Now for the home brew stuff....
*Click here for a background audio reading of this section.
*Click here for an audio reading of this section.

I've always had an occasional FTF (fail to feed) with my LCP. It wasn't that big a problem but it did cause me to be a bit wary of the LCP for a carry weapon. This week I ordered a MagGuts spring/extender, installed it and went to fire some. I got an FTF about 60% of the time with the first three rounds. Not what I wanted for carry for sure. When I got home, I took the guide rod/springs out of my LCP and put the slide back on. I wanted to mimic the feed of the rounds in "slow motion" so I could examine what was happening in the breech to determine why I would get rare feed problems with the stock mag and more frequent problems with the MagGuts.

I noticed that when the slide ejected a round then tried to feed the next, with the MagGuts the round would "dip" in the front causing the nose of the bullet to drag on the ramp and stop the feed. This dip would only happen with the MagGuts follower. With the stock mag, it would not dip but from time to time the round would also fail to feed with too much friction on the ramp. My ramp is polished to a high sheen so it wasn't a problem with the ramp. This happened mostly with hollow points

I struck upon a solution to the problem by using a pair of needle nose pliers on the "ears" of the mag body only in the forward most 1/8"of the mag's ears (see illustration). I increased the gap there where the mag would grip the casing on each round which would cause the round itself to stand up a bit proud in the front. This caused the bullet to strike at a more favorable angle and just a tad higher on the ramp while at the same time raising the entire rear of round sooner with the forward motion of the slide so the round entered the chamber in a level and straighter line. This totally eliminated the FTF problems.

I racked without the spring about fifty times and found no resistance to the round seating in the chamber like it did before. I put the return spring and guide rod back in and racked the slide on full magazines on both the stock and MagGuts and and found no hesitation or FTF's AT ALL on the magazines for 100 feeds. This cured the problem if I racked the weapon slowly (which once caused an FTF always for the first three feeds on the MagGuts mag) or if I racked it quickly simulating more of the real action of the slide (which once caused the MagGuts mag to FTF on the first three rounds about half the time). Essentially, by widening the gap at the front of the magazine "ears" from 0.342" to 0.355" I completely eliminated the FTF problem on both magazines. I fired some forty rounds today with the MagGuts and more with the stocker and did not have a single FTF using these widened mags.

The picture shows what the improvement looks like. It's not much, but it does solve the FTF problem once and for all even for the stock magazines. I came upon this method because when I bought an XD40SC I had a bunch of XD 9mm mags with extended capacity. Rather than buy all new .40s $$$ I did the same thing to the "ears" on some of the 9 mags turning them into satisfactory .40 mags.