This is Part 4 of the full transcript of an interview with Craig Ouzen, a National Champion, Multigun Competitor. You can watch the video HERE

Craig:  So now we get to adding capacity with a QMAG-53 from Desert Tech obviously has a bunch of technical information that they’re going to be putting out. As far as the mags durability, what they did, testing round counts, what they did to to prove the reliability and all of that. With this mag, I can speak from personal experience.

I’ve got about five to six-thousand rounds through these mags now and I have yet to have any sort of failure with the rifle that I could even come close to saying it’s mag related. These mags have been very reliable for me, so much more so than the other versions of large capacity magazines. What you see is that quad stack and so we’ve got the same form factor.

There’s a standard magazine, so no longer do I have the problems with handling a magazine. I don’t have the problems of the extra length. I don’t have the problems of putting the gun in a position due to barricades, shooting under a car, and anything like that. That would happen with the other large capacity mags and due to the design of the magazine and the ribs inside. There’s very low friction, very little chance that these mags are going to get dirty enough to slow down that feeding process. So a good high end reliability.

The second part of this is is mag storage. So carrying it in a chest rig, it’ll slip into to most any of your elastic carriers. Obviously rigid carriers, rigid hard carriers will have to have to be accommodated by their size. But any of your elastic carriers they’ll squeeze into because they’re nice and square and rectangular, they don’t tend to walk out, they don’t tend to wiggle out because they’re not lengthened. There’s not weight that’s uncontrolled outside of the mag carrier. So they tend to be very secure and mag carriers as well. And again, form factor, right. It’s the same mag I’m grabbing at the same way.

I’m going to perform my reload the same way, I’m going to be able to carry it in the same round orientation of my preference that I would normally carry an AR mag. So there’s just not much changes here other than I have another 23 rounds. Second part of that, my experience told me that these would be really difficult to load because we’re putting a lot of rounds in a magazine.

It’s very noticeable on a traditional double stack mag or mag that when we do put a base pad,  putting rounds in there gets more and more difficult. I’ve loaded these Sure Fires quite a few times. The pressure in the spring pressure gets more and more difficult going in.

[With the QMAG] I have no problem just doing a normal loading procedure. 51 rounds goes in here really easily. Those last couple of rounds, if you want to squeeze them in, go in as well. I guess I’m kind of old school in that I still always load bags down two from what their capacity state. So but no problem reloading these with the extra capacity.

Kevin: Have you ever used [redacted]’s in competition?

Craig: Yeah. Everybody. This was the hot set up. This was the gambler set up. You probably don’t want to put this out there, but the hot set up for these was you buy ten of them, and you would find two or three out of that ten that ran and then you would sell the other seven. They were finicky. They were just super finicky. 

Craig: So over time with magazines, the pistol mags were very common back in the day to have to be tuned. This happens to many mags which is a really high quality magazine. They tend to work very well with with no tuning whatsoever. But when we talk about tuning magazines is anybody who’s building magazines on a on a high volume process, you’ll wind up with injection molded parts or or any of these parts having some flashing or having some some minor imperfections.

So a lot of times what we’ll do with our magazines is just disassemble them and make sure there aren’t any sharp edges, make sure that where that that follower path flows at the weld spots are nice and smooth. So nothing, nothing radical, just just kind of making sure that there’s none of those normal manufacturing processes that might cause some extra friction in a magazine.

So we’ll we’ll tune them that way. It doesn’t happen as often anymore, but with the old style GI mags, a lot of guys would would keep an eye on what the feed lip distances and, and things were so that we were sure that whether through training or shooting, dropping those magazines, you didn’t wind up with a feed lip bent a little bit or have some feed problems that way.

So when tuning just that general term, I guess for making sure the mags are going to work that first time or maybe a little bit improved out of the package and then over time, just keep in good maintenance and keeping track of how they’re how they’re feeding and running.

Craig: [I disassemble my mags on] A very routine basis. It’s a good idea to to disassemble your mags. We all know ours. The classic statement is AR's [poop] where they eat because it’s a direct gas gun. We know we’re getting a lot of gas back where the magazines set. So to operate that gun, we’ve got dirty, dirty gas coming back to operate the bulk carrier group and it’s it’s displacing all of that carbon in our magazines over time.

Obviously, a magazine can become quite dirty if you’re training, if you’re shooting competitively, you’re having a lot of mags hit the ground, get kicked around in the dirt during reloads, things like that. So absolutely, it’s imperative that you kind of take magazines and it hurt to pop up base plate off, pull the spring and fall wear out. There’s many brushes out there on the market that you can buy.

You just run a brush them, get all that stuff out, wipe off any crap and you’re good to go. So mag maintenance is pretty important. So it should be routine as a part of your when you clean your gun.

Kevin: Have you taking the QMAG-53 apart. And have you noticed they can run dirty.

Craig: So yeah. So now be the hypocrite. So I purposely have not done that with the quad mags. I’ve been running in competition this year.

Kevin: Purposely have not?

Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as far as cleaning my QMAG this year, I’ve shot four or five matches with the QMAG-53, national level matches and then quite a bit of training. And because I wanted to find out if or when this mag might have some failure to it, I haven’t cleaned mine with any routine schedule at all.

They’ve been dropped and they haven’t been cleaned or disassembled to see if I start to experience a slowdown or if I there is any kind of malfunction. So far I’ve had zero malfunctions with the mags and they’ve seemed to run really well.

So we’ll see if there’s a point where they get dirty and react. A lot of mags will a lot of especially our mags because of the mil-spec standards on them tend to be able to run with with a fair amount of gunk in them. Now once I’m kind of done with this little testing portion on these mags and I have a little better understanding and a little more experience on them, I’ll back on cleaning them routinely just as a matter of maintenance.

And I want my gear to to always be in the tip top shape. But so far I haven’t had any problems with the QMAG-53,  it seems to run just fine. They’re obviously running a little bit dirty and have some carbon caked on them, but it hasn’t, I haven’t seen any negative effects whatsoever.

Read the next part of this interview PART 5 
When will the Quattro-15 be available? 
Development History: Quattro-15 & QMAG-53 
Behind the Scenes testing the QMAG-53