Saturday, April 13, 2013

Miscellaneous pistol add-ons...

I mentioned in an earlier post the base pads for the M&P from 10-8 Performance, but there is a similar product for Glocks! In case you didn't know, you can also avoid breaking a nail while clearing a Type 3 Malfunction in your Glock the Larry Vickers way, with Vickers Tactical Magazine Floor Plates for Glock Pistols, which is a mouthful of words for a little piece of plastic. But a very cool piece of plastic it is!

Note that both plates have dimples allowing you to number your mags by coloring in the dots, which is way cooler than just writing a number on the floorplate. (Unless you have more than eight mags currently in use for that gun, of course...)
I picked some up at Premier Arms last time I was there (they come five to a pack) and slapped them on a couple Glock mags when I got home. They work well for me, not interfering with my grip and not flying off when I dropped a loaded magazine repeatedly on the concrete basement floor. Be aware, however, that people with hands wider than mine have pinched up epic blood blisters during fast reloads using these things in G19/23/32-sized frames. Also, unlike the 10-8 baseplates for the M&P, they aren't metal, and so don't add that little bit of extra weight to speed the empty mag out of the gun...

Both gizmos are, of course, also available from Brownells: M&P, Glock. (I really should remember to set up a Brownells affiliate program account thingy one of these days...)

ETA: Ooh! Amazon has the Glock Base Plates! Free two-day shipping for Amazon Prime members! 

16 comments:

The Great and Powerful Oz said...

Eight? Looks like you could count to 256 to me.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those that don't.

Scott J said...

Sorry for being ignorant about mag numbering. Is it for keeping up with usage cycles?

Several of my mags came used with used guns so I have no way of knowing.

Keads said...

Well duh. I just marked all of the M&P mags with a metallic sharpie. I guess I will never be tacti-cool. Sigh....

Tam said...

Scott J,

I do them sequentially as I put them into use so I have a rough idea as to which have been working longer.

If I'm at a class or a match or whatever and have a malf that may be mag-related, I can make a note of the number and see if it happens again with that mag.

It can also help tell my mags from somebody else's on a busy line.

Kevin said...

The Great and Powerful Oz beat me to the punch. By a day.

Keads said...

Oh, the mag plates do not match my "flat dark earth" M&P VTAC. Or whatever they call that shade of green.

Brad K. said...

As for treating the two groups of four dots as two hexadecimal digits -- what about using the resistor color code system of black-brown-red, etc., for an eight digit, decimal value large enough for many uses.

That, or use two or three dots for the sequence number of the magazine, two for the year acquired (starting with the birthdate of the wonderful Tam as 'zero' hour), and the rest to record the distance in miles from point of purchase to Roseholme cottage.

To anyone else they would look like random funny colored dots. That, or a pair of resistors.

Rob said...

"Eight? Looks like you could count to 256 to me.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those that don't."

Damn, beat me to it, too.

You could also do WAY more than 256 using color codes. Using the eight basic colors that'd show up best (red, blue, green, orange, yellow, purple, pink, and white), and you could do 2048 different magazines.

Rob said...

Thinking it over, if you mixed it up and used different color dots for the same magazine (in effect doubling the number of bits of information possible over using a single color), that'd push your possible combinations from 2^8 or 2^11 to 2^16, or 65,536 different combinations.

It'd get really confusing, though.

Ed said...

Multi-color dots confusing? Only to everyone else but you because you choose the color code and so they have meaning to you.


Firehand said...

Tam: dropping mags on a concrete floor so we don't have to.

And damn, I don't want to, them suckers are hard to replace right now!

Ian Argent said...

Blogging, a way to attract technical pedants like no other (says the man whowe first thought was basically stated by Oz.)

KM said...

and have a malf that may be mag-related, I can make a note of the number

Exactly. That's how I culled one of my Wilson 1911 mags.

Of course, I didn't mark them first so I had to shoot them all just to find the gremlin.
Ya know, it would have helped bunches if you had posted this a month ago. ;)

Anonymous said...

I thought those dimples were so blind people could keep track of their mags.

TigerStripe said...

Oz, I think she was talking about the dumber people, like me... TS

Geodkyt said...

Keads --

If you were truly tacti-cool, you would use Hello Kitty or Twilight stickers on your floorplates.

1. Truly cool cares not what others think.

2. Chances are, NO ONE at the range that day will have similar mags.

3. It's easy to remember "Green Kitty is bad!" or "Must crush Edward in a vice".

WV: "2104 Velopone" -- The new dystopian cyberpunk My Little Pony meets Transformers