What's the Best AR Mag?

[Music] welcome back to a rather different rather nerdy edition of GP guns what you see here is quite a variety of magazines and it's not even all of them that are up there I wanted to help people understand why some mags work with some guns and not with others and vice versa why your buddy might have great luck with troy mags but they don't run in yours etc etc so I took all of these mags and busted out the calipers and made some measurements I looked at a couple things so the mag catch here they all have different width height and depth and that impacts how it works in your gun and I'll show you how so depending on your catch and how you have it installed the height that is vertically how much space there is on this catch here determines how high or low the magazine is going to sit and present the bullet to be fed that width impacts some of the wiggle room front to rear for things to being consistent and set the wrong feed angle and then the depth allows how deep or shallow your mag catch is going to grab onto the magazine which can impact how easily a magazine drops out it can also impact the force needed so you're talking your reload speeds or the chance of a magazine getting bumped out so all that depends on the depth of that little catch there and it can be quite different from one magazine to the next and I'll show you the data that I have on those so looking across this and these are organized from shortest to tallest you can tell that it's generally about the same and we're talking about miniscule differences from one company to the next I do want to admit right out that my sample size was one some of these mega are newer than others some have had a lot of use some of them have been hardly used so now that that's out of the way also that I'm using an inexpensive caliper let's get on to the information we found the height the total gap there as I said can affect how well a magazine is going to set up for the initial feeding height we look into ATI there's quite a bit of height there that probably means this magazine is going to be the most versatile in running across different platforms that being said the magazine catch height is generally the same across all brands I mean that gap on your receiver is in the same spot pretty much every time milspec is milspec what could be different though is the catch itself that you're using and how wide that fits but it looks like for the most part I'd say these are insignificant differences now we're looking at the width of that mag catch cutout in the magazine and one thing that stuck out to me right away if you look at those that are narrowest is see products DN h NH MTG my government-issued okay magazine and the civilian market okay a magazine those are all metal mags so I found interesting that those were the narrowest of them all and your latest production I'd guess you could say more trendy polymer mags ets troy and mission first tactical are the three that were the widest so I don't know why this trend is about it is interesting that the second gen PMAG Daniel defense and the pro mag we're all pretty much the same what I can assume from looking at this is that your metal mags are gonna have the least potential for de rearward wiggle of course that totally depends on how tight your catch is and on whether or not your catch is reaching the maximum depth of that catch spot on the magazine let's take a look at that depth here's our catch depth measurements you can see the five on the right end have nothing to them that's because those are our metal mags that don't have a backing the the cutout just goes straight into the body of the mag so looking at the left end a TI pro mag 40 the tork mag 35 and the Lancer being our shallowest those are going to drop out quick and easy but they're also going to have the full tension of your mag release regardless of how tight or loose you have that so that's gonna be where you're gonna get most likely your minimum amount of wiggle without having to put a lot of force on the magazine also some interesting differences here once again looking to the right end daniel defense H&K and ETS being the deepest the other experiment I did was to look at magazine feed lip whip alright so how broad this is across here I measured going straight across where the rim of the cartridge is right through there on all these magazines while they're empty I then measured with a 50 percent load why fifty percent well because there's a lot of magazines that's a lot of ammo and quite time-consuming so I went to half figuring that was enough to put pressure on here and looked at how much the lips widened if you've ever had a magazine fail on you it's usually because the lips have split too far and the mag the rounds just kind of fall out that or sometimes they will crack in the army with old mags like this one here which is one of my GI mags from Afghanistan 12 years ago now we used to take the stripper clip pieces and use them to bend and tighten up those mag lips when they got a little too loose that's kind of a forgotten art long gun with polymer magazines obviously because we can't reshape them some of them have a metal reinforcement on the leg the Lancer now I wanted to see how much that helps and doesn't help so I measured right after we loaded I measured 24 hours later 48 hours later and then at the time of this filming one week after loading it and water to see how much that changed now this may or may not be important to you if you load your magazine and then use it immediately not a big deal but if you load mags and leave them stored loaded for a long time it meant not feed as well for you after that week as it did right away of course there are several several factors to this including the springs the followers all of that so this isn't the one and only answer to it but there is some interesting data looking at those caches skin to give you a demonstration let's take that Troy here got a little bit of vertical water front rear comes up taking the H&K not much vertical at all lots rather take but more front to rear see I'm getting your RC products a lot of puncture rare not a lot of vertical so each magazine is going to behave a little differently and present its own unique opportunities to either work or fail let's take a look at that data so immediately you have to go into 50 percent load and I chose 50 percent because not all of these were 30 around magazines we had a 20-round a 32 round a 35 round and a 40 round in there this is the lip swell so the looses lips if you will and I was shocked to see all the way on the right there that the Lancer actually opened up the most for a second here I was a little concerned I also noticed some of them contract a wee bit that's what you see over on the left side I tribute this to the magazine body swelling a little bit causing the lips to narrow this really isn't too meaningful considering that all of these run in my guns anyways but I thought it might be indicative of what will come in the future and here's the information that you are wanting to see with these magazines at 1/2 percent capacity or 50 percent rather loaded for a week how much did the lip with change what we're looking at is a difference in measurement between when I first loaded them to half capacity and a week later our winners daniel defense CAA the PMAG Gentoo and jim 380 i mission first tactical and ETS once again with those negative numbers that's probably the body swung a little bit so the lips getting narrower but I would say our losers for sure are the civilian ok industries see products master Mulder and Troy let's take a look at the consistency across the board so there's a lot going on with this chart hopefully you're looking at this from a computer or a tablet something where you can really read all of this what I wanted to see with this chart is how much total change there was look all the way to the left the gen 3 pmags very consistent our C products had quite a bit of swell all the way to the right the Lancer mag seemed like it was gonna explode in comparison of keep in mind that this is a difference of two hundredths of an inch so maybe not that big of a deal but looking at on the scale the Lancer got huge after first loading and then began to contract back to its normal spot which makes sense considering that those metal lips probably had a memory and it wanted to come back to that once again ATI CAA the annual defense mission first tactical all did very well having minimal change throughout the time the pro mag forty over on the right side looks like it was starting to give up as it started to get wide it's same thing with the C products magazine was given up at the end of a week hopefully this helps you make a decision as to how you want to treat your magazines and what magazines you use I'd say that all of these magazines are fine for going to the range loading it that day using it that day some of these magazines though I would not want to leave loaded for long periods of time whereas others are more likely to trust hopefully this helps thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Graham Baates

Views: 28,264

Rating: 4.8714857 out of 5

Keywords: armslist, best, top, GBGuns, shooting, sport, defense, airsoft, ar, ar15, mag, magazine, ATI, C-Products, CAA, D&H, Daniel Defense, ETS, OKay, H&K, Lancer, Master Molder, Mission First Tactical, MagPul, TorkMag, Troy

Id: n6q-Gr-eiow

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017