1911 7 round magazine vs 8 round

It seems to me that given the dimensions of a standard 1911 full size magazine, and the .45 Auto cartridge, John Browning could have made the magazines 8 rounds instead of seven. Is that correct? If that’s so, what would your guess be as to the reason he went with 7?

It would seem to me that it’s unlikely that John Browning somehow missed the fact that his box magazine would physically accommodate 8 rounds. Given that squeezing just one more round into the magazine could well mean the difference between living and dying for a mounted cavalryman, we often wonder why he didn’t make it an 8-rounder.

Well…maybe he did and found that the overall reliability suffered. I strongly suspect that this is the case. In order to stuff an extra round into the box, something else has to be sacrificed. In this case….two somethings. The number of active spring coils and the length of the rear follower leg. With the standard follower…with the magazine empty…there are three coils against the rear leg, about evenly spaced. One in the corner…one about mid-ways…and one near the bottom. This keeps the follower rock-solid stable. Here you see the springs, uncompressed. In the magazine they are somewhat compressed and that is where you get the coils against the follower leg.

We’ve all seen how easily the folded Devel-McCormick follower (bottom) rocks forward and how it damages the feed ramps on pistols with aluminum alloy frames. The standard magazine follower doesn’t do that (top).

More importantly, the standard magazine spring has 13 active coils, and provides enough strength and a high enough rate to get the last round or two into position and keep them there during the violent, slam-bang cycle of the .45 caliber 1911 pistol…with the last round being most critical because it has minimum tension acting on it.

Also important is that tiny little dimple on top of the magazine follower (top) that’s conspicuously missing in nearly all of today’s 8-round flush-fit magazines (bottom). That little speed bump helps to keep that critical last round in the magazine when the slide impacts the frame and literally tries to jerk the pistol out from under the cartridge. Ever had the slide lock open with the last round lying loose in the port? Ever found a live round among your spent brass?

Heeeere’s yer sign! We can increase spring tension to combat these issues, but it becomes an ordeal to load the magazine to capacity. We can put front skirts on the follower to keep it stable, but then we have to reduce the front-to-rear dimensions of the spring so it’ll fit…which affects tension and rate. We can bring the tension up to compensate, and we’re back to having to fight with the spring to get the last couple rounds into the magazine. Another downside of increasing the spring’s tension that much is that the top few rounds place more drag on the slide in recoil…increasing the possibility of short recoil…and in stripping the round as it runs forward…increasing the possibility of failure to go to battery. All for the sake of just one more round. An old engineering dictum states that when you change one thing in a successful design, you have to change three more things in order to compensate for the “improvement” or you deal with the consequences. The most preeminent firearms design genius in recorded history…along with his “Dream Team” of Colt’s top engineers and designers…burned a lot of midnight oil on the 1911 pistol. Nothing was put there on a whim, or just because it “seemed like the thing to do” and you can bet the farm on that. So many people have been working for so long, trying to prove that they’re smarter than John Browning…they really believe they have.

7 round dimpled follower top, 8 round flat follower bottom.

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