I've been accumulating bits and pieces to make a move back to my preferred magazine setup of GI magazines, Magpul followers, and Magpul Rangerplates. My reasons are varied, but the reality is that my transition to primarily Pmags was mostly accidental. I happened to use a few GI magazines in recent months and was reminded both of how much I like them, but of how much more I like them with the Ranger Plates installed (the ones I used recently lacked them). This is obviously not a cost-saving measure as GI mag + Magpul follower + Ranger Plate > Pmag alone.
I've begun digging through my old stashes of this and that, mostly magazines that slowly got put away as I used them less and less.
The first thing of interest that I found was my old stash of "pre-ban" magazines. Since so many of our members of late appear to have come to the AR after the ban ended, this may be a confusing concept. During the ban, one would scrape and scheme to get 20- and 30-round magazines from any source. Most often they were from guys that got out of the military and brought a handful of magazines with them. You'd pay (too much) for them, and the conventional wisdom of the time was you'd swap out the black follower (if so equipped) for the green one (which was current new issue at the time). Then you'd mark it somehow to identify it, and go shoot it to see if it actually worked. I typically replaced the springs too, just to be sure. If it didn't work, many people would invest hours trying to figure out why and fix it, because you couldn't simply go buy more. NIW GI mags, when they came available, were often $30.
I worked at a gunshop, and and army surplus shop, so we had a fair amount come through. NIW I never opened, and still have a good number of those, but used ones I went through the process outlined above. Below is the result of that, and these are my stash of pre-ban, used, but heavily function-tested and known-reliable magazines. Some of the 20s are actually newer, but the majority are also used. You'll notice that some kept the black followers, and some eventually got Magpul followers.
This is one of a few parts boxes I came across. I never threw anything out. I even have boxes of the used, shorter, unserviceable springs. At the time everyone assumed the ban would get extended and eventually we'd need these things. I have magazine bodies that never worked too, for the same reason. This is just a collection of followers of various types, with a few Ranger Plates in there too.
This is what I really wanted to show you guys. Even with one follower vs. another, all magazines are not created equal. The magazine on the left functions 100% while the magazine on the right has intermittent partial failures to feed, typically on odd numbered rounds. You'll notice a very subtle difference between the top of the frontstap and it's distance from the front of the feedlips, as evidenced by the amount of follower you can see. Once you've had something like this happen, you know what to look for, but when you're on the range and all of your magazines look like the ones on the right, it's really hard to figure out what the problem might be.
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