Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Deburring flash hole --- Necessary?

If anybody here hasn't heard of the semi-famous (at least among benchrest shooters) "Houston Warehouse Experiments," the were conducted in a 325-yard long warehouse, where the were no variations in wind, light etc. PRECISION SHOOTING magazine published an article on them, and it can also be found on the Internet if somebody wants to read the entire thing:

https://precisionrifleblog.com/2013...house-lessons-in-extreme-rifle-accuracy/

But the major points Virgil King (the benchrester who owned the warehouse) found after considerable experimenting by him and other benchrest shooters, were:

Myths Busted:
Powder charges, as long as they were fairly consistent and bracketed within a couple of grains, were not important. He threw all of his charges with a Belding & Mull powder measure, and for one experiment he shot groups using three different powder measure settings (51, 52 & 53) … all three groups were identical.
Lot variation in powder didn’t seem to have any effect on accuracy, even on when using IMR 4198, which has a reputation for varying considerably from lot to lot. He would just buy powder as he needed instead of laying in a big supply, because he found no evidence to support that powder lot variance affected accuracy in the least.
He never saw an inaccurate primer, and was unable to detect any accuracy variances resulting from seating pressure.
Rumors have persisted for years that some rifles shoot proportionally better at 200 yards than 100 yards, or vice versa. Virgil files that one under “occultism.” His experience in the warehouse was, if a rifle was shooting a consistent .100″ at 100 yards, it shot a consistent .200″ at 200 yards.
He did NOT uniform primer pockets.

This may all seems radically different, but for decades some of the common benchrest stuff that made it into major gun magazines was also BS, at least in the long run. One big fad for a while was cleaning bores every X number of rounds, often around 20-25, but sometimes other numbers were given. In fact one loading manual published back then suggested cleaning intervals "for best accuracy" in various cartridges from 10-25 rounds. This may have been valid in their test barrels, at least at the time--when many "accuracy powders" were sphericals that left considerable power fouling. But that has changed enormously since, due in part to major improvements in powders.

As I noted in my earlier post, I do a lot more handloading than the average hunter, the reason I try to stick with what works, and don't do stuff that doesn't make any difference.

But have also noted a number of times that many handloaders prefer to spend more time than they need to on minutiae, because it's a hobby that takes them away from the everyday world. That's great--but that doesn't mean the minutiae actually makes a difference.