Any alternative magazine designs for an autoloader?

J

jcims

New member
Hi All,

I hope this is the right forum. It seems to me that the 'stack of cartridges pushed by a spring-loaded follower' design for magainzes, while ubiquitous, requires a fairly sensitive balancing act between friction/spring rate/feed angle and recoil spring/bolt momentum/etc. It's hard to be the simplicity, to be sure, but have any other designs made into a mass produced (civilian) firearm with any success? The only thing that comes to mind right now is a belt feed, but i don't think i've seen many of those at the local gander mountain.

Thanks in advance for any info you can share.

Bob
 
There are rotary magazines like the old Savage 99s, and of course staggered stack magazines, and rotary magazines like the Ruger 10/22, but these are just variations on spring-pressure-fed magazines. If you want to get very exotic, gravity-fed drums like a Lewis gun have been around a while, but can be quirky. And let's not forget tube magazines, like most lever actions. Belt-fed is troublesome at best because you have to assemble the belts (the military has very nifty machines that do this automatically). The relationship between the feed angle and the ammo geometry is controlled by the shape of the magazine feed device. But the reason the spring-pressure-feed mechanism has been around so long is that it's simple and IT WORKS!

By the way: if you like staggered box magazines, thank Paul Mauser, who patented the design in 1891.
 
There was a Gatling Gun magazine, the Accles drum, that fed with positive mechanical linkage; it would even shoot upside down, which the usual tall gravity feed Bruce clips or Broadwell drums would not, and of a capacity a spring feed would not handle.

There was a designer (Bill Ruger, maybe) who designed an action that would feed a cartridge from magazine to chamber, fire it, and return the empty to the back of the magazine so as to not risk fouling a jet engine with empties ejected from an aircraft gun.

Consider the 28 shot spiral feed lever action Evans rifle, or the more modern Calico.
 
Thanks for the info guys! It's just crazy to look at a 1911 and realize how little has changed in nearly a century, but i guess if there was a better way we'd know about it by now. :)

On a somewhat related topic, have there been any interesting alternatives to the hook/claw type extractor?
 
There is the T-slot face as used in Browning machine guns and some few rifles. The cartridge feeds out of the belt into a T-slot in the bolt face, is chambered, fired, and extracted. It then tracks down the T-slot until free to be ejected. I think the little Browning BL22 has one, though I don't know the details.

There have been guns made without extractors, you still see the vest pocket Beretta .22, .25, and .32 pistols that depend on blowback to clear out the empties.
 
Thanks again Jim! I Googled t-slot and found all sorts of documentation/field manuals/etc. I was trying to figure out ways to build a gas ejection system to pop the brass out like a cork. If the pressure was high enough, the fact that you were puffing into an open barrel wouldn't really matter. Problem would be dirt and nothing to help a stuck casing.

In a completely alternate approach, if you had a relatively low pressure cartridge, you could also possibly split the chamber into halves and let the new cartridge push the fired brass out. Use a rolling/sliding sleeve to align the chamber and keep it together under pressure.
 
Sounds like you want to automate the trapdoor Springfield. That would be a challenge. The other magazine that comes to mind is cylindrical and has a separate chamber for every cartridge, with one of those revolving chambers being moved into alignment with the bore for each shot. Entirely finger powered mechanical operation. The concept dates back to black powder and cap and ball days. I know I've got some around here somewhere. . .

;)

Nick
 
Unclenick said:
I know I've got some around here somewhere. . .
Click to expand...
I think that's what i'm getting at though... There's a reason you don't see proud proclamations of '5000 rounds without a hiccup' in the revolver forum, and I guess i'm thinking there has to be a way to get closer to that level of reliability in a semi-auto. I'm not saying that revolvers don't have their own problems, but generally they aren't feed/extraction problems. And of course you have folks in semi-auto that run 10K rounds without a problem, but that certainly hasn't been my experience to date.

About a month ago i rented an Alexander Arms .50 Beowulf to give it a try. The first few shots bucked pretty good and i felt like i understood why it could have a good application for LE and military duty. Unfortunately, i had three feed/ejection failures before i emptied that magazine, and it completely soured my initial impression. Looking into it afterwards, it turns out that the magazines may have just needed a small 'tweak' to restore that delicate balance i talked about in my first post. That's the thing i don't like.
 
Seems to me there are several issues you are dealing with:

1- The feeding problems could have just been a cheap magazine. Cheap mag feed lips bend easily, requiring tweaking to ensure smooth feeding. Perhaps higher quality magazines would fix that problem.

2- The .50 Beowulf is a rebated rim case, and historically there have been issues with rebated rim cases not feeding well. This is one reason there aren't a lot of dangerous game rounds with rebated rims. As the bolt goes home, it can miss the rim and push on the edge of the case body in front of the rim. When the round contacts the breech of the rifle, everything stops, followed by cussing and prying on the bolt.

3- Extraction of such a large straight-walled case can be tricky in a semi-auto, especially without much rim to hold on to.
 
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