[Justin Pasternak]

The question that I have is, what are the main types of magazines in either repeating or autoloading firearms (Breechloaders), are they the:

1) Box Magazine

2) Tubular Magazine

3) Drum Magazine

Also, for example, under the Drum Magazine: could you classify Helical magazine and Pan magazine as a sub-group of the drum magazine? Or are they within their own category?

I'm just curious to know if you could actually classify different feeding systems into several main-groups and sub-groups, that's all.

Thanks,

Justin

[Lin Robinson]

[David Nash IV]

Lin; An example would be the Calico 960. Helical magazines have the rounds in a spiral, which makes high-capacity magazines into long cylinders that lay parallel to the reciever.

Justin; Just in conversation with other collectors, I've more often come across feed systems being classified as just "magazine" or "belt" or "something else". That said, I suppose you could subdivide "magazines" into box, tubular, and drum (or drum-like, perhaps). and that would cover the majority.

[Justin Pasternak]

Sorry about that.

I meant all firearm's in general whether it be a civilian or military model. I'll try to explain what I was trying to say to the best of my abilities. I was wondering if the way to store cartridges into a magazine could be or is done in only a few ways.

The box magazine stacks the cartridges one on top of the other. The tubular magazine stacks the cartridges end to end or "nose to tail". And last but not least the drum magazine stores the cartridges in a spiral or circular pattern.

Are their any other ways that cartridges can be stored into a magazine?

Here's a link to help clarify the different magazines (firearm) that I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazine_(firearm)

[David Nash IV]

I don't know of any other ways to feed a firearm from a magazine, other than some exceedingly slight variations on the three basic layouts you've mentioned. If you expand from "magazine" to "feed device", though, there's a little more variation. Some designs showed up in the Gatling guns, where loose cartridges are fed into a hopper or feed chute, and they rely on simple gravity to let the rounds fall into place as needed. There were also strip-fed systems, where the ammunition was placed in what really amounted to an inflexible belt of fixed size.

But sticking to magazines, I think you've really covered the major categories.

[Geoff Wood]

I suppose as a minor variant of the tubular magazine you could include the version where the barrel itself is the magazine and the rounds are fired in succession, front to rear, electronically initiated - 'Metal Storm' is the trade name.

[Justin Pasternak]

That's all I was asking. Even with slight variations being mentioned, all firearm magazine's feed with the three main types of magazines that I had mentioned.

Think of the hopper magazine as a primitive form of box or drum magazine (since almost all of them have a box shape, the only exception that paintball and airsoft guns use an elliptical shaped magazine) without the spring mechanism used to hold in the cartridges.

And with the firearm's barrel acting like a tubular magazine, technically it is not a magazine, as a magazine is a device that feeds cartridges into the breech. Since, each of the rounds are all ready stacked end to end inside the barrel, there for it is not a magazine.

But, Metal Storm is a little different as it does have stacked cartridges, end to end in the barrel, it also has a large capacity drum type magazine that continuously feeds (stacks) the ammunition into each of it's four barrels.

There are even examples of muzzle-loading rifles and pistols that have used stacked projectiles from end to end. This was incredibly dangerous was to store more ammunition in the barrel because their is a risk of all the cartridges detonating inside of the barrel. So, this concept was soon abandoned, until the development of Metal Storm.

[Lin Robinson]

[David Nash IV]

[Lin Robinson]

[Justin Pasternak]

Here's a link to an article on the Calico M960 sub-machinegun, and a cut out of its unique/odd style drum magazine, in case anyone is interested: http://world.guns.ru/smg/smg57-e.htm

[Gordon Frye]

The Calco rotary magazine is a good idea, but in practice they're not very good. Calco makes things poorly from my experience, and I would never put any faith in one. Might be fun to blast off a few bricks of .22's in one, but that's about it.

Cheers!

Gordon

[Darryl Aoki]

One issue with spring-powered magazines of any kind is that if you push the spring to full compression, the spring will eventually start to "remember" that shape and lose pushing power. I think that it's recommended not to load any spring-fed magazine to full capacity, for more or less that reason.

One of the problems with the Thompson's drum magazine, I think, was that the rounds were fairly loose in the drum and could potentially end up misaligned in the feed mechanism, causing jams. The Soviet PPSh SMG also used a drum magazine, but apparently had a reputation for not jamming. Maybe the magazine designs were somehow fundamentally different?

[Lin Robinson]

[Lafayette C Curtis]

Is the omission of rotary/revolver-type magazines here deliberate or accidental? The Wikipedia page mentions several examples of the rotary type including the Mannlicher-Schonauer, while ACW buffs would certainly be familiar with the Colt Revolver rifle.

[Lin Robinson]

[Dmitriy Sobolev]

There is also Disk magasine. It was used on the Lewis, Degtyarev and (rarely) Bren machine guns. It's not the same as drum.

While drum magasine have cartridges positioned perpendicular to its radius, in disk magasine cartridges are positioned along its radius with nose to the center of disk and primer to the periphery. So it is wide and flat, like a dish - and thus unwieldy. There may be more than one "layers" of cartridges arranged in that manner in the magasine (russian Degtyarev Tank DT has 3 layers of 21 cartridge each, total magasine capacity being 63).

Here is Degtyarev DP-28 with its 47-rounds single layer disk attached.



There is also tubular built-in magasine of shotguns. It may be used not only in pump-action, but in semi-auto design too.

[Jean Thibodeau]

[Darryl Aoki]

I'm assuming that belts are not counted as magazines, though they're a feed type as well. There are some belt-fed LMGs (squad-level 5.56 automatics generally) that can fairly reasonably used as rifles. (The FN M249 and IMI Negev LMGs are the two that come to mind immediately.)

[Gene Green]