Mag spring life

[johnny]

   Hello forum members.
  It appears, thanks to Ryan, we will be able to have a fair number of mags sitting around in our little arsenals in the fairly near future.
       My question is this. What appears to be the best procedure to retain mag spring tension over time?
   Eric, you want to weigh in on this?
                                                                                                               Johnny,
                                                                                                                Wisconsin

[PsychoSword]

I'm going to say the act of simply not using them. I'll qualify that with saying when a magazine is stored loaded, this does not ruin the spring life either. The act of using them does. When the spring goes through its cycles of compression and decompression. I don't think most of us put very many rounds through our R9s so it's probably not a huge issue, though the shorter slide and tighter tolerances make it a bigger issue than on a larger handgun like a 1911 Government model or a Beretta 92.

[backupr9]

I have been informed that mag springs don't usually go bad if kept loaded as this is not a dynamic compression.  That is not the case for the recoil springs in pistols that accept sudden heavy loads intermittently.  Someone more expert than I should comment further.

[johnny]

Thank you both.

[MICHPATRIOT]

The spring being compressed and then violently shook during firing does them in..loading one round at a time and shooting would be tedious but would give the spring the longest life.

[Faawrenchbndr]

Thanks to Ryan, I am able to have carry mags and range mags.
However, I found want to purchase a few mag springs to have on hand

[ECR]

   Hello forum members.
  It appears, thanks to Ryan, we will be able to have a fair number of mags sitting around in our little arsenals in the fairly near future.
       My question is this. What appears to be the best procedure to retain mag spring tension over time?
   Eric, you want to weigh in on this?
                                                                                                               Johnny,
                                                                                                                Wisconsin

Wow. . . . . I am so sorry I missed this one!  Seems like a few members have already weighed in on the topic. . . Thank you guys for taking up the slack here. As mentioned, you would have to shoot the tar out of the gun to have an issue with the mag spring. The early R9s did have a weaker 10 coil spring, which Karl updated to a 13 coil spring. Whilst doing the some warranty repairs through the years I found that the 13 coil spring was too strong, which seemed to give us problems with the cycle rate reliability. I lowered the mag spring by one coil to 12 coils and that seemed the be the magic number for reliability of cycle. If you have a 13 coil spring, simply remove the baseplate, use a pair of cutting pliers to cut one coil off and then use two needle nose pliers to reform the end. That should do the trick. If you have a 10 coil spring, I know I'll get hell for this, but it will certainly work if you remove the spring, stretch it a bit and reinstall it in the magazine. Better than before and I've done that and it works, so go for it! Right to the last R9 going out of our shop in late 2013, those guns all had the 12 coil magazine springs installed.

Regards,

Eric R.