Have you gotten those mags back from the chrome platers yet? I'm really curious how they're coming out...

LOL, yeah I did.  I didn't have them chrome plated but it looks like it.

I call them my "pimp mags" now.  The nickel plating itself is shiney enough, I can't imagine what a chrome plating would have looked like.



I should have told them not to worry too much about letting the nickel build up to full thickness as now the magazines fit a bit tighter in my guns.

On my Bushmasters all 4 mags now fit so that they are no longer "drop free" and to remove them they need to be pulled out.   In my custom gun with it's stainless cast steel lower one out of the 4 magazines will not fit into the lower at all, the other 3 fit fine but are a tight fit.

3 of the magazines are in very good shape and 1 magazine has had it's feed lips partially erroded, I think it has something to do with where they chose to place the electrical contact for the electro-plating process.  The magazine with the now bad feedlips is gonna need a little bit of work to restore it to the point where it doesn't leave a deep gouge through the brass casing of the shells, the other three don't have this and are absolutely fine.


I can tell that the nickel is going to be a very long wearing finish.  It would have been nice if the magazines never lost their anodize in the first place but atleast now the magazines have regained their durability once again.




For those who are wondering why these magazines "lost" their anodize it was because I originally intended to send these off to Paul Podhorn to have him nickel plate the things and refinish them.  To hopefully save on some labor I had abrasive blasted the magazines and the anodize went the way of the dinosaur, which was no big deal because that's what Paul said he did anyhow.   Well, we all know what happened with Paul and basically I got stuck with having a couple magazines that had no finish on them to survive rough handling.  Things with Paul started to go screwy about 1 month after I blasted these magazines and was getting ready to send them off to him, goofy SOB screwed over a lot of us and he managed to nail me even without having sent my magazines into him.


Finally I found a place in town that does electroplating and for 40 bucks I had 4 magazines redone.  Seeming how I'm in Ca. and "what I've gots, is what I keeps" I figured getting a nice durable finish on these magazines was a smart move so that they will last me as long as possible.


Treetop, if I can get to the Ventura GunShow in June I'll bring along a couple of my "pimp mags" for you to see.


It's hard fighting the urge to not want to make a "Pimp Gun" and do an entire AR15 in nickel plating.  Whoa buddy!  That would be really ugly!   These AR15 mags basically look like the Ruger Mini14 nickel or chrome plated 30 rounders.