amd6547 said:
My father brought home a 1911 made in 1925 from WWII...it had it's original magazine.
I inherited it with the mag loaded with 7 Rem-UMC FMJ’s, and the box of ammo with 20rds left. The mag had been loaded since the last time he shot it, in 1957.
After he passed away, I put that mag, loaded by my dad so long ago, in his pistol, and fired every round. That was in 2000.
I don’t worry about mag springs.
And, if all you ever shoot (or store long term) is a 1911 using 7-round magazines, you have no reason for concern. I've read of folks who fired a 1911 with a full 7-round mag that had been stored for 40+ years. It worked well.
That's because the 7-round 1911 mag spring is never stressed or compressed anywhere NEAR the spring's elastic limit. Not all magazines and magazine spring designs are the same.
But, if you're shooting a 1911 with first-generation 8-round mags, or even some of the later ones (until they improved mag follower designs for that gun) you may run into some reliability problems if they've been stored fully loaded or long periods. Ditto some 10-round 1911 mags.
If you use a sub-compact 1911, any very sub-compact gun with 7+ rounds in a small magazine, or any hi-cap weapon with 17+ rounds, and keep the mags fully loaded, some of those guns COULD (not WILL) give you problems.
You might also have a problem with a gun that has been stored with the slide locked back for a long periods, as the recoil springs (like magazine springs) can degrade more quickly than you might expect in some designs.
Just because one type of magazine spring works beautifully over time,
you can't assume that all magazine springs -- especially for guns with magazines designed to carry many more rounds -- will behave the same way. It all depends on the design of the mag, the number of rounds, and what the gun designers were trying to achieve with their design.
The first widely-used (double-stack) hi-cap mag was created by Dieudonné Saive, an FN small-arms designer who was working with Browning on the High Power design for FN. That magazine design wasn't put into production until several years after Browning's death.