I remember back in the day of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban and what it was like to go to Gun Shows and all you saw were after market magazines and many of them being not very reliable, if you wanted standard capacity magazines that were factory made, you had to pay a pretty hefty price for them.   One of the reasons I ended up going with the Beretta 92FS was because that had the most availability for used standard capacity magazines and reliability was what I always wanted.  The Colt 1911 was the first hand gun I owned but the AWB really didn’t impact that firearm, and as a matter of fact, there was actually a trend towards firearms like this because if you were stuck with 10rds and less for a firearm, why not go with 45acp.   For some reason I thought I still needed more than Wilson Combat 7rd or Wilson Combat 7rd magazines but I ended up going with a cheap aftermarket 10rd magazine, and the mags barely lasted more than 3 range sessions before they crapped out on me.

I learned that lesson real fast and just went back to 8rds +1 but on my learning curve, I stopped doing the +1 on my guns because after several training events, started noticing that this was over stressing the springs and if you have cheap springs, they are going to slow down and throw off the timing on your 1911 and it’s either going to stove pipe or fail to feed properly.    I’ve made the decision in the past that any time I change the magazines springs on my handguns, I change the recoil springs because I’ve seen “timing issues” on many occasions and I don’t own unreliable handguns.   There are always tweaks you can do if you have the patience to salvage magazines that don’t work but why waste your time and get Wilson Combat 10rd Magazines that are very popular with our IDPA Competition shooters.  I personally find anything over 8rds for 1911s to throw off the balance of the gun but there is a time and place for extended magazines.