Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

,Rawles over at SurvivalBlog pointed out that Cheaper Than Dirt was selling used G3/HK91 mags for ninety-nine cents. Prior to this, the best price I’d found was from Lew Horton at around $1.50. So for less than a buck each, wouldn’t you have picked up 250 of them also?

Out of the 250 that I received, 20 were new in the wrapper, 23 were culled for dents of varying severity. I pulled any mag that has a dent that looked like it might even remotely cause a problem. In all likelihood, most of the dented mags are strictly cosmetic although theres at least three that are genuine ‘what the hell happened here” kind of dents. Two mags were pulled for having very bent baseplates. I figure this means theres about 15 or so mags that are gonna be scrapped for parts. That’s a reject rate of 6%. So the $0.99 per mag becomes closer to $1.05 once you factor in the rejects. Still, that’s mighty cheap for anything stamped “HK”.

Oldest mags were dated around 1965, newest around 1985. Various manufacturers with about ½ being HK. About 40% of the mags had rust on the baseplates but it was strictly cosmetic. It was about 60/40 in terms of blued/parkerized finishes…except for one mag that had the bluing turn to a very pronounced purple color. Go figure.

I am so very, very done with HK magazines that it isn’t even funny. At a buck each you can almost afford to just throw the magazine away when youre done. Or, put it another way, the magazine is cheaper than two rounds of the ammo it takes. How many mags does this give yours truly? Uhm…well, I guess I shouldn’t feel embarrassed about this..about 500. I have two PTR-91 rifles (at the moment..I might need one or two more.) so I think I can honestly say that the magazine needs for those guns is very handily met. I can keep fifty with each gun, fifty in storage for each gun, fifty offsite for each gun, fifty for range use for each gun, and fifty for caching for each gun. I can spread all the eggs among a number of baskets and each basket can hold enough to keep me well supplied indefinitely. So…no more HK91 mags! I am done. Finito. Finished.

Move on to picking up some more mag pouches and HK spare parts and we’ll be sitting pretty.