This is Part 5 of the full transcript of an interview with Craig Ouzen, a National Champion, Multigun Competitor. You can watch the video HERE

Craig: So as far as gun maintenance and things like that, you’ll see a whole spectrum of people at competitions or anywhere else, and you’ll see a complete continuum of how people take care of their gear. And you’ll have someone who as soon as that magazine is used, it gets disassembled, it gets cleaned out and it gets reloaded.

You’ll have other people who, you know, literally are carrying around a black garbage sack full of their gear and it hasn’t been cleaned or anything maintenance for a while. I tend to not fall into the let’s see how bad it can get before something happens. But I’m also not super finicky about maintenance on my gear. I want my gear to be very reliable and with a reasonable amount of maintenance.

With simple maintenance, I want it to be to be able to run well. And so far the the the lower obviously doesn’t have any wear components to it. So I’m not worried about that. Obviously, our big question is, is how reliable and how durable will these mags be over the long term? And so far I have I have no negatives to report about that.

And we’ll see when there gets to be a problem. I’m certain at some point where we’re going to see some failures. Every one of these mags has had failures. The Magpuls we talked about earlier are very much a standard. And there’s a reason there’s a Gen three. That’s not a knock on Magpul. They’ve done a great job of iterating those designs and improving them.

This QMAG-53 is already a really good design. It’s proving very reliable for me. I’m very happy with it and we’ll see how that plays out as more time comes. I look forward to putting a lot more rounds in it. I look forward to see how it goes.

Kevin: I think you mentioned like five or six thousand rounds. So how many rounds per QMAG.

Craig: So okay, let’s, let’s talk quad mags and round count. So when I started this project with Desert Tech, I was given four prototype magazines that were already in rotation and testing. So there was these were magazines that had been demo mags, shoots, they had had been out and about a little bit. So round count on them was unknown. They appeared in great shape.

There wasn’t, you know, they weren’t dinged up, they hadn’t been stepped on run or anything like that. So far those mags have been very good. One early prototype mag, we did experience a failure and it cracked on the spine. The same place that the Maghpul commonly cracks on the spine and it showed up in the same way that the Magpuis did. I experienced a double feed where the feed lips were able to spread just enough to let two rounds out, took a look at it, and there was a slight crack there going back. We looked at where that mag had been and it was definitely one of those mags that had been unaccounted for. So it could have likely been shot. Its been out at Demo day and seeing mag dumps in the gun. We have no idea what that round count is to date other than that magazine. I’ve had no other problems with magazines and up till that failure the mags were were incredibly reliable. They’re still incredibly reliable. But obviously, one of the questions that we we want to answer, and it’s going to be interesting to see where this falls is how many rounds will that magazine last until until you do, just see a use failure?

Maybe we’ll take a lot of heat on the on the interwebs for this or not. People have a tendency to kind of do have some odd ideas as to standards. Let’s not forget that magazines, especially in the AR-15, were considered a consumable item. So at some point there is a service life to everything and the only way you find out the service life is to put a lot of them in service and see where that goes.

My gut feeling tells me these are going to serve for quite a long time to really high round counts. I’ll be getting actual production magazines soon and those magazines will have round counts logged on them from day one. And we’ll see where that goes, and we’ll have updates over time, I’m sure, as to round counts and whatever.

I’ll be able to have a training set of mags and a competition set of mags and we’ll watch how rounds of how high the round count gets and will keep track of any malfunctions we may or may not have. And and we’ll have a much better update on final production magazines and we’ll probably come up with a really good number on how long and how durable those mags will be.

Craig: All right, so the question comes up as I’m shooting for Desert Tech, so I must be getting special gear. As you know, everything’s kind of always in flux in the firearms industry. Everybody’s trying to get to that final production piece, and times were no different here. We wanted to be able to get out this last summer and get to a few matches and shoot a few matches, but the absolute final production pieces weren’t in hand yet, so this is an example of one of the mags  that I’ve been using. It is not a final production mag. The final production mags will have a couple of changes to the base plate to help with base plate retention. We did see in testing that some of the base plates had a tendency to pop off too easily or more easily than we like to. So this mag, you’ll see it’s it’s still a prototype mag.

It’s got a little piece of rubber to help with that base plate retention hasn’t affected reliability at all. These are the mags that I’m talking about that I’ve had a real, really high reliability from. These are mags that have been in the in the test range here at Desert Tech and have been fired and fired and fired. They’ve fed a lot of rounds through full auto guns.

They’ve been tested with all different different loadings of ammo. So longer ammo, shorter ammo, 55, 77 grain, OTM bullets, whatever you want to say. We test all of those to make sure that they run in these. So if anything’s going to fail, it’s these prototype mags because we’re kind of on that final prototype. We’re still finding what’s going to happen and those production mags should be even that final step of improvement over this prototype.

So again, I just want to be really transparent and let you know the reliability and the experience I’ve had with this QMAG has been on the final prototype. I look forward to seeing the actual production mags and seeing how much you know, what little improvements we did design into that and go forward from there.