Datapoint Regarding Mag Springs

[MaciekA]

Just a datapoint regarding the health of springs in mags...

In the last few months I've been incredibly lazy and just coming home crazy tired from games and throwing my entire camping bag (full of guns and mags and such) on the floor of my work room and forgetting about it until the next friday or saturday night, when it's time to clean barrels, fill up mags and re-charge batteries in preparation for my weekly games. Most of my mags are completely full when I get home, usually the dump pouch only has about 3 to 5 mags in it, unless the game organizers do a "mad minute" at the end of the day where we all shoot melons and cans.

I have generally gravitated towards polymer mags for my M4-based setups, which means mostly PMAGs. I typically have been taking 15 mags to a game: 4 PTS TMAGs, 2 PTS "M" shorty PMAGs, 4 Star-brand PMAGs, 4 Beta project PMAGs, and 1 King Arms SIG 556 mag.

To my amazement, these have been doing fine remaining fully loaded for 6 days at a time due to my laziness, especially now that they've been fully broken in with very regular abuse. I don't plan to continue running them this way if I can help it, but it is nice to know the springs remain fairly peppy after literally weeks on end of being compressed. So if you're one of those guys who is paranoid about this issue and use any of the above mags.. you can probably rest easy.

[Spike]

Meanwhile, you can leave MAG mags loaded for like... 3 days, and they'll stop feeding properly.

[Stealth]

Interesting. . . I was always paranoid about my PMags and cycle them out of my inventory every year.

Thanks for the info. I'll hang on them longer now.

[Danke]

The theoretical rule on springs is that it is cycling them that fatigues them. Not leaving them compressed or tensioned.

The reality is though they will sack under load and the smaller the spring the easier that is to happen. So something like a torque wrench with a tiny spring needs to go back to zero after each use. Something like an airsoft magazine will on the clock the longer it's left.

Brand will play into the longevity of the spring also so you'll get the players saying I never unload my gear and never have problems vs. the others who do see an effect.

If you wanted to be scientific you could build a rig to test the springs in a few magazines, then load them for six months, and re-test them after.