If you’re following my G34 project, you’ll know that the first thing I did was send it out to DP Customs for: Slide Cuts, Cerakote and stippling.
The very next item for me was a Magwell. Why? Because DP Customs prepped the stippling for my Magwell choice!
Now, let‘s talk about Magwells...
Why do I love them so much & what do they do for you, the shooter?
1. A magwell acts a lot like a guide or a funnel - steering the magazine into position, ensuring it seats properly and quickly.
2. Magwells help keep your hands choked up on the grip - keeping your hand high on the gun where it belongs for proper control. I cannot state how much I love the feel of this on my handguns. My first magwell went on the G17gen4, a magwell came standard on my Sig P320 X-Five Legion, you will find them on most performance guns like the ones from Taran Tactical and others.. They are just awesome!
Which magwell did I go with? Well I'm glad you asked. This is a review blog, after all, right?
After a lot of research, I chose to use the Magwell Glock Gen 5 Ice® by Dawson Precision. To save you some of the research, here is a summary of why I chose it. It supports the ability to work with Glock factory magazines, and more importantly (for me) this magwell supports the use of the backstraps with the Glock grips. This matters a lot to me because I have very large hands, and I use the backstraps to widen the grips for comfort.
You can see in the above picture that I have the large backstrap on this G34 with the Dawson ICE magwell. Dawson also sells Extended Baseplates For Glock by Dawson Precision, which replaces the baseplate on the Glock magazine, and is seen in the picture above.
The magazine with the extended baseplate worked perfectly with the magwell, but the factory magazines did not fit properly at all. Yet, I know I read with my research that this magwell would work just fine with both the Dawson extended baseplate and the factory mags... Why was I having these problems?
Well, the Magwell ships with two different plastic inserts...
The plastic insert smooths out the bottom of the magwell, and ensures that it acts as a funnel, and steers the magazine correctly into handgun.. Basically, it keeps the magwell working properly. So I figured I must have used the wrong one. Maybe one of the plastic end-caps is to be used for factory magazines, and one for the extended magazines?? I was really not sure, and definitely frustrated. Well, I ended up cracking the original endcap when I removed it, as you can see in the picture below.
So I called up Dawson to see if this was known.. It is. They have (had) a totally different part to order that fits the factor base plates. The part was named "Magwell Inserts For All Glock Ice® by Dawson Precision-Fits Factory Basepads". However, when I went to link to that part for this blog post - they don't make it anymore.
So the answer is... Use the extended magazines like the GlockStore mags with the Magwell, like you see in the picture below.
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