Nope, it doesn't take Glock mags. And maybe that's a good thing.
This is of course one of the very first questions that people seem to always ask about a new firearm is,
"Oh, it's a pistol calibre something, does it take Glock mags?"
Because I think people are assuming that, "Well, if I've got some little Glock mags and some big Glock mags,
then I don't need to buy new magazines for the gun that I get, and I can save a few dollars."
However, there are good reasons why you might not want to use a Glock magazine in a particular pistol calibre firearm.
So today we're ... going to just look at the technical issues. We'll leave out the financial issues, which
I will argue are relevant, that the accessories like magazines to a firearm
often have a ... substantially higher profit margin than the gun itself.
If you want a gun to remain in the market, and continue to be developed, and have support,
it has to actually make money for the people designing and building it.
And if magazines are a particularly good way that they can actually make a profit on the gun,
maybe it's not necessarily always a good thing that you can cheap out and not have to buy their magazines.
But we'll leave that aside and look just at the technical issues today.
So first off, Glock magazines are made of polymer.
This is great, this is fine, there are lots of benefits to polymer. It's light weight for its strength.
However, it also has to be thicker for a given strength than a metal magazine.
So if one of your design considerations is I want to minimise the width of the gun, or I want to limit the width of the gun,
well, this guy, this Glock mag, is more than 10%, it's like 12% wider than this.
Which happens to be a ... MAB PA-15 magazine, but both double-stack 9mm mags,
but because steel is a stronger material you need less of it, and so this magazine can be narrower.
In addition, Glock magazines are designed as a single-feed style of magazine.
Meaning that you've got two stacks of cartridges in the body of the magazine,
you can of course on these see the nice little witness holes there.
However, when you get to the top, that double stack has to contract down to a single stack.
And there are good reasons to have single feed magazines,
but there are also good reasons to have double feed magazines.
So the benefit of a single feed is that you have one position that the cartridge will always appear in.
It's a little bit easier to design your firearm to pick up a cartridge always from the exact same location,
(the bolt face to pick up the cartridge).
In addition this means that the presentation area is narrower.
If you have a double feed magazine it's going to be wider because
it's going to accommodate two cartridges effectively side by side.
And in handguns in particular, you may not have the ... space at the top end of the gun
to accommodate a double stack magazine.
Some do, but they tend to be larger pistols.
Guns like the Steyr GB or the Russian Stechkin have double feed pistol magazines.
And there are benefits to that, we'll get to those in just a moment.
But most pistols go with single feed largely for space issues.
Now the benefits of a double feed are, first off, you have less friction in the magazine.
They are less prone to malfunctioning in some ways
because they don't have to compress this double stack of cartridges into a single stack.
They just continue double stack right up to the top, and
the bolt then picks up cartridges alternating from the left and the right.
Takes more space, it can be maybe a little trickier to design the gun to do it,
but ... you have less stuff going on in the magazine, and that tends to lead to it being more reliable.
So if you are designing a pistol and you like the idea of a polymer magazine,
and you're planning on using a single-stack magazine anyway, then a Glock mag is a pretty good solution.
Because it's well tested, and what it means is while you
may not be able to sell your own magazines and make a nice profit margin on them,
you won't have to do the R&D time to develop a properly functioning, reliable magazine.
You can just piggyback off of work that other people have done.
Note that Glock is not the only option here,
there are plenty of guns out there that were designed to use Beretta magazines or CZ 75 magazines.
But Glock has kind of become the de-facto standard that people go with,
probably because Glock magazines are offered in basically every calibre that you might want.
Now if you're designing something like a pistol calibre carbine, say an AR-15 in 9mm,
there are a few other things that you might want to consider about Glock magazines.
So first off, the location of the magazine catch.
On a pistol the magazine catch is located like, well, I'm left handed, right under my trigger finger.
If you're right handed, right under your thumb. It's very convenient.
Like, we've kind of optimised pistols and determined what works best for most people,
and right under the thumb there is it.
And so that's where the magazine catch location is put on a Glock magazine, or really any pistol magazine.
However, if you're sticking this into something like a converted AR-15 receiver,
well, now this is kind of an awkward location, and you're going to have to
build some kind of wonky connecting levers to connect
the magazine release button people are expecting, which is at the back of the magazine well,
to the catch, which is at the front of the magazine well.
Maybe this isn't the best option.
Also, ... your pistols typically operate their hold open mechanisms from the front of the follower.
Again this makes sense in a pistol because of the limited geometry that you have available to you.
However, rifle magazines pretty much always are going to operate the ... bolt hold open from the rear of the magazine.
So once again, if you've got a bolt release mechanism in an AR-15 receiver
and you're converting it to use some sort of magazine well for Glock mags,
now you've got to connect your ... bolt release out to the front where the follower is.
Or ignore that, don't deal with it, and just opt to not have the bolt lock open when it's empty.
Which is, I think most people would find, ... not a beneficial option. Prefer to have the bolt lock open if you can.
So, there are some options where people have done an interesting hybrid system like this.
This is from a CMMG Banshee designed by MEAN Arms, where they have adapted an insert to accept
9mm cartridges in an AR-15 magazine retaining a follower hold open that activates a standard AR-15 bolt hold open,
retaining the magazine catch from the AR-15. This is an interesting solution.
Other solutions, of course, are proprietary magazines. What do these add? Well ... I suppose for one thing,
this is a Kalashnikov KP-9 or a Vityaz magazine.
It doesn't actually have a hold open either, so that's not necessarily a relevant thing in this case.
But it's able to be a double feed magazine,
so that you don't have this issue of constricting the cartridge stack to one round at the top.
And it means you don't have the ... potential reduced reliability of a single-stack magazine.
Yes, Glock magazines are pretty darn reliable, but that's mostly because they're kind of short.
When you get to very long Glock magazines, they get less reliable.
I hate to step on any dreams here, but this is not the most reliable 30 round, 32 round stick magazine out there.
Something like this is a lot better.
You'll notice even in cartridges that seem pretty darn straight wall like .30 carbine,
and where a short magazine remains straight walled, like .30 carbine 15 rounds here.
When you get to longer magazines, they decide to give them a bit of a curve. This is a 30 round .30 carbine magazine.
And even though .30 carbine looks like it's a perfectly parallel straight-walled case,
it functions better with a slightly curved magazine.
You see that again all the same in the AR-15 magazine, a 20 rounder is just a straight mag.
In fact even 25 rounds you can do with a straight mag, like the FAMAS did.
But once you get to 30, or more than that, then you kind of want to add a little bit of curve.
So MEAN Arms did that internally in this magazine body.
But that's not something you can really do for ... an extended pistol magazine like a Glock mag,
because their follower is designed to travel straight and not around a curve.
... It's easier for them to just stick with a straight magazine
and accept a little bit less reliability, a little bit more friction in the magazine,
than to try and re-engineer things to work optimally with a slightly curved magazine.
So what I'm not saying here is that Glock magazines are bad, they're definitely not.
However, like everything in firearms design, or really I suspect everything in mechanical design,
what you have is always a trade-off. There are always compromises made both ways.
And so the advantage of a Glock magazine being something that is somewhat ubiquitous,
that you may already have a lot of,
that's not the only consideration in deciding what magazine you want in a 9mm or other pistol calibre firearm.
And there are valid reasons to say, "You know what? It's a Glock mag, but I don't want to use it in this.
I'm going to use something else that's a little better suited to the specific role that I have in mind."
Hopefully this is something of interest to some of you guys. If you're still around at this point obviously it wasn't too boring.
But ... "Does it take Glock mags?" is of course the ubiquitous, memed out,
kind of gets old to read, question about anything new.
And so, while some people say it as a joke, I think there are a lot of people who legitimately
don't recognise that there are compromises that might make you not want a Glock mag.
Anyway, thanks for watching. Check back in tomorrow, we'll have another cool forgotten weapon.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]