PMAG 17 GL9: Magpul’s Mea Culpa

Like men, now and then companies, even the best, mess up. How they handle a mistake says a lot about them. Magpul recently had such an issue. A production mold error with its Glock PMAG 17 GL9s was causing failures. Magpul immediately mailed replacements to every customer who purchased one of these magazines. It also fixed the problem—the magazines are now all working. Here’s how the company handled the issue on its Facebook page:

OK we screwed up.

After initial release of the Glock PMAG 17 GL9 a few days ago we started seeing random issues of failure to feed with the new magazine in other Glock models, primarily the Glock 19 and 26. Of all the challenges of building a Glock magazine with a single new composite, issues like drop free, impact strength and feed lip retention were foremost on our mind. The failure to feed came as a bit of a surprise to us and we immediately headed out to the range to investigate.

In short order we found the problem. Without getting into technical details, some small, but critical geometry changes did not make it into the initial production molds. We should have caught this but no failures showed up on our factory guns during live fire testing and flaws in our internal processes of checks/balances did not flag the oversight as it should.

So as I said before, we screwed up and here is what we are going to do about it.

Molds are being updated with the correct geometry as we speak and a replacement magazine body with the correct geometry should be available by May 4th, 2015….

—Richard Fitzpatrick, President/CEO Magpul Industries Corp