I've been thinking about this thread and I want to appologize to ShootingNut for my contribution to topic drift. It happens all too often on too many topics on so many forums and lately I have caught myself getting involved way to often. I'm trying hard to be more respectful to those posters who deserve it.
The original post asked about primer detonation.
For many years I loaded commercially.
Combining that with 32 years of personal reloading, I've loaded well over 3 million rounds of handgun ammunition. SO far I've never had a primer detonate and I've used just about every method of priming there is. Currently all of my priming is done with an RCBS hand priming tool. I like being able to feel the primer seat and the RCBS unit is much more durable than the Lee tools I used to use.
I've primed over 75,000 with my current RCBS tool wheras my Lees needed rebuilding or replacement after about 25K-30K. But I digress, this post isn't about hardware.
Anyway...
One sentence in the original post has been bouncing around in my brain.
As you know, some seat slicker than snot, others kind of crunch into place.
I was at the range the other day, handing a shooter a box of .38 Special S&B ammo he had just purchased and he remarked that he'd never used it before and asked if it was any good. I remarked that I liked it and that so far we had received no complaints about it. He then asked if the "empties" were any good for reloading so I had to tell him the truth.
My answer was, "Yes and No."
Yes, it's pretty good brass. I've reloaded a lot of it over the past six or seven years. Especially recently. I've got some S&B .45acp that's been reloaded so many times that the headstamps are almost completely erased. I've got several hundred S&B .44 Magnum cases that're on their 10th loading and some .38 special that are closing in on 20. In my book that's good performance.
But I added the "No" because it does have one slight problem.
Or should I say one
tight problem. In some lots the primers are, shall we say, a little bit on the snug side. You can notice it during depriming. It takes just a little more effort on the handle and the primers come out really "domed".
Now I've had some lots that deprimed and then reprimed just fine.
I've had some lots where the new primers "crunched into place".
And before I caught on to the problem I even had a few that just plain crunched.
I really hate having 100 bright and shiney cases, 100 bullets and only 97 primers. 
Now over the years, I've also had repriming problems happen once or twice with MagTech (CBC) and probably four or five times with PMC (usually the older lots). Sellier & Bellot however is by far the biggest culprit. I don't know if they are crimping the primers in place or if they just have different ideas about primer pocket specifications and tolerances, but sometimes repriming them is downright tricky. Or at least it used to be.
Nowadays, as a matter of course, I treat all of my once fired S&B brass to a ride on my RCBS primer pocket swager.*
Now when reloading S&B cases my primers "seat slicker than snot" on a brass brothel doorknob. Which as you all know is almost as slick as the scum on a Lew-eazy-ana swamp.
*I've also used an RCBS deburring tool to chamfer the edge of the pockets on some S&B cases that were prone to crunching primers. Afterwards they primed much easier but still felt just a little snug.
Swaging the pockets seems to be the best solution as well as being much easier on my hands.
All in all I'd rather have the pockets too tight and need swaging than to have them too loose and dealing with the associated problems.
I hope this info is helpful to ShootingNut and everyone else.
