Taming the Jimenez JA-380: Magazine Tuning

It doesn't matter how well a handgun may be designed and manufactured, or how well maintained, if it has a badly adjusted or worn-out magazine installed. Because, it simply will not work correctly. The adjustments that I have had to make are minor, but they do play an important role in performance and reliability.

The reader should notice the slight lift to the front of the cartridges in the two photos above. This is not a natural position for the ammunition the way that these magazines came from the factory. It is important to have that slight lift of the nose of the bullet to help facilitate loading into the chamber, and to eliminate the possibility of a jam. If a round is orientated too level and straight-on forward, it may very well get stuck against the feed-ramp and never make it into the chamber. I had to slightly spread the forward part of the magazine feed-lips in order to accomplish this. I was careful not to spread the lips too far, as this would result in the magazine not being able to properly hold the rounds and may interfere with slide operation. My years of dealing with this issue, allowed me to quickly adjust these magazines for flawless performance.

The magazine-catch and the bottom edge of the magazines needed to be worked over, because magazine release and removal was awful. After doing the modifications below, magazine release and removal is much better and about as good as it gets for this type of setup.

In the above pictures I have tried to show the area that was worked over. There is a seam where the magazine body and the floor-plate come together. This seam does not align well, and this creates a lip that the mag-catch hangs up on. A small hammer was used to hammer over the metal tang on the mag body, then it was filed and sanded smooth. The upper edge of the floor-plate also had a sharp kind of burr all along its length, and had to be rounded off. Where the yellow arrow points, is to the area that the factory ground, and this was sanded smoother too. In this way the mag-catch will release without hang-up.

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