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Back in the early 80s when I was preparing to get into reloading, I spent some time at the local gun shops talking to a lot of people about this new venture. I was interested to know what were the most important things to keep in mind, and hear about the experiences from people who had been doing this for a while so I could avoid making their earlier mistakes.
The one thing that impressed me was that nearly everyone agreed that the primer was the weakest link in the chain. It was the easiest to botch up and have fail, and the one part you needed to pay the most attention to if reliability was your goal. The general consensus was that cleaning out the primer pocker prior to reloading a new primer was critical in this regard.
Now I have cleaned out primer pockets for every round I have ever reloaded. Every one. And to date I have only had ONE round I reloaded fail. And we are talking about many thousands of rounds since the early 80s.
But the progressive loaders don't have any means to clean out the primer pockets, do they? So is this step really not all that important or is this just a tradeoff you need to make in order to get the high volume reloading that a progressive press allows?
The one thing that impressed me was that nearly everyone agreed that the primer was the weakest link in the chain. It was the easiest to botch up and have fail, and the one part you needed to pay the most attention to if reliability was your goal. The general consensus was that cleaning out the primer pocker prior to reloading a new primer was critical in this regard.
Now I have cleaned out primer pockets for every round I have ever reloaded. Every one. And to date I have only had ONE round I reloaded fail. And we are talking about many thousands of rounds since the early 80s.
But the progressive loaders don't have any means to clean out the primer pockets, do they? So is this step really not all that important or is this just a tradeoff you need to make in order to get the high volume reloading that a progressive press allows?