Stress-strain cycles play a major role in spring wear , however, parts designed with ferrous metals like most steels generally have lifetimes in the millions of cycles and fail by different modes long before the lifetime is reached. So obviously, the life of the spring depends on proper design and the choice of materials. The spring steel gun magazines typically use is a moderately-high carbon steel with alloying agents in small quantities.
Properly designed, a magazine spring would last far longer than the other components of the gun that are regularly undergoing thermal stress, diffusion, and much larger fatigue cycles. This is no reason to be stingy at the range. A high-quality magazine should function perfectly through tens of thousands of cycles. No evidence exists to support this suggestion. Take your strategic magazine to the range for a change, and put a different pre-loaded magazine in its place.
How often this should be done depends on who you ask. Some say as often as two weeks, others as much as six months. The average answer falls around every ninety days. Rotating your magazines gives you a chance to strip, clean, and inspect the magazine for faults and imperfections. A lot more can go wrong with a neglected magazine than the spring spontaneously quitting on you. So just to be safe, the best practice is to rotate the magazines periodically.
A gunsmith at Beretta who claimed not to be speaking on behalf of the company told us he rotates his personal carry magazines every two weeks. The customer service rep we spoke to from Sig said that once every six months would be sufficient. Polymer followers in particular seem to be a common failure point for magazines. Adding some complexity to this debate is whether loading the mags to their full capacity will make any difference in how quickly the springs wear out.
Again, there is not a clear consensus in the industry. However, Wolff Gunsprings , a company well known for manufacturing a wide variety of springs for the firearms industry has a slightly different take. These are designed to hold more rounds with less spring material often in the same space. The army, the top-level gun associations, and most professional shooters all agree that around 6 months is a good middle of the pack time for storage. If you leave them any longer, you run the risk of the springs wearing out and the magazine spring losing its power.
If you are someone who only shoots casually, then keeping one or two loaded magazines in the house at all times is a good idea. If you are planning on going shooting soon, then loading a few extra magazines beforehand would be a good idea. A neat little trick is rotating your stored magazines out for ones you just loaded before you head down to the range.
That way you are using up the mags that need using and ensuring that fresh ones regularly take their place. For a professional shooter, like a soldier, then a faulty magazine may be the difference between life and death. It can also be hard to know how long a magazine can be stored while loaded and still function normally. As mentioned above, a magazine should last for at least 6 months across the board. Some will last longer, very few will last less than 6 months though.
Some magazines can keep their spring for years, even decades, after they were manufactured. In world war one, magazine-fed rifles and pistols only just started entering into circulation.
Beforehand, cavalry and bayonets still played a large part in wartime tactics. You can get a good idea just how much weaponry and war progressed between world war one and two with this alone. This led to a huge amount of allied soldiers using world war one weaponry, with old magazines, before they would eventually have their issued weapons replaced. And sometimes people died because of this. Even without being stored fully loaded they will begin to lose their tension. Since the magazine will lose its tension in its uncompressed state, filling it with ammo will compress it again giving you a little bit of spring.
Though not as much as it once had. It is possible to create your own springs if you buy the machinery. Anyone who plans on stockpiling magazines and creating their own ammunition should invest in the ability to create their own springs. If you go through a lot of magazines, learning to do so might save you a heck of a lot of money in the long run.
And, of course, you always run the risk of breaking the magazine altogether. So, while it is possible and safe to store loaded magazines there are some things we need to be aware of.
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