9 and a half rounds


Bitcoin in its natural habitat…

I guess there wasn’t room next to Barely Legal (which probably sold more copies).

Limited appeal…

Following…

My current twitter feed: ad, titty, kitty, snark, ad. Dear Elon, I could do with a bit more content between the ads.

Followers…

A few days ago, I helped a friend solve a problem with his new .45 ACP Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0. It comes with 10-round magazines, but it’s almost impossible to actually squeeze the 10th round in, especially if you use a magazine loader like an UpLula. The two most common recommendations are to leave the magazine fully loaded for a few weeks/months until the spring breaks in, or to snip a coil off the bottom of the spring, reducing the tension.

Neither of these actually works well, because the real problem is California. In order to sell any handguns in CA (and other states allergic to civil rights), magazines cannot hold more than 10 rounds. A good magazine will still have a bit of slack in the spring when the last round is loaded, so that it can be inserted into the gun without force when the slide is down, and that slack could allow a Sufficiently Motivated State Agent to squeeze an 11th round in, converting all owners to felons and banning sales of that model in that state.

So S&W deliberately made the magazine followers too tall. If it barely holds 10, then the manufacturer is safe, and only a consumer who deliberately modifies their magazines is at risk of prosecution.

Anyway, we took a quarter-inch off the bottom of his followers with 100-grit sandpaper, and they now comfortably hold 10 rounds. Then he went out and bought some 14-round extended magazines, which are much easier to load to full capacity, despite using the exact same followers.

(there are a number of videos out there documenting this process for the 10-round 9mm mags, but you don’t need a video to learn how to rub plastic against sandpaper)

(and if you screw up the process, Midwest Gun Works sells replacement S&W followers)

Unrelated proper setup

Ambi safety, long trigger, arched mainspring housing (grooved), tritium/fiber-optic sights, no frontstrap checkering, Wilson mags.


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