Tag Archives: magazines

More Tapco

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I’d picked up a couple Mini-14s over the course of the year and that means that the mag:gun ratio shifted unfavorably after each purchase. Whats that mean for the savvy survivalist? Duh..it means buy more mags:

I stumbled across these Tapco Gen2 mags on Gunbroker and made a deal to take all the guy had. I’ve posted about these mags before and I recommend them. Even the Ruger factory mags arent always 100%….the 20-rd mags work flawlessly but the 30’s sometimes fail to feed reliably. These Tapcos (and the Eagles) seem to work more reliably than the Ruger OEM…and theyre usually cheaper (when you can find them).

As I’ve said, the Mini-14 isn’t even a tertiary level of backup around here but despite that, it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a decent mag supply on hand for them.

Blast from the past

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Sometimes, if what you need isn’t available in your present, and unlikely in the future, then you’re only choice is to mine the past for it. Case in point – Mini-14 magazines.

I picked up a Mini-14 a few weeks ago and while I don’t mind buying Ruger factory mags, they are expensive and while I’ve had no problems with the twenty rounders, their thirty rounders havent always been reliable.

A few years ago Tapco came out with a Mini-14 mag that was, in my opinion, the best aftermarket Mini-14 mag available. (Keyword: available) Unfortunately, Tapco got caught up in the Remington bankruptcy and it is, for now, ‘not a going concern’.

I’ve mentioned them before, but years and years ago Eagle made some Mini-14 mags that I thought were just amazing. The Eagle mags were 35-round instead of 30, used a constant-force ‘windowshade’ spring that made loading mags a breeze, and I found them to be utterly reliable. They also havent been made since the ’94 weapons ban. I was scouring gunbroker for more Tapco mags and stumbled across a stash of NOS Eagle mags. Hmm. Okay, lets make a deal for all of them.

As I’ve said, the Mini-14 is barely on my radar as a ‘run out the door’ kind of gun. It’ll do in a pinch, but I can’t think of too many situations where I’d not have one of the three dozen AR’s sitting around here to use. But…who knows what the apocalypse is going to look like? Maybe there’ll come a time to tuck this thing in a case at the beta site with a dozen magazines. Who can say? Better to have and not need…

So, if you have a Mini-14 (or Mini-30) and you’re a little annoyed at current mag selections, I can recommend the Eagle mags if you can find them, and wholeheartedly recommend the Gen2 Tapco mags. (The Gen 2 have the still reinforcement tab at the mag lockup point.)

I should also point out that in a housecleaning frenzy the other day I discovered an old tactical vest from the late 90’s/earlt 00’s that still has six Eagle AR mags, fully loaded, in it. An excellent experiment to see how leaving a magazine loaded for 25 years winds up working out.

 

The Ruger P-series fetish continues

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Been a good boy and not bought any guns in a couple weeks. But….gun accessories, on the other hand…

I was doing well until an email landed in my box asking if I was interested in some factory mags for the Ruger 9mm P-series….you know…P95DC mags.

Me: How many do you have?

Them: *sigh*

Interesting thing is, this works out to about three mags per gun.

Logistics

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Well, if you’re gonna have an Uzi (or two), you’re gonna need mags….right?

Fifty oughtta be a good start. And I’ve a few other accessories for the new acquisition that have started trickling in.

This was a 50-mag package from Atlantic Firearms. These are 25-rd mags and, thoguh used, they appear to be in pretty good shape. I need to thoroughly examine each one closely, but so far they all look good.

 

AK mags

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I’m not really an AK guy. Yet, somehow I have managed to acquire three of them.. a milled Arsenal, a milled Norinco, and a WASR-10 of some flavor. I still have gobs of 7.62×39 laying around, so I decided to keep the AK’s since having a military-style semi-auto with plenty of ammo is never really a bad thing. And, of course, logistics rears its ugly head. If you’re gonna have a buncha AK’s, youre gonna need a buncha AK mags.

Ok…will 200 be enough?

I went for an even split of 40- and 30-rd mags. These are the AC Unity mags that you’re seeing all over the place. Made in ex-Yugoslavia they’re pretty good mags. The nice feature is metal locking tabs front-and-back. Ordered in bulk from Robert RTG (bookmark that place, guys) they came out to, with shipping, $4.87 per mag. (10% on 100+ mags.)  For that kinda money, I don’t mind having a bunch of extras to someday sell to the unenlightened masses when the next mag ban comes rolling in.

This is, by the by, on top of the AK mags I already have. I went deep on AK mags a few years back when those metal Korean AK mags were coming into the country. And prior to that I had a buncha ChiCom mags. For a guy with only three AK’s, I’d say I’ve got the magazine end of things covered.

One is none, and two hundred is….one hundred?

Springtime

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I have a Mini-14 GB that I like for nostalgic purposes. Trouble is, finding good, reliable magazines for the Mini-14 has always been a fool’s errand. I’m sure someone will jump into the comments about how their TripleK/USA Brand/RandoCo magazine has been utterly reliable for them. Hey, may be. But I’m willing to believe those are outliers. The fact is that there have been only two aftermarket Mini-14’s that are reliable – the long-discontinued Eagle 35-rd mag, and the recently discontinued Tapco Gen 2. What’s that leave? The Ruger OEM product.

So, I have a 30-rd Ruger-marked mag here and for some reason its been giving me some headaches. I suspect the magazine spring was losing it’s enthusiasm. A new Ruger 30-rd mag is a little under $40…ridiculous. So, I ordered up some Wolff replacement ‘extra strength’ mag springs. They arrived today.Normally, magazine springs aren’t something I worry about. In a world of $10 Magpul magazines it makes more sense to just buy a new Glock or AR mag. But when you’re looking at a magazine costing almost $40, thats a different story.

So, I wound up with a handful (a ten-pack,actually) of Wolff Mini-14 mag springs that I now have to carve out some storage space for.

 

Just another ‘beware the coming bans’ post

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Unless you’ve been under a rock the last week, you know some guy in Maine (of all places) went sideways and killed about twenty people before taking his own life. As usually happens after these events, the usual crowd wiped the blood onto their faces and began wailing about ‘commonsense’ and ‘reasonable’ restrictions on…well..whatever they think was at fault.

To be fair, the administration really has it’s hands full right now and is probably not interested in getting into a domestic policy quagmire while it’s in the midst of a couple foreign policy quagmires. But…I’ve been wrong before.

But if they do get some traction on their usual ban-dwagon, you don’t want to be caught unprepared. It’s been 19 years since the sunset of the much-despised ‘Assault Weapons Ban’.  If you bought on pistol magazine and one rifle magazine each month (a very easy goal) since then, you’d have about 228 pistol mags and 228 rifle mags…an amount that almost everyone would agree is a comfortable amount to have.

And if you bought one ‘evil’ rifle every year, again not an outrageous or difficult goal, you’d have 19 AR’s in the safe.

But some people just will not learn. It seems like every time some whackjob shoots up a 7-11 and the media starts their campaign about ‘high capacity magazines’ there are people who sudenly think they need to buy. Dude…you should have had your magazine issues settled shortly after the ban expired. I encounter way to many people who think that “Oh, I have a dozen mags for my AR. Thats plenty.” That is wildly shortsighted thinking that fails to account for what perils the future holds. I’m not going to elaborate about that because I’ve covered it elsewhere on this blog more times than I can recall.

TL;DR for todays post: one of these days, these gun/mag bans will come back and you don’t want to be caught with your pants down. Stack it deep. And if you really want a positive habit to develop, buy one pistol mag per month, and one rifle mag per month. They are money in the bank. (Not that keeping your money in the bank is a good idea, but you get my meaning.)

MP5 mag arrival

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Palmetto had a sale on MKE-made MP5 mags for $30 a mag. Still a lot of money to pay for a simple magazine, in my opinion, but a bargain compared to what these things usually sell for. Picked up ten and they arrived yesterday. They seem to fit just fine in my MP5 clones but my MP5k clone doesnt seem to like them. I suspect something is off with the magazine catch on that one and I may need to send it to be looked at.

Other than that, these seem like good mags and I’ll be taking them out this weekend to function test them. So, if you’ve got an MP5 clone and you need some mags for it…well...I hope you got in on that deal.

10% mags

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It’s interesting…I was thinking about how mags for the Barrett are normally around $150 ea. To buy, say, six spare magazines, which is a reasonable amount, would be almost $900. Thats the sort of thing that would make most people, reasonably so, declare “what the heck, I’m not spending almost a grand on magazines for one gun!”

And then the math kicked in. That would be about 10% of the cost of the Barrett. Hmmm. A quality AR is, say, $900. Ten percent of that is $90 and that would get you about….six or seven spare magazines.

A Glock? Retail is about $550. Ten percent of that is about $55. That $55 would get you about five Magpul magazines.

An AK? A Zastava goes for about a grand in the stores. Ten percent of that is a hundred bucks. Again, you’re back to around a half dozen magazines.

So, the more I think about it, I’m starting to think the answer to “how many mags should I have for a gun?” is to plan on having at least as many mags as 10-15% of the gun’s cost will get you. That would seem to put you on some pretty solid ground…a starting point.

Of course, that math gets skewed if you buy a used gun which is usually much cheaper than new. But the notion of spending about 10-15% of the MSRP of a gun on magazines sounds like it might be a good baseline.