Triangle Tactical Podcast and Blog on Guns, Gear, and Competition Shooting
One of my gripes about the S&W M&P9 Pro is that the magazine baseplates are just too big! With the baseplate being so large, it changes the angle of the magazine in my hand during a reload, and is causing me to fumble some reloads. Certainly I could just practice more and more until I’m used to the different angle, however, I like to stay proficient with both of the pistols that I shoot most (Glock and M&P) so I began searching for a smaller baseplate for the M&P fullsize magazines.
While shooting a match a couple weeks ago, I was discussing this with another shooter, and we compared his M&P9 Compact magazines to my M&P9 Pro magazines and we found that the baseplates for the compact pistol are much smaller, and lower profile than the baseplates that come on the full size M&P. Ben was nice enough to allow me to pull his magazine apart, and try it out, and sure enough the compact baseplate fit just as nice as the factory one.
After about a week of searching online at different retailers, I found Speed Shooter Specialties, who sells a lot of pistol parts, and competition accessories. SSS had the M&P Compact baseplates in stock, so I went ahead and ordered enough of them for all of my magazines.
Apparently somewhere along the line S&W re-designed their baseplates, with a different style catch. Instead of using the old standard round hole like every other magazine for every firearm ever made has used (not really, but you get the point) they moved on to a fancier plate that uses an angled catch to lock the plate on. Well, all of my magazines used the new system, and the baseplates I received use the old standard. Not a huge problem, as I just went ahead and ordered a handful of the old style locking plates from SSS as well. In the mean time, I cut a small piece of kydex plastic to the correct size, and ran a small screw through it to act as the retainer. I used this system today during an IDPA match with no issues, but I will still swap out the locking plates when the new ones arrive.
If you would like to order these baseplates for your magazines, Speed Shooter Specialties has them below:
How well do they fit the gun?
They fit as well as the bigger ones, just shorter. They do not match the contour at the end of the grip, but I couldn't care less about that.
One option on my Glock that I will have cheangd from custom to standard is the extended magazine release. It may be great for competitive shooting, but it is a problem for practical carry. Every time I lay the gun down or give it a bump on its left side, the magazine pops loose. This happened a couple of times and I didn't realize it until later. That could have been disasterous in an emergency.
Where I can get Compact baseplates?
S&W is out, Midway, Brownells and SSS are out also.
Where I can get 3?
Thank you.
SSS is where I’ve bought them in the past, and I know of a couple others who have bought them from S&W. If they are both out, unfortunately I don’t know where to send you.