Project Appleseed

(I posted this on another forum, but thought the info would be useful here as well)


The M&P 15-22 makes a great AR training tool and I am loving mine.  The only downside that I have with the rifle is with the lack of magazine options that are currently available.  Right now there are 26 round mags (red followers) and 10 round mags (blue followers).  This makes sense except the 10 round mags are the same length as the 26 rounders and despite early talk of a new set of magazines, none have been seen in the real world to my knowledge.

Why short mags?  Well, a shorter mag gives a distinct advantage in getting low to the ground for the type of prone shooting we do at Appleseed.  The short mag both allows the shooter to get lower but also is easier on magazine changes in the same position.

So the only option is to adapt, and by that I mean the magazine.  Following what others had mentioned trying, I ordered 3 mags from a dealer in TN and had them in less that 48 hours (nice guy!).  The rifle only came with one mag and I wanted 2 full capacity and 2 lower capacity (8-10 rounds).

This is what I got in the mail:




I began by scoring the spot where I wanted to do the first cut:




The I pinned down the follower and spring:




Then came the cutting which I did with a small saw:



After getting the magazine into two pieces, the spring, follower, magazine horizontal bar, and "floor retainer piece" all came out easily.  BTW, the plastic is thick and makes a powdery mess when cutting.  I got to use the vacuum a lot.








Now I scored and cut the bottom piece that would become the "bottom plate":




The cuts were not perfectly level so a file was used to level the pieces that were to be matched:



This took a long time and was followed by a knife to clean up the edges:




Finally I clipped off 1/3 of the spring, epoxied the bottom back on as best I could and secured it together to dry.  Here is the final product:






She looks good unloaded, but I needed to do a quick check of an 8 round mag.  The rounds loaded easily and felt like I could get in 10 pretty easily.  This is 8:




All in all, it was a very easy mod and was done while working on other things and watching a red dwarf episode with the kids.  Now that I have one down, I am going to do a second and try to make this one look nicer.

Tomorrow I will take them to the range to be sure of their function, but I am pretty sure that they will be just fine.

For anyone with an M&P 15-22 and a need for a shorter mag, just do it.  It is really quite easy!

Techres

Way to go, great job! 

Techres,

Have you had the opportunity to try out your mag mod. Any feed issues?

Looking to perform the same mod and would like to know if you would do anything different.

Thanks,

Karl

Quote from: Karl on April 20, 2010, 12:01:51 PM
Techres,

Have you had the opportunity to try out your mag mod. Any feed issues?

Looking to perform the same mod and would like to know if you would do anything different.

Thanks,

Karl

Yep!

Youtube Video:

Comparing M&P 15-22 Magazines in Prone: 25 Round Originals vs. 10 Round Short Creations

And one of my students ran them at Nashville all weekend (drop free "action pic"):



She had roughly 3 failures in the weekend.  One was likely the mag, one was possibly mag/possibly dirty, and one was definitely because of dirty.

Given a .5-1% failure rate, I would put these on the same par as the full length ones.  One spring is a tad longer than the other and so one will do 10, and one will do 11-12. 

I am happy with them.

Thanks for the info. You're a scholar & a gentleman. 

Now it's time for me to get to work. 

Karl