CCW Weekend: This Is How To Maintain A Magazine Because You Need To Maintain A Magazine

By Sam Hoober, Alien Gear Holsters

If you’re a bit new to the gun thing, or if you just didn’t know this, you have to maintain your magazines too.

The good news is that it’s easy and you really don’t need much in terms of supplies. The other good news is that it’s also a way to save some cash, which we’ll get to in a bit here.

As most people are aware, the Achilles’ Heel of magazine-fed semi-autos is the magazine itself.

Of course, there are other flaws, hiccups, peccadilloes and so on that can cause malfunctions, though these tend to be design deficiencies native to a particular make and model of pistol, and that would be a trip into the weeds that we just don’t need to take.

Let us instead concentrate on just the issue of magazines themselves.

There are only a few components to the typical box magazine. You have the magazine body itself, the magazine spring, the follower, a locking plate (if applicable) and the base plate.

This is different for drum magazines and rotary box magazines.

Maintenance is rather simple. All you need is a clean rag, an old toothbrush and a bit of all-in-one gun cleaner. CLP, Ballistol, RemOil, whatever you want, but any all-purpose cleaner/protectant is all you need.

After shooting, you disassemble the magazine, and clean the magazine housing itself and the follower. You can give the spring a spray if you want, but it’s not the most necessary thing in the world.

So, how to take down the magazines?

It depends on the baseplate. The baseplate is either fixed (pinned/welded in place) or locks in place by means of a locking tab. Fixed (pinned/welded) magazines require the user to take the guts out of the top of the magazine, but sliding baseplates can be removed for easy maintenance.

Generally, pinned/welded baseplates are the province of single-stack magazines, and tend to be – mostly – only the GI-spec magazines for 1911 pistols. Sliding baseplates are found on single-stack and staggered (double-stack) magazines as well.

So, to take down your standard double-stack magazine, you depress the button in the middle of the baseplate, unlocking the sliding baseplate itself. You’ll want to cover it with your hand as you slide the baseplate off, to keep the magazine from shooting the locking plate across the room.

Once it’s taken off, you simply pull out the spring and follower.

For fixed, meaning pinned and welded baseplates, you have to take the guts out of the top. What you do is depress the follower until it’s about halfway down the magazine box, and capture the spring using a screwdriver or punch to hold the spring in place.

Tip the magazine upside down and take out the follower. Place your hand over the magazine to keep the spring from flying out, and pull out the screwdriver or punch. Then simply take out the spring.

Cleaning is simple. Take an old toothbrush, and spray a bit of any all-purpose gun cleaner onto the bristles. Clean out the inside and – if necessary – the outside of the magazine. Wipe off the inside and outside with a clean rag, and then reassemble by reversing the above steps.

Not too hard.

Okay, so that’s how you maintain magazines, which is easy to do. But magazines eventually wear out, right? Don’t you have to replace them every so often?

You might have to, but you might not.

So, there are three components on a magazine that are a failure point, in that something can go wrong with it to begin with, namely the spring, the follower and the feed lips. Of those failure points, only an issue with the feed lips requires total replacement of the magazine.

Competition shooters have broken baseplates when dropping the magazines on hard surfaces in competition, or have broken polymer magazine bodies (i.e. those of Glock pistols) but this rarely happens outside the competition environment, so we’ll set that aside.

Most magazine issues are due to the spring wearing out. As springs are repeatedly compressed and released, eventually the metal deforms and loses strength.

Storing a magazine loaded doesn’t matter; what matters is the number of compression cycles the spring goes through. The more it’s loaded and unloaded, the closer it gets to an expiration date, so to speak.

Typically, you should replace the magazine springs about every year, instead of buying new magazines. Magazine springs will typically run you less than $10 per, as opposed to $30 to $40 per for new magazine for most pistols.

Followers can be damaged or bent, but that tends to be much rarer than just a worn spring.

If those things happen, replacement of the spring and follower can restore a malfunctioning magazine to full function. The magazine body itself is not under any stresses; it’s literally a metal or plastic box.

The feed lips, however, do undergo some mechanical stress as the top round is pushed out by the slide. If they deform, either by cracking or by being bent outward, feeding issues will occur.

The fix in that instance is to replace the magazine body. You can try to bend the feed lips back into place, but doing so is usually staving off the inevitable and not for long.

So long as the feed lips don’t deform, you can use a magazine in perpetuity so long as you periodically replace the spring and follower. There are folks using 1911 pistol magazines from World War II (some even older) that are still in regular use by replacing the springs periodically.

However, what happens if the feed lips deform or crack? It does happen, then you do need to replace the magazine. Just like with magazine springs, once deformation has occurred replacement is necessary.

It’s true that magazines are a consumable, up to a point, in that you should expect to replace them periodically, but – again – so long as the feed lips don’t deform, regular maintenance – including replacement of the springs – can keep them running for years, if not decades.