How many times have you heard it before? If you’re having feeding or other reliability problems with your pistol, the first place to check — and the most likely culprit — is your magazines. That applies for everything from cheap pocket mouse guns to full-size duty pistols. But it may especially apply to 1911s.
Lovers of the 2011 platform were thrilled at the announcement of the Springfield 1911 DS Prodigy last month. It’s a doublestack 9mm 1911 that gives you 17+1 or as many as 20+1 rounds of carry capacity built on John Moses Browning’s much-loved design. And Springfield had priced the Prodigy 2011 pistol at $1500, almost two grand under some of its well-regarded competitors.
However…if you follow the forums, keep an eye on the Gram or watch YouTube videos, you may have seen that early adopters of the Prodigy weren’t entirely happy. Many had experienced feeding problems. These mostly seem to be failures to feed or failures to return fully into battery.
That’s not what buyers want to see in their new $1500 pistol.
Some people returned their gun to their retailer. Others sent their pistol back to Springfield for some TLC. Still others went to work themselves polishing rails, buffing feed ramps or buying new springs. And after all that some still experienced problems.
And then today, we got this from Check-Mate Industries. You may not know that name, but Check-Mate makes OEM magazines for lots of gun makers, some of which you probably own.
Huh.
We talked to Check-Mate and they tell us the Prodigy in the video is a stock, unmodified pistol. They say they fed it standard MagTech 115 grain range ammo in both the Duramag magazines Springfield packs with the Prodigy and Check-Mate’s own 2011 mags (which, incidentally, they make for another prominent maker of 2011 pistols located here in the great state of Texas, not too far from TTAG Central Command).
As you can see, there’s a big difference in reliability shown in the video. The results would lead you to conclude that there’s nothing at all wrong with the Prodigy…nothing that better magazines won’t fix.
We have a Prodigy and some Check-Mate mags on their way to us. We’ll give them all a good going over, see what we can see, and report back to you.
I purchased my Prodigy several days ago. I as many others buyers had problems with failure to feed. I replaced the slide spring with a Wilson Combat 15# springs. I,ve fired 200 rounds since with no problems. Very happy with the accuracy of my Prodigy.
I just bought one last weekend. Put 600 rounds through it so far with 0 failures.