I did not mention in my original post, but I use a .40 cal bronze brush, which does work a lot better than a .38 for this.

Yesterday I tried stringing a strip of lead remover cloth in between the brush rows and that works pretty good too, used a toothbrush to clean off the lead cloth lint from the brush afterwords.

I have a small collection of lead remover cloths I've amassed, here's the best to worst as far as performance in my experience:

1) old 1990's hoppes l-r cloth (the usa white one, not current yellow chinese)

2) tipton l-r cloth (works great, but it's pretty thick and juicy, kind of messy)

3) birchwood-casey l-r cloth

4) midway house brand l-r cloth (yellow, not so great, but works for light cleaning/shining the barrel & frame and getting combustion stains off the (stainless) cylinder sides without buffing it up too much.

I only clean off the cyl face every so often, like others said above, it only gets dirty the next time you shoot.

Some good stuff posted here, thanks. Hopefully this will be of some use to you guys with the 10 chamber 617's heh heh..

Dave