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The topic of magazines and best break-in practice comes up. I saw this article posted and thought it quite interesting. They took 8 replicates of a spectrum of 5.56 AR15 magazines as well as various handgun magazines, and did a series of tests over about 9 months. With magazines left loaded, unloaded, cycled. etc. And post a very interesting data-dump. What I got out of it was that yes- there is a break-in period where magazine spring tension comes down a bit. But then it stabilizes, pragmatically forever, as far as mortals are concerned.
I always thought cycling a magazine spring helped break it in faster, but in the second link (the data-dump), they basically took half the mags and shot them every week, a good bit. And then left them loaded. And half the mags, loaded them, and didn't touch them again. At the end of the test period, both mags had about the same spring tension; both of which were a little lower than brand new.
They then hooked up to a machine and cycled the spring to failure. It took 70,000 cycles (of a 30 round magazine spring), to make one fail.
Another conclusion was that leaving a mag loaded didn't really hurt it. And leaving a mag only partially loaded, had no preservation benefit.
Anyway, gor the technical minded; it was a neat summary and some pretty neat testing.
I always thought cycling a magazine spring helped break it in faster, but in the second link (the data-dump), they basically took half the mags and shot them every week, a good bit. And then left them loaded. And half the mags, loaded them, and didn't touch them again. At the end of the test period, both mags had about the same spring tension; both of which were a little lower than brand new.
They then hooked up to a machine and cycled the spring to failure. It took 70,000 cycles (of a 30 round magazine spring), to make one fail.
Another conclusion was that leaving a mag loaded didn't really hurt it. And leaving a mag only partially loaded, had no preservation benefit.
Anyway, gor the technical minded; it was a neat summary and some pretty neat testing.
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