ETS Transparent glock mags

[williejc]

I paid $52 shipped for 3 from Gunmagazines.com, and at this price I can afford to buy a few, and like you I have oem for serious tasks.

Maybe I missed it in the thread but would be interested in hearing from the ETS man about their R&D efforts in developing these products.

[lawusmc0844]

I have ten 15 rounders and one 31 rounder. All work great and I just love the solid translucent body and affordable price. My first five are of the darker shade and I will say I prefer the lighter shade, but both look good as well. I am currently using all my ETS mags as range mags but I may start using them with defensive loads since they've been working so well.

Thank you ETS for making an excellent and affordable product!

[williejc]

Today I bought a Glock 15 Magpul to test. On the surface it appears nicely made and robust. My lgs has them for $14.95 and is closing out their few ETS Glock mags.
Magpul mags are packed in a very strong plastic bag that occupies minimal space. I noticed that a very large Magpul mag collection took up little room. I'm happy that two venders are producing quality after market mags and hope that they continue to improve.

I see that the Magpul mag has a patent. Anybody know what's different about it?

[ETSGroup]

I paid $52 shipped for 3 from Gunmagazines.com, and at this price I can afford to buy a few, and like you I have oem for serious tasks.

Maybe I missed it in the thread but would be interested in hearing from the ETS man about their R&D efforts in developing these products.

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have. Were there any aspects of testing and development that you were particularly interested in?

[misfit47]

Did you jump out an airplane with them?

[williejc]

In testing, how was the shooting part set up? Number of different pistols? Ammo quantity? Records kept?

Most materials are resistant but may not be completely safe from solvents or degradation over time from sunlight. Can you talk about how you tested in this area? Results?

How do your mags compare to the oem? They're bought by some as inexpensive(not cheap)range mags.

[ETSGroup]

In testing, how was the shooting part set up? Number of different pistols? Ammo quantity? Records kept?

Most materials are resistant but may not be completely safe from solvents or degradation over time from sunlight. Can you talk about how you tested in this area? Results?

How do your mags compare to the oem? They're bought by some as inexpensive(not cheap)range mags.

In testing, how was the shooting part set up? Number of different pistols? Ammo quantity? Records kept?

Most materials are resistant but may not be completely safe from solvents or degradation over time from sunlight. Can you talk about how you tested in this area? Results?

How do your mags compare to the oem? They're bought by some as inexpensive(not cheap)range mags.

In this post I will go into general info about how we tested our mags and our material. We try to not get too specific as testing, how its done and such, gets into proprietary info. That said, lets start with function testing aka shooting the mags.

We shot the mags through a decent size sampling of glocks ranging from Gen 1 - 4 in all of the double stack 9mm configurations. We had several new guns and some really old guns with high round counts. During testing we had some guns that were given zero maintenance and some that were very well maintained. We tested the longer mags in all sizes of glocks. Any glock the mag could fit in, ie a 17 in a 26, the mags were tested in those models. As far as the ammo goes, there were many many brands. Although I am sure there were some that were missed, we definitely hit most of the popular brands and some that aren't so popular. We ran several defense loads with hollow points and down to the cheap steel junk ammo. We never cleaned a magazine that was in testing. Some of the magazines were intentionally made very dirty with dirt, sand and things like that and then tested. We had some mags that just got a few loads put through them, and a few mags that had the pleasure of several thousands of rounds thought them to see how the mags wear over lots of rounds. There were a few failures during testing but almost all were ammo related. We did get a couple of glocks so hot they seized up, that was fun. All in all it was very boring and not nearly as fun as everyone thinks it would be.

The material testing is a bit different. Some of that is done by us, like the impact testing and the creep testing while loaded. Some of it is more for the labs like the chemical resistance and UV resistance. So we had our material tested for chemical resistance against many many solvents, acids and other common fluids like gasoline, diesel, brake fluid, transmission fluid, Jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and many more. The test for that was to leave it completely submerged in the chemical for 1 week. The polymer was them removed and tested for several mechanical properties like tensile strength. On virtually all of the chemicals our material retained over 99% of it's properties meaning that it was not affected in any way. On the UV test, which is a very serious test for mags, we had the mag left in a UV chamber that was stronger than what they would experience anywhere on Earth. It was left in that chamber 24 hours a day until 100,000 hours was reached. This test took over 400 days. The materials was not affected by UV at all. This was great news. For thermal testing, we left the mags in a thermal chamber for 2 weeks at 180* F. We then checked to make sure the mag retained it's dimensions and checked it for function. No problems there. Then the mags were placed in a special thermal chamber that goes down to -60*F. It was left there for 48 hours. It was then removed and impacted tested then immediately fired for function testing.

I am sure there are things I forgot to put in here but this gives you some idea of what goes into testing for new mags. It's very time consuming and very expensive.

As for how our mags compared to OEM mags, great. Now keep in mind that we only fired a small sampling of OEM mags because that is not what we were testing, but in what testing we did with them, we could not see a difference in failure rates between ours and theirs.

I know there are a lot of guys who make comments like "It will take years before I trust these mags as carry mags". And that's cool. I always would rather someone error on the side of caution when selecting their self defense gear. But with most mags, if there is a problem, you are going to see it early on. It's usually a spring and that shows up almost the first few times you use it. If the housing is out of spec, it won't work from the get go. About the only thing to worry about long term is durability and in plastic mags, creep from stress of being loaded.

On that note, one of the biggest challenges we faced with our glock mags was people thinking they would be too fragile. I assure everyone that is not even close to being the case. We put the mags through hell before you all ever get to see them and their toughness is one of the reasons we can offer a lifetime warranty. In our 3 years of business, we have only had 1 mag housing returned because it broke, and that customer called asking if he could buy just a new housing because his gun blew up from a bad re-load. He said he knew our warranty wouldn't cover it. He was honest and I felt bad for him blowing up his gun so I sent him a new mag for free. Trust me when I tell you that there is nothing to worry about as far as durability goes.

Creep testing is another area of testing that is slow and painful. It just takes time and there is no way to speed it up. We have AR mags that have been fully loaded for over 3 years and glock mags that have been fully loaded for almost a year and a half now. None of our creep test mags have seen a measurable amount of spread. A lot of guys think that eventually plastic will get weak and spread, they think it's only a matter of time when left loaded. And while that can happen, it's important to understand what creep is. It is literally the de-tangling of the plastic molecules so they re-arrange into another shape. This happens when a certain stress level is exceeded (this stress level varies in different materials) the material creeps and re-arranges itself. Even steel creeps, its just at much higher stress levels than plastic. Now, that said, if the given stress level is not exceeded, the plastic will NEVER creep. That means it could be left loaded for 100 years, its not going to creep. Also, when that stress level is exceeded, the creep happens faster earlier on. Meaning that you will see more creep in the first 10,000 hours than the next 50,000 hours. So if you have your mags loaded for a year and don't measure any creep, you aren't ever going to measure creep. If the mag breaks down 3 years down the road, that is from something else, not creep.

The our plastic is not affected by UV and is extremely thermally stable, it can handle 10,000 cycles to over 250*F and not get brittle and break down. Thermal and UV are some of the most common reasons plastics break down over time. We spent a lot of time and effort to make sure that doesn't happen with our mags.

I hope you guys find this info interested and I will try to keep an eye on the thread to answer any incoming questions.

[williejc]

Thank you for providing this informative narrative, which for me answered all my questions. If I had to guess, ETS is applying advancements in polymer science that may not have been discovered 15 years ago, or if they were known, may not have been economical for mass production. I'm impressed and will continue buying your product. I understand creep because at my age, I creep around.

[lonnie1120]

I invested in 28 of the 22 round ETS magazines due to the length of time Magpul was taking to release their 21 round mags. After reading the ETS testing process, I'm glad I went with ETS.

[naloxone]

I only read through half, so sorry if I missed; any plans for an extended .40 mag? 21-23rd range?