cleaning, maintenance, magazine, disassemblyI have several 1911-style magazines from Wilson Combat, specifically the 47OXC model (similar to the 47D) You disassemble them by pushing in a little recessed button on the bottom, which allows the base pad to slide off, which then lets the spring come out.
When putting a few of these back together after cleaning them, I couldn’t get the button to re-seat on four of them. The base pad still goes back on, but if I whack the magazine hard, I can get the base pad to slide off a bit.
I don’t remember ever having this trouble before. It happend on several of them in a row, so I figure I must be doing something wrong. What’s the trick to do this correctly?
My Novak and Nighthawk Custom magazines (both by ACT-MAG) are constructed the same way.
What I've noticed is that loading the magazine and tapping the rear edge of it against my palm helps to finish seating the little plastic nub on the base of the spring plate into the magazine base pad.
In the picture below, you can see the before and after results. The nub isn't quite flush with the base pad after, but it also isn't pressed in enough to allow the base pad to slide off.
In the top image, the magazine is unloaded. In the bottom image, it is loaded.
Wilson 47D or ETM magazines? I am willing to bet they are ETMs…
Make sure the spring is not installed backwards. If the spring isn’t installed properly, not enough tension will be applied to the locking plate, preventing the dimple from getting a good seat against the walls of the hole in the floorplate.
More common on the ETMs, as the earlier ETMs had a few issues. Either the dimple was not machined tall enough and/or the hole in the floorplate was off resulting in exactly what you described. Not enough tension on the floorplate, allowing it to slip off with “interesting” consequences.
Make sure the hole in the floorplate isn’t rounded or hogged out.
You can troubleshoot this by swapping locking plates and floorplates with know good mags of the same model to isolate where the trouble lies… Wilson will make good on their warranty. I swapped a few ETMs that exhibited this same problem.
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