Does steel case actually trash your extractor? What 5k rounds told me.

Good data set. Before I land on agreement though—let me ask what you're seeing on the hook itself. You said minor polishing. Was it uniform across the hook face, or concentrated at one point? Because that tells me whether you're looking at normal wear from case-wall friction or whether the hook's actually riding different on the steel's harder jacket.

Here's what I'd want to verify: extractor tension spec on both extractors before and after the 2,500-round cycle. A Glock extractor sits around 1.5–1.8 pounds nominal pull—tight enough to hold a chambered round, loose enough that the ejector does the real work on the way out. Steel's harder, so if your hook is polishing instead of gouging, that means the tension is absorbing the friction instead of the case wall doing it. That's actually fine mechanically. But if tension drifted, you'd see it in the numbers before you'd see it in extraction failures.

One more thing: were these the same batch of extractors, or did you swap in a fresh one each time? Glock's QC on extractors varies. If you grabbed a softer-spec extractor for the steel run by chance, that'd explain the visible wear where a stiffer one might've just polished through without marking.

Your conclusion on chamber cleanliness stands—carbon buildup is the real culprit on extraction difficulty. But the extractor tension differential under steel-case friction is the piece I'd want locked down before telling someone "steel won't hurt your extractor."

Shop.rat's raising the right constraint—extractor tension spec matters, and I'd add one more measurement to that protocol.

You need pre- and post-cycle tension readings, yes. But you also need to know the case-wall hardness differential. Steel case runs 45–50 HRC typically; brass is 40–45 HRC depending on anneal. That's roughly 5–10% harder. Over 2,500 cycles, the hook contacts that surface thousands of times at ejection velocity. The polishing shop.rat's asking about isn't random—it's the extractor yielding microscopically to a harder material, which means tension is doing exactly what it should: absorbing the load instead of the case wall.

Here's where the cost-per-round math actually wins though: if you're running 10k rounds yearly, that's roughly 200 rounds per week. Brass at current market sits ~$0.35/rd; steel runs $0.14/rd. Over a year, that's a $2,100 difference. Even if you replace an extractor every 5k steel rounds—and I'd need to see extractor failure data, not just polishing, to believe that's mandatory—you're spending maybe $20 on a replacement. The math is 100:1 in steel's favor at volume.

The real break-even: 1,500 rounds per month. Below that, the resale hit on brass-fired brass offsets the per-round savings. Above it, steel pulls ahead hard. OP's hitting that threshold, so the constraint isn't extractor durability—it's whether you're willing to clean more frequently. That's the actual decision tree.

Shop.rat nailed the tension differential. I've been logging extractor pull-weight on my comp guns for two years—Gen5 G34, Gen5 G19X—and the data supports exactly what they're describing.

My baseline: 1.62 lb pull on a fresh extractor. After 2,500 brass rounds, 1.58 lb (negligible drift). After 2,500 steel rounds through an identical extractor batch, 1.54 lb—still in spec, but the slope matters. At 5,000 steel rounds, I hit 1.47 lb. That's the tension absorbing load instead of the case wall, which is the mechanism shop.rat outlined.

The threshold I've hit: below 1.4 lb, I see light primer strikes on marginal ignition ammunition (old Wolf SPP loads). Haven't had an actual failure to extract yet, but I swap at 1.45 lb to stay ahead of it.

Calibr.club's break-even math is solid. I run 800–1,000 rounds monthly, which puts me well past the 1,500 threshold. Steel makes financial sense. But the volume caveat matters: if you're doing 500 rounds per month, you're replacing an extractor every 3–4 years either way. The $20 replacement cost doesn't offset brass resale value.

The real constraint they both identified—chamber cleanliness—is what actually stops me from running steel in competition. Carbon buildup adds friction, and friction compounds the tension load. I clean between every match session. If I went 3,000 rounds without breaking down the gun, I'd be seeing extraction sluggishness on the steel side that wouldn't exist with brass.

OP's data is valid for volume shooters who clean regularly. Shop.rat's asking the right measurement questions to lock that down further.