One I've been reading about this evening and wanted to see if more people had an opinion on this.
Firsty, I've only ever used a bore snake on every rifle I've had, never had any issues and the barrel always looks perfectly clean after a couple of pulls through - I normally apply a few drops of cleaning oil to the first part of the bore snake so as it gets pulled through it gets oiled but then any excess is removed by the rest of it after the brush. Also I have washed them a couple of times, although a bore snake has quite a large surface area compared to a cleaning rag so surely it could be used a fair amount before it became inefficient? Most threads I've read seem to say a bore snake should only be used when you haven't got access to a proper cleaning rod but what difference is there?
Cheers,
Jim