Supporting gun ownership and sportsmen's rights in response to the flurry of anti-gun and sport legislation under consideration in Congress and the Illinois State Legislature.
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From SSR:
I was just reading a blog post where the author proudly noted that he had a new floorplate & a high power spring installed in his magazine, which made it highly reliable.
You see aftermarket springs advertised for just about everything under the sun. Magazine springs, hammer springs, firing pin springs, slide springs, ejector springs, extractor springs, anal springs and the list goes on. Springs are cheap to make and usually easy to install.... Thus the owner isn't likely to have a conversation with a gunsmith that can talk him out of it. Not that many would anyway, if they are doing the spring installation.
In my experience, probably 95% of these items are bullshit that actually decreases the reliability and/or utility of the firearm. I've tried a good number of them in my early years before knowing better.
Sure, if you have a cheap Norinco knock off, perhaps the springs in it will or already are bad due to crappy materials or poor heat treating. But a Glock, AK or Springfield is not likely to have such problems.
The springs in most automatic firearms are carefully selected to balance the force required to do the job with the energy available to load them (the springs). Changing this force can drastically alter the functioning & functionality of the firearm. Case in point, my Mini14. It's known to have way too much gas venting out of the barrel port into the op rod (Ruger deleted the gas piston to save money..). This results in the op rod hammering the receiver at the end of it's stroke and the high velocity during the unloading cycle flings steaming hot brass 10+ yards away, making you a favorite when on the line.
So the obvious answer is to just put in a bigger op-rod spring in right? Wolfe will be happy to oblige you with one for $17. Except that once you install the spring, low power ammo will no longer fully cycle your action. Try using your support hand to drop the action on a freshly loaded magazine. Now, only a gorilla can release the oprod when it's locked back with a fully coiled spring. And hope you don't have soft primers in your ammo, as the return velocity of the bolt is way faster. Maybe next time you should change the gas port bushing instead....
Magazine won't feed reliably? Let's add a high power mag spring to help! Now it's worse. No shit, you just added even more pressure to the stack of cartridges, increasing friction between them and mag lips, making it even harder for the bolt to strip the cartridge (let's add more spring force to the action, to make up for this!) And watch what happens next time you do a tactical reload with the bolt closed. That nice shiny new spring is gonna push back extra hard against the bottom of the bolt while you are trying to stuff it into the magwell. Maybe, if you're lucky the magazine will stick and then fall out when you fire the first shot. And the joy of loading such magazines. But I'm a man. I can take it!
You can see where this is going; Hammer spring - adds force to cocking/slide pullback and makes bolt lift force higher on a bolt guns. Slide spring - makes it harder to run the slide, low power loads may not cycle. Maybe useful if you have a suppressor. Extractor spring - Makes it harder for the action to close, as the extractor has to be forced over the rim of the cartridge. May cause out of battery conditions. Ejector spring - Ditto. May also cause ejection problems as there is much more force pushing the empty case against the side of the chamber, thus altering the timing of ejection vs. bolt position.
To sum it up, I've never replaced a spring with a stronger one and not regretted it. I've also never worn out a spring except on the 590 tube magazine and that was due to bad metallurgy. After 4000+ rounds and many years sitting fully loaded it finally became weak. I added a Wolfe spring and... regretted it, as loading / unloading the last shell is now much harder to do. I cut it down but it's still not as good as the factory spring was. They must have spent a bunch of time figuring out just the right spring rate. Imagine that.
Posted 07:50PM Jul 31, 2008 by MCSA
