>>This is a single-stack magazine holding, if memory serves, eight
>>rounds, with one of the stiffest follower springs ever fitted. That
>>little button on the follower? Will bust your thumb if you try
>>to work it manually, especially as you get farther down and the spring
>>resistance gets higher and higher.
>
>Obligatory I-have-no-experience-with-these-things question: Is it
>practical to hold the magazine vertically against a hard surface and
>then just push cartridges in from the top, without messing with the
>button? It seems like that ought to work; there's some sort of catch
>that holds them in once they're in, isn't there?

You mean like catching the button under the edge of a table and using that to push it down? That would probably work, although it might slip.

The way most box magazines work, the sides are bent in at the top to hold the cartridges in, and open at the front, so that the action can pull each round out forward and chamber it, but the others don't pop out of the top of the magazine and jam up the works. (The technical term for those structures, a bit amusingly, is "feed lips".) With most modern magazines, the follower and the feed lips are designed so that you can push each round down with the next one, but in some, like the Luger's, that doesn't really work (not sure why—maybe the open part is too small), so you need the button to move the follower/previously loaded rounds down to make room for the new one.

That's an awkward explanation, but it's hard to explain in text.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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