Wearing out the springs in a mag

That is correct.

Magazine springs that "wear out" are a sign of bad springs and ought make a person a touch angry if they paid more than a discount price for either the spring or the magazine (or both).

The X factor is the overall quality and design of the magazine in question. For example, the military bought a large amount of magazines from a vendor (I don't recall which vendor) for the M9 that had the followers "stick" if they were loaded for any amount of time. You would fire the round in the chamber and maybe 1 more,, and the slide would fully cycle, but the next rounds would not move up- there would be a gap between what was now the top round and the chamber. I had a similar problem with some aftermarket mini 14 mags I bought years ago too- I fixed them by pirating springs from GI M16 mags, and they worked- but capacity was reduced by a couple rounds.

When I was much younger I bought a Squires-Bingham .22 rifle as my first firearm purchase. Didn't put more than a couple hundred rounds through it before the mag spring was useless. If the mag spring is of poor steel/poorly tempered it doesn't matter how long you leave it compressed or how many times you compress/decompress it.

20ish years ago virtually every spring put in CZ pistols were bad from the factory. They would work fine for a while but it was advisable to simply replace all of them ASAP. Especially the mag springs.

Suppose you are out on the highway and you set the cruise control at 60. Suppose the engine is turning 2000 rpm. A valve spring cycles 1000 times in a mile. That's 100 million times at 100 thousand miles. Why do we have to think of replacing a recoil spring at 1000 cycles?

my late uncle’s llama 32acp mag was separated from the pistol and lost, until this past weekend. it had sat loaded for at least 30 years, maybe 50, literally. i unloaded it and by the fifth round the follower wasnt being spring-released. my late uncle was a retired usaf navigator who got it on one of many flights to spain ages ago. he wasn’t a gun guy and literally kept it in a sock drawer. probably no magazine could go so long loaded without trouble. why sock drawer handguns ought to be revolvers.

unspellable said:

Suppose you are out on the highway and you set the cruise control at 60. Suppose the engine is turning 2000 rpm. A valve spring cycles 1000 times in a mile. That's 100 million times at 100 thousand miles. Why do we have to think of replacing a recoil spring at 1000 cycles?

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Good reasoning, IMO.

Interesting thread...

Vonderek said:

If the mag spring is of poor steel/poorly tempered it doesn't matter how long you leave it compressed or how many times you compress/decompress it.

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or, what happens?

unspellable said:

Suppose you are out on the highway and you set the cruise control at 60. Suppose the engine is turning 2000 rpm. A valve spring cycles 1000 times in a mile. That's 100 million times at 100 thousand miles. Why do we have to think of replacing a recoil spring at 1000 cycles?

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Go pull a valve spring and compare it to any spring in rifle/shotgun/pistol.

tarosean said:

Go pull a valve spring and compare it to any spring in rifle/shotgun/pistol.

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A spring may be a spring, but that is a jump Evel Kneivel could not make.

tarosean said:

Go pull a valve spring and compare it to any spring in rifle/shotgun/pistol.

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Exactly, a valve spring is designed to work well below the infinite fatigue life of the material given the application. Most gun springs are not, due to weight requirements and large deformations required the springs often operate well above the materials infinite fatigue life limit and thus have a relatively low finite cycles limits in many cases. I have worn out magazine springs on my USPSA handgun.

Test all your equipment regularly.

Good springs don't fail due to compression.

But bad springs fail.

Something I ran up on while wandering the web a while back...according to their tests some springs definitely do get weaker when sitting compressed.

https://www.gatewaytoairguns.org/GTA/library/Keeping a Springer Cocked.htm

unspellable said:

Why do we have to think of replacing a recoil spring at 1000 cycles?

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Probably because we are surrounded by $25 toaster or $30 coffee makers that seem to just "die" for no obvious reason, maintained or not.
Too many consumer products are only made to "just good enough."
And, it's less obvious that the onerous world of liability lawsuits means that the opposite applies to firearms as a general notion, that they must needs be held to a higher standard prima facie.
And that whether they are used once a year, or a couple hundred times a day.

My valve spring analogy is meant to imply that maybe gun springs are in general not is good as they might be.

SunnySlopes said:

Funny. I'll have to remember that one. But I'll say, "...that's a jump that even Evil Kneivel could not make."

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Problem I have, I read words that are not there. It was a real bitch 50 years ago when I was in school. I don't test well at all.