How many rounds to wear out a magazine?

General General Discussion
1

I’ve been stocking up a little lately, wishing to have enough of a “Prepper stash” of mags for each gun. Yes, I already have a bunch, but more is better.

Assuming a person takes care of their magazines, how many rounds–ballpark–are mags usually good for before they have to be thrown out?

Glock 17 mags?

AR mags?

1911 mags of quality make?

AK mags?

S&W M&P mags?

PMags vs. OEM or USGI?

Any others you want to add?

2

Concerning USGI AR mags…

Mike Pannone penned this article on AR mags for Soldier Systems, he has a USGI mag that he’s used for over twenty years that he picked up at Operator Training Course after he made selection:

Feeding Eugene Stoners Brainchild

Common mistakes people make:
7.) GI magazines are crap. In the picture below you will see 3 magazines. The one with yellow marking is what I call the “magic magazine”. The only magic is if you don’t abuse your kit it will treat you well. It is marked 1-92 and I got it from a bucket of s#*t magazines in OTC. To this day it still runs fine and I have used it for 18 years. The other two “new magazines” are both 12 years old (5/03 & 6/03) with the only additions being one has a MAGPUL and the other a CMMG no tilt follower and I can’t even begin to estimate the round counts on any of them.

http://soldiersystems.net/2015/06/20/gunfighter-moment-mike-pannone-28/

3

It depends on how they hit the ground, what part hits the ground first, how hard the ground is and did you step on them. If they never hit the ground they will last until springs and followers are no longer availible. You won’t wear out a quality magazine by using it.

4

I’ve never seen a magazine that was worn out.
I’ve seen a hell of a lot of them that were broken and even then I would guess 25% were fair wear and tear.
I’ve seen guys load AR mags and wondered if the were intent on breaking them or hoping they would cause a malfunction. Sometimes stupid does hurt.

5

Pretty much. I’ve got a WWI date 1911 running on original mags after three wars. The general rule of 10 rifle mags per rifle and 6 pistol mags per handgun is probably all you’ll ever need assuming you aren’t using promags are similar junk.

6

Wait, wut?

4.) Kicking, throwing, or generally abusing/misusing them. For instance, they can open bottles but they are not bottle openers. You fill in the rest from your experience. The only use for a magazine is to hold bullets and reliably feed your rifle.

I learned something today.

7

Yep. If you calculate the spring cycle life times the number of rounds to fill the mag. It’s a lifetime of ammo buying to wear one out.

8

In my experience the average has been about 1,317 rounds per magazine.

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9

Steg

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10

My daily carry Glock is still using pre 94 mags.

Surplus steel AK mags are overbuilt and will run forever unless blown to bits or completely rusted shot. I’ve got mags with dents and bullet holes that I’ve never done a thing to except load ammo. Never even seen a drop off oil

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11

If not abused, or broken they do run for quite some time. I’ve got old USGI 20s from god only knows when, that have seen only god knows what, and they still run, and run, and run. I’ve also seen junk mags last less than 5 range trips, but that is why you don’t buy KCI. A decent mag will last. End of debate really. Don’t abuse, or over compress the spring, and it will be good to you most likely.

12

I’ve seen springs wear out in mags. Both in some ar mags(crappy ones) and in mp5 mags that have had countless rounds through them.

I’ve also replaced a spring in a smith and wesson 3rd gen 1006 magazine.

Most of the time mags fail because they have been beat up. Dropped doing drills and whatnot.

13

Good luck trying to get any type of reasonable round count. Way too many variables not to mention what type of AR mags are we talking about?

The answer you are looking for is how many magazines can your pocketbook withstand? I use the same magazines for range or training repeatedly until they wear out or break. If it’s an SD/HD magazine then it gets replaced with a NIW.

14

Here’s a f’r instance:

I’ll have to do some digging to find the post, but someone on this forum posted that Glock Pmags don’t last as long as OEM mags. Oh really? That’s what got me curious as to round counts.

Some criteria:

  1. Supposedly repeated cycles wear a mag out faster than just leaving one loaded.
  2. It’s arguable that not loading a mag all the way helps preserve spring tension. (Even author Chuck Taylor buys into this one).
  3. Even though your mags are “drop free” doesn’t mean you should let them fall onto surfaces that might damage them.
  4. Of course, a mag in combat is likely to be trashed due to various factors that a civilian or LE shooter won’t encounter (that’s why I specified “if you take care of them”).
  5. Once upon a time, magazine-fed weapons came with fixed, non-replaceable magazines for decades, and that suggests that detachable magazines were developed more to increase ammo capacity rather than to compensate for fixed mags wearing out.
  6. In contrast, we are always told to treat magazines as “expendable” and “mags do wear out.” There seems to be a contradiction in those statements vs. the posts in this thread. I’m not saying either position is right or wrong, but surely someone has done some scientific testing at some point? If they test common consumer products for durability, why is it no one has apparently done so with firearm magazines?
15

  1. Once upon a time there was different military doctrine. Having more than one round and later detachable mags was considered waste of ammo. Which is why many original bolt action rifles came with a cut off. You had extra ammo in case you needed but the procedure was to shoot one, load one from a pouch, shoot one, load one from a pouch…etc. None detachable mags were seen as an extension of that. Later on it was simply cheaper to make chargers than mags. All ammo could be packaged on chargers and only one fixed mag was needed. It wasn’t so much a mag as a place to hold more than one round inside a gun. Along with that mags needed to be fitted to each individual rifle so making mags would be costly and time consuming and the soldiers wouldn’t necessarily be able to share. Of course there are exceptions

  2. They are expendable. You wouldn’t toss your firearm if it had a malfunction but you can toss mags and buy more by the crate.

Because there are too many variables in testing the mags to failure. They’re all tested by the factory to a certain extent when designed and built.

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16

Do different mags wear differently? To me, the feed lips and the base are the parts that seem prone to ‘wear’ and tear. Still have some old AR 20s that look like they were dragged behind a Pinto in the 70s.

Feed lips are what concern me. I could figure out the tao of spring making if I had to. I’ve already leaned how to 3D print mag bases and the capture/lock parts. 3D printing mag bodies seems like a pretty straightforward exercises. I have some engineered solutions for z-axis splitting. Feed lips, that’s another level of complexity and stress.

17

With regard to M4 magazines, I’ll leave this here, not because I necessarily agree with it, but just to stimulate discussion. Feel free to dispute it but please provide facts and/or your experiences (especially if you shoot for a living).

https://www.smallarmsreview.com/display.article.cfm?idarticles=1372

Point ONE:

The AR-15/M16-type magazine was designed to be disposable and not used over and over again. This was the reason for using lightweight aluminum alloys. The original AR-10 was designed with “throw away” magazines enabling the soldier to carry preloaded magazines and drop empty magazines from the weapon and load a new one into the weapon and return to the firefight.

The standard GI magazines are extremely reliable but do have a service life. When used in the field, attention should be given to be sure the magazines are not dropped on the feed lips nor stepped on. With the recent controversy of the performance of the M16/M4 series weapons under scrutiny, the main problem is, and always has been, the magazine. This is not due to a design flaw. It is a design intent versus application issue. When Gene Stoner first developed the AR-10 with lightweight magazines, he designed them to be lightweight and disposable enabling the soldier to carry large numbers of preloaded magazines. But the key word is disposable. They are not designed to be loaded an indefinite amount of times and left loaded for months at a time without cleaning and inspection.

Users need to keep in mind the design of these magazines as they are a disposable commodity. They should be replaced as often as possible and every magazine should be tested prior to it going in an ammo pouch. This will insure you do not find out you have a damaged magazine in a firefight.

Point TWO:

The malfunctions mostly encountered with these magazines are from damaged or bent feed lips. This prevents the bolt locking lugs from contacting with the base of the cartridge case causing bolt-over-base malfunctions as well as the angle from which the point of the bullet enters the feed ramps. This damage is not from using the magazine but from dropping it on a hard surface, stepping on it or some other form of abuse. Many military units come across this problem due to storing them in bins and not being checked for reliability prior to them being issued.

Military and law enforcement personnel should always, if possible, obtain new mil-spec magazines for duty use.

The main issues coming back from the Gulf from the small percentage of troops who had problems all described their problems as double feeds, bolt over base and failure to feed. All of which are due to damaged magazines. The other issue brought out was failure to extract, which is caused by sand getting in-between the cartridge case and the chamber. Any weapon with this scenario will experience the same failure. The same soldiers interviewed claimed to be issued old magazines out of bins in some depot and carried them throughout his entire tour. The magazines were never gauged or checked for bent feed lips or magazine bodies and he never received replacement magazines. Many soldiers interviewed brought personally purchased magazines from home or ordered them through catalogs to insure reliability. The Army has had difficulty re-supplying troops with new magazines on a regular basis. Part of the way the Army is combating this is to have Colt Defense provide seven new magazines with every M4 they ship to the Army. Troops also do not clean the magazines at regular intervals to prevent the followers from seizing with sand. This type of detailed disassembly is really unique to the desert environment.

Point THREE:

With the advancements in synthetic materials, these are just as, if not more, reliable than the standard aluminum ones. However, the synthetic magazines (PMags, Canadian military and Green Magazines) offer some incredible improvements. Most troops will not notice a damaged aluminum magazine until they put it in their rifle and try to shoot. With the synthetic magazine, immediate signs show damage. The feed lips would be broken off and cartridges falling out. These new plastics are stronger than the aluminum ones and will not bend or dent. The magazines will be less expensive to make as well. All of the synthetic magazines examined in this article are simple to maintain and the MagPul PMag and Canadian magazines are proving themselves in combat. The Army has issued a magazine improvement program. This program calls for improved followers such as the ones MagPul is manufacturing which are 100% anti-tilt. The program calls for synthetic magazines as well as a standard go/no go gauge. Many defense contractors as of this writing are developing synthetic magazines though it is expected that the MagPul PMag will be the standard in synthetic magazines.

My take: I’ll bet if you look hard enough, you can find an detailed article that disagrees with this one. Thoughts?

18

I’ve understood it to be more of a “don’t get attached to a defective/damaged mag”. Ditch it, and replace it. Trying to fix a defective USGI mag is a waste of time. Feed lips are nearly impossible to re-shape.

19

the title made me think of the old tootsie pop ads with the owl :slight_smile:

20

While the above is true, we must take into account that is for MIL purposes. The civilian gun owner has to contend with things like pocket books and magazine bans via anti-2nd legislation. We have members here who live in states that can’t just go order a new mag if they break one.