Home Forums Reloading Big Game Rifles Cleaning primer pockets

Do you remove your hat when you do it? (From another thread.)

I have a Sinclair tool, use it sometimes, usually just a mild scrape with the small RCBS tool.

In a hunting rifle, say a Mod 70 fwt 30-06...is "deburring" the Flash Hole of Winchester/Remington brass really necessary? I have only had a few really tight, blueprinted, custom jobs that I could tell it worked on. Same with cutting the primer pockets with the Sinclair Tool. For along time I only used lapua, Norma and Nosler brass that was already prepped during manufacture.???

To be honest, I probably couldn't tell if deburring the inside of the flash hole made any difference for most loading, but it gave me a warm and fuzzy doing it just to be sure I was covering all my bases. I've come to the conclusion that loading is a total of a lot of sequential processes depending on how accurate you want/need your loads to be. Each process is incremental to the end product, so skipping one step in the process like deburring the flash holes, or chamfering the case mouths, or cleaning the primer pockets may or may not make a difference by themselves, the incremental nature of the whole process contributes to the end result.

To make a long story longer, it probably doesn't really matter all that much for hunting loads as long as you're not shooting extreme long range. In fact, in most cases I doubt you could measure the group difference in most hunting rifles with/without the extra steps. In a target rifle or across the course rifle it will probably be measurable, but I wouldn't know for sure....

Bob