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First the good news....
The $7.99 Bulgarian Polymer mags from
have been working great for a while now. No functionality problems, no problems fully loaded right off the bat.
There was another variant of polymer mags of relatively unknown origin we got a couple dozen of a few years back that we had some issues with. I believe we bought them from Aim. Anyways every single one of them had to have the front catch area milled out just a touch with a dremel in order to lock correctly in both the Arsenals and Polytechs. In addition those mags in question can STILL rarely be loaded past about 20 rounds without considerable effort. I need to take the time to root any remaining out of the range mag boxes.
These Bulgarian mags from www.sgammo.com fit and ran fine right out of the box.
If I had to find something bad to say about them- it would have to be I don't care for the silly like bullet design on the side of the mag. That's really it, and I like I said I had to FIND something I didn't like to say it :)
Now the bad news- MONARCH 9MM
Let me preface this by saying I'm pretty sure this is Tula- CORRECTION 1:40PM- THIS WAS MONARCH AMMO BOUGHT FROM ACADEMY SPORTS. the ammo in question has a green lacquer on the case. This particular ammo was in our loose 9mm training ammo can. Typically that's where a couple odd boxes of this and that goes. Rarely does ammo in those training cans come from long term storage- something I just started rectifying.
So Saturday we had AT LEAST 4-5 dud rounds just like the ones in the picture. We were breaking in a new Glock also so honestly I was concerned about the GLOCK not the ammo. So I went down Sunday again with some nice PMC 9mm from storage to double check the new Glock.
No problems with the new Glock and once those 10-15 mags of PMC were shot up, I dug in the range bag for more mags. Not long after I had a few more dud rounds. Lo and behold they ALL were the green lacquered ammo. I started picking them up here and there but lost at least a few to puddles (range is swamp'tastic right now). I put the duds in my pocket and kept training.
Later before leaving I pulled them out for the pic seen above. Now here is where I need to state that these came from TWO separate Glocks- a new 17 and one of our well used 26s that NEVER has issues. It might even be the original 26 I ran 7,500 rounds without cleaning or lube to break in.
FWIW, having to "know" I reloaded the 4 rounds in a mag and they did shoot the second time through. I remember "back in the day" we used to buy some nasty corrosive Egyptian 9mm that was designed for SMGs and had really hard primers. Not only would your pistol barrel be ORANGE after a few days from the corrosive ammo, but you would have at least 1 round per mag that wouldn't fire. But for college kids, paying $70. per 1,000 rounds versus $150. was a big deal, so we dealt with it. We also were using PT99s back then and we found that if you pulled the trigger again on a dud round, most of the time the hard primer round would fire on the 2nd hit. Something that might be useful in SHTF situations- but definitely not possible with Glocks.
It would be worth checking for that green lacquer case MONARCH AMMO n your ammo stocks and set it aside primarily for TRAINING. I may have received a bad batch, not sure, but almost 10 bad rounds in less than 1,000 rounds is way too high, even for Soviet era standards :)
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