High Tower Armory 10/22 magazine
High Tower Armory has come out with a new set of magazines for the Ruger 10/22 rifle. They come in a number of colors: Black, Desert Tan, Flat Dark Earth, and OD Green. Magazines come in a 30 round capacity, and all have removable windows to visually see the round count. These have arrows designating every five rounds, starting at 10, with a red marker on the follower that shows where the round count is at. The feed lips are Nitrided stainless steel. The magazines can be disassembled without tools as well. A neat feature of the magazine windows is that once they are removable, they can function as a follower hold down because the follower will extrude through the former slot where the windows used to be. This can be useful when reloading the magazines over a long course of fire because you can depress the follower without having to individually press each cartridge in. The magazines are listed at $29.99 a piece.
There are obviously a huge variety of 10/22 magazines out there on the market for the Ruger platform, some good, some mediocre, and others not the best of course. But High Tower Armory really focuses on 10/22 accessories and parts so it looks like the company has a handle on what works and what doesn’t with the rifle platform.
Infantry Marine, based in the Midwest. Specifically interested in small arms history, development, and usage within the MENA region and Central Asia. To that end, I run Silah Report, a website dedicated to analyzing small arms history and news out of MENA and Central Asia.Please feel free to get in touch with me about something I can add to a post, an error I've made, or if you just want to talk guns. I can be reached at miles@tfb.tv
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My magazine arrived today, and I tested it out by manually cycling rounds through my 10/22. Disappointed so far, but I can't pass final judgement until I can actually get to a range. Took it apart to see how it worked, and blew out a couple of plastic shavings. Loaded up 25 and tried to chamber a round. That round on the top of the left image is the result- it slammed into the front of the feed lips, deeply gouging the bullet, and didn't chamber. I pulled it out and tried cocking again- second round is seen in bottom of left image hung up in chamber. I pulled that one out, and the remaining rounds were not being pushed up by spring. The follower or whatever had apparently hung up. I was able to easily shake the next four rounds out the magazine. Banging the mag on the workbench unfroze the follower. I was able to cycle several more through the action manually, until 10 rounds remained and the follower seized up again. I loaded up 25 more rounds, and the first one or two failed to feed. as picture on right shows- the rounds are not being pushed up enough. Got it cycling again fine, until 10 rounds remained, and then it failed again as before. Banging mag on hard surface got it feeding again. Tried running a full mag through several more times, and seemed to improve a bit, but always had one or more failures to feed on every full mag. I own 3 Ruger BX-25 mags, and two of them are great. One of them behaves almost identically to this High Tower mag. Frustrating. It's entirely possible that this issue will resolve itself after it's broken in more on the range. Quality seems good, love the color options and the round-count window. I'm rooting for anyone who makes magazine for the 10/22, and I will buy several of any that work reliably. Jury's still out on this, and I'm curious what other people are experiencing.
Other than reliability the biggest problem with 10-22 magazines is how much of a PIA they are to load. A couple years ago I bought my sister a new Talo edition 10-22 that was pretty darn cool in my opinion and obviously any 10-22 is a great gun. I had owned several other kinds of .22 rifles but never a 10-22 so I was excited to use it myself. Unfortunately we quickly discovered that it was a PIA to load the higher capacity magazines. Little ones not so much but the gun was really made for high capacity mags.
It's not hard to load the mags but it's hard on the finger/thumbs after a short time. With both of our other main "fun" .22's being M&P15-22's that are extremely easy and much faster to load, her Ruger was relegated to life in the safe. Even my Umarex/HK MP5 22 is extremely fast and easy to load as are most semi-auto .22's out there. I'd even choose my old Marlin tube feed over having to deal with loading 10-22 magazines. The various magazine loading devices out there for the 10-22 aren't worth buying so that's not an answer.
The Ruger 10-22 is very likely the best semi-auto of its kind available. Nothing even comes close to all the amazing things you can do with the Ruger. The magazines are a great design but they are simply a huge pain in the arse to reload if you are doing any kind of fast shooting. Surely someone can design a high quality magazine that is reliable AND easy to load. This High Tower Armory seems like the closest to that so far but it's gotta pass the test of time and trial by fire so to speak. If it actually loads easy enough with the "window" removed it may be the end of my quest. Since things are insanely tight financially at the moment and I'm not willing to buy a mag to "test" I guess I'll watch reviews for awhile to see how they do. I've got my trigger fingers crossed (which makes it incredibly difficult to type by the way lol).