Armednfree,
I was using Remington bullets and had inconsistent results. Some would expand and kill coyotes DRT but most required 2 or more shots and showed little to no expansion. I heard in the early/mid 90's, which is when I had my first 17, that Remington had a run of 17 bullets that were doing just that.
Take this for what it is worth but from the gun gack grapevine I had heard the earliest Rem. bullets were melting in mid flight. Remington re-tooled with a thicker jacket and for a time bonded the jackets or so I have been told. I sectioned some of these and could not separate the jacket from the core unless I physically ripped it off with fencing pliers. I wish that I had hoarded a bunch of the bonded iteration as these work well on deer, smaller hogs, javelina and turkey as they don't ruin that much meat. But pretty quickly ( a year or less) they gave up on the in-house bullets and loaded the Hornaday 25 HP exclusively. Assuming this is true no wonder you saw erratic and variable results as you could have been shooting three very different bullets all coming from the same looking yellow and green boxes. Nice the way they don't tell you when the radically change a product and the packaging remains the same. The same is true of the barrels with some of the earlier ones being pretty rough, not sure what they did but probably involved new mandrels and tighter tolerances which cured the problems.
All of this to say most of the bugs have been worked out on the 17s but the old stories still persist.
If you want to have some fun shoot a can of Cheese Whiz with a 17. We did this when we were cleaning out the camp cabin and the can went airborne some 20 feet up and showered us and a thirty foot radius with the golden goo. I swore off chili con queso for awhile after that experience, but not the 17.
