I always shook off people saying not to shoot steel in the 17. It's one of if not the most reliable battle rifles made. Just plain feeds and shoots everything.

Well today I was shooting some close range drills with Tula and could not get a round to chamber. I thought the mag was bad until I tore the gun down and saw the case still in the chamber. What a bummer.

Going to order a broken shell extractor and see if it works. Should I call Tula and make them pay for the tool or gunsmith if the chamber is screwed up?

I doubt Tula will reimburse you for anything. How many rounds had been fired from the last cleaning before this had happened?

Lesson learned

Not worth shooting crappy ammo for the price you can find decently priced brass cased Prvi Partizan M80 Ball - with no issues.

Less than 2 mags of Tula.  Shoot some MFS but thats quality ammo and the rest was wither FGMM or Nolser custom 155's. Maybe 500 rnds from last cleaning. Who the hell cleans a scar lol

FWIW, there are far more case head separations with brass ammo than steel

Understanding is new manuf brass is MUCH less likely to have a case head seperation than steel.

Steel is much more brittle and will break instead of stretching like brass will. The steel they use is also mild cheapo steel that is not the strongest.

The exception is brass that has been reloaded a bunch of time and/or not annealed.

Brass is not annealed (heat treated) on the lower half, where case head separations occur.

Only case separation I've ever had was using shit Tula 308 steel case.  It also ruptured and tried to blow up both my Remington 700 and my DPMS G2, blew the magazine out of the G2 and wrecked the extractor on the 700...done with that stuff.  I have like 140 rounds of it just sitting there.