Seafire,
I bought my first .17 caliber rifle 18 years ago, a CZ.17 HMR--after waiting a year to see if the cartridge was going to survive. It did, and when I bought one also bought couple quality, coated cleaning rods and maybe 3-4brushes. The rifle's very first 3-shot group at 100 yards measured slightly under 1/4". Never had any problem with brushes or rod, but then never ran the brushes through the bore "dry." However, soon discovered the rifle didn't need to be cleaned. In fact have only cleaned it twice in thousands of rounds--and each time the accuracy degraded noticeably until a few more rounds were fired.
Have had similar results with other .17s, including the .17 Fireball, which was my second .17--a Remington 700. Never had any problem with resizing brass, but used a Redding bushing neck-sizing die--without the expander ball--rather than a typical FL die. Brass lasted a LONG time, with annealing after every 4 shots or so. But I also sorted the brass for neck thickness within .001"--and back then over 90% qualified.
Within a few years also bought an early 700 BDL in ,17 Remington, which my bore-scope indicated hadn't been fired much. It shot well from the get-go, and didn't foul enough to require cleaning within 100 rounds. But after a little experimentation I was using very clean-burning Ramshot Big Game, rather than one of the dirty-burning older spherical powders. After that I installed Dyna Bore Coat and the rifle would go 200 rounds without groups opening.
Eventually tried the ,17 Hornet (a CZ 527) and couldn't see any difference in field performance between it and the .17 Fireball. It also used less than 2/3 the powder of the FB, and brass was a LOT cheaper and easier to find. Haven't bothered DBC'ing the bore because it fouls almost as little as the CZ HMR.
Am still using the same brushes and rods purchased way back when, but don't find much reason to use them.
