sure your old First Sar'nt and your mom would both approve.
Agree with the previous posters--a muddy hull needs cleaning. But I have so many hulls that one that's really cruddy I'd just toss. Having said that, IMHO, wiping hulls never hurts.
Since you give 'em a wipe, I'd do it BEFORE running through the loading machinery. You do it to save crud in the shotgun; why not also save crud in the loader?
A thought--Back when WIN was first introducing the AA hull, they tried to reload 'em to destruction. Win said that the hulls turned completely black but they claimed that they couldn't actually reload them so many times they'd fail because of reloading. Those must have been REALLY dirtied-up hulls, but please to note that Win said they still worked fine. The ad I read said that the Win engineers gave up on trying to find how many loadings an AA would tolerate.