Instead of Hoppe's I use Ed's Red to clean everything else, other than lead out of the barrel, then I soak with Kano Kroil which gets under the lead as the Hoppe's does for you. I went back with the Chore Boy and it got the rest of the lead out in just a few strokes after the Kroil soak for 30 minutes.
Just some experience some might find interesting regarding fears of anything resembling steel wool in bores. And I'm not suggesting everybody should change their cleaning regimes. Just some corporate info and personal experience.
I just spent eight months as the operations manager getting the carcass of what was Montana Rifle Company up and running again. Or at least, the barrel making side of the business. We walked in there a week later - the place looked like everybody went home after work Friday afternoon and then just forgot to come back Monday morning. That is an interesting story in itself - a cutoff machine made in 1902 that cuts the 12' long bar stock to the lengths to be drilled, reamed, and bored. The machines doing the long hole drilling and reaming are Pratt & Whitney's dating from the 1930's, that spent WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc making barrels for Garands, M1 carbines, Thompsons, etc. Brass tags indicating "War Department" and "Springfield Armory" still riveted to them.
Those century old machines were doing 3,700 barrels A WEEK for the brief period Remington purchased the barrel side of Montana Rifle Company for that purpose.
Back to the story:
So after drilling, reaming, button rifling, and heat treating, the barrels are "hand lapped" to remove reamer marks. This is done by wrapping medium steel wool around a brass bore brush and then givin' 'er. The employees don't use regular cleaning rods - those break from the two handed effort put into the "hand lapping". They make custom lapping rods for each caliber on the CNC machinery in the shop. They have a two handed grip not much smaller than a baseball bat. Didn't see any fat guys working at the barrel lapping stands, where they do barrels ten at a time, progressing from barrel to barrel. Getting paid to do Crossfit...
This "hand lapping" is done to the point where the remaining reamer marks in the barrel have been reduced/eliminated to the point where borescope examination determines they meet QC/QA standards prior to shipping to the rifle manufacturer who ordered the barrels. Or ultimately, if the barrel finish was really bad, to the point that the lapping with steel wool opens the bore up to the point where it overpins and fails the pin gauge portion of QC testing.
After 45+ years of competitive shooting, bullet casting, and 'everybody knows' tribal knowledge, I was completely aghast to watch this and find out that was the way it was done. And more than a few other barrel makers, including name custom barrel makers, also do their "hand lapping" the same way - using medium steel wool.
Couldn't believe my eyes - first thought the must be doing it as a gag to watch the new boss's head explode. Like many cast bullet types, I had lapped several rifle barrels by pouring a lead lap, loading it with increasingly fine grades of clover compound, repeatedly obdurating the lap in the bore by tapping it, etc. That's what hand lapping a barrel meant to me.
Turns out Montana Rifle Company/Remington isn't an outlier in using steel wool to lap barrels after reaming and button rifling. And MRC's rifles had a pretty good reputation for out of the box accuracy (their QC/QA reputation, as I quickly learned, was another thing).
Just out of curiosity after watching this, after the shop closed for the day, I grabbed a barrel in line for being lapped, set it up in the lapping vises, and started scrubbing. Regularly inspecting the bore to wait for rounding to start appearing at the top corners of the lands. After all, when you simply wrap steel wool around a bore brush, you don't have equal contact and equal force on all surfaces being lapped.
To shorten an already long story, it took a long, LONG time and some real sweat to start seeing any degree of rounding on the corners of the lands. And by that time, the barrel was WAY over the point of overpinning. It went in the stack of other failed 6.5 barrels that would be redrilled to .30 (probably for an order intended for .300 Blackout). It's important to remember that these are barrel blanks that have yet to be chambered or have the muzzle cut and crowned.
I doubt this is going to make anybody rush out to buy a lifetime supply of Bulldog medium steel wool along with a cleaning rod that will take the abuse. But as I proved to myself, steel wool isn't instant death to a rifle barrel - and there's probably a few people here with custom barrels from name custom barrel manufacturers on their bolt guns that don't know the "hand lapping" their expensive barrel received prior to profiling and chambering was done with medium steel wool.
Must be a few out there with a scrapped barrel or two laying around. Clamp them in your vise and try it for yourself.