I'm going to have to disagree with my friend, Tom. IMHO it's utterly useless unless you are a benchrester trying for the mythical 10 bullets into the same hole. I have loaded ammunition with and without this tedious little step and it has made absolutely ZERO difference. The most accurate ammunition I've ever loaded was ammo that was in brass that not only did not have the flash hole deburred...but they didn't even have the primer pocket cleaned.

There areall sorts of reloading gadgets out there today that are mostly designed to make the manufacturer money andaccomplish nothing for 99.9% of all reloaders and hunters. Each of us in our reloading career will develop our own style of reloading...little rituals we think we simply MUST do. I wouldn't think of loading ammunition now without cleaning out the primer pocket...even though the first 30 or 40 thousand rounds I reloaded in my life worked wonderfully well without it. Each time Iclean a primer pocket I tell myself I'm silly...but I do it just because it's part of my ritual. I never had a round fail to fire or even "hang fire" because the primer pocket wasn't sparkling clean.

We can carry these rituals to the extreme where reloading ceases to be fun and becomes tedious. Frankly, I think it's all mostly silliness. Most of us aren't capable of shooting much less than 1 MOA at 100 yards even with a gun to our heads. Most of us don't own rifles that are capable of shooting any better than this.........regardless how tedious and how much jicking around we do with each roundof ammo we load.

What then is the point of these exercises?I suggest most of them have NOmeaning in the real world.