How good are Colt magazines?

[NWcityguy2]

I'm not getting the whole idea that the 100 year old, JMB designed magazine can't be improved upon, even though there have been changes to the follower to allow an extra round, the gun itself and how to gun is commonly used, which often dictates ammunition choices. And a magazine is a sum of it's parts, and not just a pair of feed lips. Spring strength, longevity, material durability, seating a fully loaded magazine on a closed slide, removable baseplates, all of those are factors in what makes a magazine average, good or great. Wilson ETMs are becoming very popular in competition for being great in all of those catagories, and has won me away from CMC power-mags (which are also good mags).

Lots of people use Checkmates/Metalform/GI mags at the casual shooter level and are very happy. Most high round count shooters move on to something else.

[johnnyrem]

This high round count shooter found absolutely no need to. Some of my magazines have had a great many rounds through them.

[NWcityguy2]

Define "a great many", b/c I shoot about 8k rounds a year through my 1911, along with weekly dry fire practice, and I buy 6 new mags every two years as a matter of necessity.

[samuse]

High round count and use like we put our equipment through can be two very different things.

Shooting from a bench at a range type setting, or bullseye training/competition and an old-school 1911 mag could last for a very long time.

Another thing, I have found that Colt 7 rounders go from a pretty shoddy mag to a pretty good mag with the addition of a Wolff 11lb spring. It makes a big difference with full powered ammo. Those hybrid lipped mags have a tendency to inertia feed if everything ain't perfect.

[johnnyrem]

NW, Being it's Easter, give me a day or two to find the high use magazines and post a picture of them. They did last a very long time.

Realistic expectations about the abuse a magazine can accept are a good thing in terms of longevity. If you think you can frequently drop partially or fully filled magazines on concrete and expect a long and rewarding life from them.....that's kinda like never greasing the zerks on your ball joints and expecting them to last the life of the car.

A magazine is a disposable part, and the more they're abused, the more disposable they get. Given a reasonably soft impact surface, the tapered lip magazine with welded floorplate can be tossed around pretty good and come up in good shape. Unloaded they've bounced off concrete a reasonable number of times.....I don't make a habit of being that stupid all that often......and come up out of it just fine. They are made of spring steel, and spring steel is bouncy and fairly impact resistance even on concrete if just the weight of the magazine falls on it.

Insist on a hard impact surface for a landing spot for your partially or fully loaded magazines and treat them like junk and ANY magazine WILL be junk in short order. If that happens, buy new ones and blame the cause on that which it squarely lies.....yourself. Plastic parts on partially or fully loaded magazines combined with concrete are a prescription for an early death or considerable parts replacement as well.

While inertial feeding issues may happen in the occasional gun (for reasons that seem to defy explanation as another absolutely identical gun will not do it), quite frankly they're less likely to occur than with many eight round straight lip magazines that are notorious for weak springs and no follower bumps that have "big names" on them. My recommendation for their use is also a Wolff 11 lb. spring. To get back to John Browning, my 1911's also have small radius firing pin stops installed as did the originals up until the early 20's. The triple redundancy......spring, follower bump, and stop positively address all inertial issues but that's how I like to roll as I'm a belt and suspenders guy myself. When the 1911 went the 6000 rounds without a malf in the original trials, the tapered lip magazines had "standard" springs in them.

The point is simply this......the big name makers have problems with their magazines they're going to softpedal or simply not fess up to. The feedway path they make the round take is fraught with increased angularity and stem binding and is less tolerant of variations in individual firearms. The need to deepen feedramps and "radius" extractors came about when short ammo was combined with nonstandard, more steeply feeding magazine types. When all is said and done, they really aren't an improvement over what the original designer intended in many ways. Some of the "features" they possess are really drawbacks. The straight lip geometry has a few advantages, but at least as many drawbacks.

IF JMB knew what straight feedlips were as some of his earlier designs used such magazines.....why did he deliberately choose a tapered lip design for a gun that had to win a very lucrative and now absolutely famous and iconic military contract? Could it be that, in his considered judgement, a tapered lip design was the very best way to accomplish the needed reliability?

It would certainly seem so! If that was best in JMB's opinion, and he designed the darn gun, that's way more than good enough for me.

This is not commonly known.....but it is getting better known with the more mainstream production and acceptance of the tapered lip magazine. In this we're coming full circle again. This is as it should be, as the magazine design closest to what the original designer intended very much should be a significant seller in today's market. I am absolutely not proselytizing for it being the only one. Rather, I am suggesting that its increasing popularity has foundation.

Heck, it was the designer's choice.

[samuse]

I'm With you, thay work with ball ammo and feed as slick snot.

Check-Mate leaves a lot to be desired in the consistency department. Their 7 round wadcutter mags they sell Springfield are the best mags they make.


I think wadcutter lips are more forgiving to manufacturing variances, they're not as likely to spread, they hold the round more securely. They do it at the cost of smoothness.

My 1911s had reliability to spare and would feed 100% with wadcutter mags so I could enjoy the extra robustness afforded by plastic base plates and wadcutter lips.

My recipe for making a 1911 dead nuts, dead nuts, absolutely reliable involves making everything on the thing true to original spec with the exception of a 16lb Wolff recoil spring, a Colt dimpled or Kart throated barrel, and CMC Powermags with Tripp kits.

For straight ball ammo, GI spec mags with 11lb springs are fun because of how smooth they feed, but they're not the best for beating on.

FWIW, my last 1911 carry mags, the ones I depended on were proven Colt 7s with 11lb Wolff springs. I knew their limitations and used them accordingly.

[NWcityguy2]

That wasn't what I was asking for Johnyrem, but whatever.

[johnnyrem]

I didn't keep an exact count....just used them till they cracked at the junction of the back of the magazine wall and the cutout for the cartridge pickup rail because I failed to radius the sharp corner and this made a stress riser.....this happens to any magazine with sharp corners in this area and has nothing to do with the feed lips.

I would guess some of them had many thousands of rounds through them, but again, that's guessing and I'd hang my hat less on that number than on the fact that they seemed to last a long, long time.

If you "have to" buy six magazines every two years as a "matter of necessity" you must be bouncing them off concrete fairly often.

The GI magazines sold by Checkmate work with much more than ball. The release point is much closer to the "hybrid" feed lips than some of the rather late releasing old GI magazines, thus they work with not just ball but also down to the rounded ogive HP's most commonly sold today and HG 68 wadcutters. If the Lyman 452460 SWC is seated on the long side approximating 1.200" assuming the gun's throating will allow that length it will work through them as well, as will Lee's discontinued 190 SWC seated long.

I've several recent examples of same......ordered with the "extra power" springs (which you have to ask for and run 2.50 per magazine more) and the "D" shaped dimple and they seem to be well made and work well. Good welds, thickish sheet metal and a nice brushed finish on the spine that covers up the weld marks on the back.

Since you've enumerated what wadcutter magazines do well, let's call that "lack of smoothness" you attribute to them what it really is......a greater chance of three point jams because the rounds don't rise at the rear as they go forward, on some designs a deeper nosedive on feeding which necessitates a deeper feed ramp, and a subsequent steeper climb to the chamber which is what makes them more three point jam prone.

A steeper climb to the chamber and rear down feeding means that the "window" for the successful approach to the extractor is narrower. The round's rim is less likely to make it under the extractor on feeding because the rim is approaching the extractor hook gap at a greater angle rather than more straight up and down. The fact that the rounds don't rise at the rear on feeding means the rim is further away from the extractor when it is released, and.....this also increases the odds the rim won't make it under the extractor.

A lot of the reason some think the extractor design on 1911's is problematic is due to the fact the feed path through the straight lip magazines being used beats them up more on feeding. Why did 1911's "have" to have deeper feed ramps and extractor hook tuning? Short ammo and wadcutter magazines. Feed the gun correct ammo that favors its preferences in overall length and use magazine that get the cartridge rim under the extractor every time and extractors last a long, long, long time. As they should. If your extractors are dying frequently, it's what you're feeding the gun and how you're feeding it.

[samuse]

I'll leave this thread with this:

When Check-Mate actually builds a mag that works, it works as good as any, but that doesn't always happen. In the past 20 years of handgunning, the most unreliability I ever experienced was when I jumped on the 'way JMB intended Check-Mate hybrid' wagon for a season. Embarrassing, dismal, frustrating performance. I went back to Wilson 47s with 10 round guts, and Powermags with Tripp kits and went on to shoot over 20K more rounds through several 1911s with ZERO malfunctions between 2010 and late 2014.

I'm a decent 1911 plummer, I can perform most maintenance that doesn't require a mill, and I don't fit my own barrels.

The only extractor trouble I ever had was a Springfield that just broke. My 1911s have always ran just fine with a drop-in Colt extractor, because all that extractor tuning is BS if the gun is setup correctly.

I have a lot of free time and I've been around these forums a long time. Every few months a new 1911 enthusiast will read that stipid 'How I Did it' article and go all 'JMB' with his new uber-reliable Check-Mates. Usually within a couple of months that same guy is on Glock Talk raving about his new reliable Glock and how 1911s are Jam 'o Matics. I've seen the cycle a few times, even went there myself.

I learned the 1911 inside and out, I consider them as reliable as a machine can be and I actually think they have the potential to be more reliable than the fabled Glock 19 that is so revered.

[johnnyrem]

Funny you should say that. I had the same trouble, but when running the big name magazines over 10 plus years. Bolt over base misfeeds, three points, live round stovepipes, failure to feed the first round from slide lock, inertial misfeeds, flinging the last round out instead of feeding it. I can't speak to Checkmate's execution because I don't have each and every example that comes off their line.

I will also note that in the nineties and oughts, when "shooting schools" started to reach the peak of popularity, their instructors would note the 1911's frequent tendency to jam.......and undoubtedly most of these guns were using "big name" magazines because that was all that was being produced. If these magazines were the answer.....a whole lotta people still weren't finding it.

Right now I'm on the recent hybrids with D shaped dimples, Wolff springs, small radii stops on the pistols. Run like a Swiss watch. Really never had any trouble with GI magazines of WW2 save with trying to feed shorter rounds than they were intended to feed. Of course I wouldn't run them if they were visibly damaged or out of spec, only the good ones.

The alternatives are now fully in place in terms of magazine design options. It is up to the user to fix issues when discovered, and if a magazine is sub par I understand Checkmate has a pretty good replacement policy. I can address inertial issues pretty easily, but if the magazine makes the round climb more steeply on the way to the chamber that can't be changed.