How A Magazine Works

We all know magazines work, but how do they work? Magazines all have a follower, a magazine tube with an internal spring and a floor plate. The follower holds the cartridges together, the spring provides the upward tension, the tube makes sure the spring stays in one place, and the floor plate holds it all together. It's kind of like a Pez dispenser from wen you were kids. The candy goes on top of the candy before it and it's all held together by the pressure from the spring. Using this clear magazine and two different colored dummy rounds, you can see how it works a little bit better. Every odd round goes down the right side and every even round goes down the left side. Both the spring and the follower are surprisingly distorted. In addition, the rounds are not perfectly lined up and some are even pointing in different directions. Even with all of that apparent chaos, when a magazine is called upon to do what it is supposed to do, just feed the next round, it does so almost perfectly and almost always in a consistent fashion.