Is it really necessary to deprime brass before wet cleaning?
If so, why?
Short answer is NO.
Personally I like my brass really clean and shiny so I do multiple passes of cleaning. My first run is for 30 minutes with pins, dawn and citric acid, dry it in my brass dryer. Assuming it's indoor range brass (outdoor range brass I process differently and will take some longer initial runs) the brass is honestly clean enough to reload.
The reason I do this is because I don't want dirty brass going through my case feeder or dies. Some folks use a decapping die, but you will still be spreading carbon and LEAD dust all over everything if you try to decap dirty brass.
One thing to keep in mind is that you really shouldn't let wet primed brass sit around wet. It's best to dry it out as soon as possible even if it means getting it discolored slightly in the oven. The reason is depending on the primers, some of them will build up slight corrosion and when you go to deprime it you end up with a ringer. With that being said from my experience in processing over 50K brass, 20K of it outdoor brass I've only had about 25-30 ringers and 99% of them were from outdoor brass that probably went through multiple wet dry periods were it sat wet for weeks.
My next step is to then resize/deprime nicely cleaned brass. If you like, you can even very very lightly lube the cases (like 2 sprays of hornady one shot in a bag of 1000 and shake them around). After that is done, I run them again for about an hour to an hour and a half with dawn, citric acid and steel pins. After this is done I rinse them off and run them one more time for just 5 minutes with a tiny bit of citric acid and wash and wax. No pins this time. This last run is just to give them a quick bath in wash and wax which will keep them from tarnishing (for me it's lasted over a year without tarnishing).
When I show my reloads to folks they say they look cleaner and better than factory rounds and that is all that is important. If the rounds don't look good then they are not worth using. J/K. But in all seriousness I do take pride in my work and don't want sloppy dirty half assed rounds.
One other thing to also consider. Some folks don't bother resizing/depriming before doing their reloading on a progressive press (i.e. they take the cleaned/dried cases from my step one and reload those) . There is nothing wrong with doing that to save time and realistically clean primer pockets don't make a difference, but I much prefer to just add the extra cycle and recommend that you do as well. The reason is I like to get into a routine while loading my rounds, that is I eyeball every powder drop and eyeball every bullet drop on each cycle. When I skipped the resize/deprime cycle I would occasionally end up with a crimped case, a case that cracked after resizing, a ringer, a 380 (when doing 9mm) etc. While I detect all of these once they hit station 2, they cause a disruption in my reloading flow. I'd rather take the time up front to catch all of these while just sizing/depriming and then when I'm actually reloading it's 100% problem free and I can concentrate on just the powder drop and bullet drop. This method has been rock solid for over 30K rounds.
. Go buy an ultrasonic cleaner, fill with water and Hornady angel sweat, dump in deprimed brass and wait. Rinse with tap water and let air dry for a couple of days or bake in a 200F oven for however long it takes. (Wait until Her Royal Highness is not in residence, of course.)
