making cheap steel magazines last longer

[Cobrafreak]

I did some research and came up with a way to give extra life to cheap steel magazines. Usually what kills them is the lips of the magazine bend and you have to bend them back, and after so many times of doing this they become garbage. Here is what you do. Take the magazine apart and put it in a vice. Take a propane torch and make the ramps bright red. Don't go bright white because you will ruin them, just bright red. Then you submerge them while glowing red hot in plain dishwashing detergent. What all this does is when the steel is bright red the pores of the steel open up. When you cool it down in dishwashing detergent, the heat carbonizes the soap in the pores of the steel and case hardens the lips of the magazine. I just did this to three magazines of mine and they are significantly stiffer. I don't know how to measure rockwell hardness, but I know the steel lips would wiggle if I put force on them. Now it takes significantly more effort to make them move. Thought I would pass this on to you guys.

[sfbay]

Wow! This sounds super interesting! I wonder if it'll work?

Is there a reason you used detergent instead of another liquid?

[TurboChrisB]

Veeeery interesting....

[Cobrafreak]

Yeah it works, I was able to repeat it 3 times. I went on an engineering forum and someone brought it up from an old machinist magazine. You can also use sugar, but it won't work as well. The prisoners that escaped the German POW cam Salag 17 in WW2 case hardened their digging tools with sugar to make them not wear out as fast. With the dish soap method someone with a rockwell hardness tester said it raised the hardness 12-15 points. Not much, but when we are talking sheet metal steel magazines you only need it a little harder. The No Name cheap magazines are what need it because they don't go through any heat treat process. Probably to keep the price so low. Premium magazines do and you pay for it. With the availability of magazines now it would be a good idea to make them last as long as we can.

[damon1272]

The only problem this brings is the lips being brittle in the heat affected zone and the magazine cracking in that area. It will be interesting to see how long these last.

[Cobrafreak]

Wow! This sounds super interesting! I wonder if it'll work?

Is there a reason you used detergent instead of another liquid?

Dish soap was brought up in the old machinist magazine article because it is readily available. It has a very high boiling point so it stays in contact with the red hot metal the whole time it cools. It does two things, it quenches the steel till its cool and it carbonizes into the pores of the steel. There are case hardening compounds that are sold for this purpose (and probably work better) but the whole purpose was to be able to use something that everyone has. It was an experiment that I thought I would try and I didn't really expect it to work because it sounds hokey, but it does in fact work.

[kurac]

I always used oil for the hardening process, which really ony works if you have a high carbon steel, regular mild steel won't show much improvement.

[GuitarsCarsnGuns]

From what I've heard about DIY case hardening, after you quench the the workpiece (in this case, a mag body) in oil or some the other stuff described (dish soap, sugar), it becomes really hard, but inherently brittle, so you are supposed to temper it in your oven at 500F Degrees to get rid of some of the brittleness. I forgot for how long though.

[elsolo]

Unless you have other experience with tempering, quenching, heat treating, etc.....

I wouldn't try to learn on mags that I intended to repair.

I have been dropping the same six mags in the dirt, gravel, or concrete for years shooting IPSC, still haven't ruined a tube.

[lilro]

Wouldn't making them too stiff make them brittle?

[appagohm]

liquid soap won't make them too stiff, but yes if you used oil, and repeated a
few times the mag lips will get very hard and brittle. I used this method to harden a knife once, polished it off and it turned out great.