Autoloaders
Reloading a semiautomatic pistol sounds simple — empty cartridge container out, full one in, round in chamber, back to work. However, there are subtleties which will make it all go faster and a big part is making things go smoother.
Early in the third quarter of the 20th Century, when Jeff Cooper and his colleagues began combat pistol competition on the West Coast, techniques and hardware advanced exponentially. Reloading was a big part of winning against the clock, and Cooper credited his friend and colleague Ray Chapman with developing the speed reload of the pistol most of us use today. Ray was among the first to realize rounding off the square edge at the opening of the magazine well would expedite things.
Before long, the beveled mag well was not just a standard modification for practical shooting competition but desirable for a defensive pistol as well. Most 1911s manufactured today will come with at least a modest beveling of the magazine well.
But pistoleros and pistolsmiths didn’t stop there. Next came add-on funnels which helped still further in guiding a fresh magazine into the pistol at speed. The most popular seem to be the Smith & Alexander brand. Since these extended below the frame, they pretty much mandated an extended pad on the floorplate of each magazine to assure full seating. It is believed magazine pads were originally the brainchild of another Cooper/Chapman contemporary, Elden Carl, circa 1960. This, of course, was not a bad idea even for a 1911 in original GI trim — the standard flush-bottom magazines often failed to fully seat if not carefully inserted. Those of us who carried 1911s concealed would generally have a flush bottom magazine in the gun, seated at leisure in an administrative load and topped off, to minimize butt protrusion under a concealment garment, along with padded-bottom magazines for reloads.
The final evolution was humongous funnels large enough to serve as small flower pots. These are seen mostly in open class competition guns, though a barely legal IDPA-approved version exists. (I use the Arredondo brand.) The faster you’re trying to go, the sloppier you can get, particularly when reloading on the run or in some awkward position which changes the body coordinates to which we’ve become accustomed. So wide they seriously compromise concealment, I see them occasionally on the butts of privately owned/department approved police service pistols on the hips of gun enthusiast cops — most often, on GLOCKs.
The tapered top of a double-stack magazine, combined with the already wide mouth of such a pistol’s mag well, creates some funnel effect to speed up the reload. However, the wider, the better for catching and channeling a sloppy reload. Get going super-fast, and you’ll revel in the bevel. If you doubt it, look at the flower-pot mag well of an experienced speed shooter — every one of the many scratches and dings you’ll see marks a reload that would have been fumbled without the wide funnel.
