Dry Fire Protip #1 – Magazine Baseplate Retainers

During the summer months I brought my dry fire practice into the living room, and lined up my targets across the top of the TV. This worked great, but I wasn’t able to move as much as I would have liked, so now that the weather has cooled down a bit, I spent most of the evening last night getting the garage all set up again for dry fire.

All summer I just used my regular magazines loaded with dummy rounds for dry fire, and it wasn’t a problem given that the living room has carpet to soften the blow on them when I drop them on the floor. The garage however has concrete floors so I dug around in my bucket of gun junk and found a few old KCI Glock magazines to use in the garage that I won’t care if they get beat up. Unfortunately these magazines had been cannibalized for parts, and one of them was missing a baseplate retainer. I didn’t worry about it too much and stuffed it with 11 dummy rounds and began to practice.

A few minutes into my 6 reload 6 practice I hit the mag button, shoved in the new mag, and heard an awful noise. Something smacked the garage door, things were falling and making noise all around the garage, and for a split second I thought that I had somehow shot through the garage door even though I had triple checked everything was empty.

Thankfully that wasn’t the case. What happened was the magazine without the retainer hit the floor, the baseplate shot off, and the magazine spring shot out and hit the garage door while dummy rounds sprayed all over the garage.

Needless to say, that was the extent of my practice today. I’ve never had a properly installed Glock magazine baseplate come off during use, so that KCI magazine now has a retainer under the baseplate.

Get to work.