As with the 19 and 22-round XDm magazines, the 35-round magazines do not feature an integral over-travel stop.
As a result, contact with the ejector is made in a similar manner to every instance of the XDms where the magazine body is longer than the grip frame height. Over-insertion damage (be it cumulative or singular) to the ejector thus remains a possibility, as there the frame cannot physically abut the base-pad of the magazine to stop/limit its upward travel in a slide-lock reload.
I can't get a good enough picture with my old (first generation iPhone SE
), so I'm charging up my old camera to see if I can get some clearer images, for those who wish to better understand this concern. More in the coming days.
Some pictures to illustrate -
First, this is my EDC 3.8 Compact, purchased new in January, 2011. Current round-count is ~13,000 live-fire. It double-timed as a training-gun through to October of that year, when I purchased a second XDm9 3.8 Compact to serve as a dedicated training gun.
The visible defect appearing as an "A" engraved into the ejector is actually just a speck of oil. I did not clean any of my weapons for these pictures outside of what state I normally keep them in and their normal cleaning/lubrication cycle, so please forgive how awful they may look. Noted in this photo is an aftermarket (Springer Precision) trigger bar and aftermarket (also Springer Precision) slide-stop/release.
Below is that 3.8 Compact training gun, purchased new in October of 2011. This gun is now at around 25,000 rounds live-fire. As I've written in other threads (
https://www.thearmorylife.com/forum/threads/xdm-3-8-compact.105/#post-2758), I purchased this gun specifically so that any hard wear that comes from training will no longer be accrued on my EDC. Here's how this gun's ejector looks -
^ That defect on the bottom-facing edge of the ejector is a real defect. It's a "gouge" that's deep enough to catch my fingernail. Aftermarket components mirror that of the EDC copy.
With the XDm, we do not have an integral magazine overtravel stop as does, for example, a double-stack Glock. Instead, it is the grip frame of the gun itself that stops the magazine from excessive upward travel upon insertion on an open slide (again, on a closed slide, this is not an issue).
This can be seen in the following series of photographs. My apologies for their quality - or rather, lack thereof - I didn't think to pull the tripod from its storage with my spotting scope....in-retrospect, it would have made for much better pictures.
You can see from the defect on the ejector that the pictures above were all taken using that training 3.8 Compact.
With particularly the picture without the dummy cartridge and the one with the dummy pointing right, you can easily see that there's a sizable and easily visualized gap between the cartridge/case and the ejector. This gap exists as the magazine sits in the magwell in a "nominal" fashion, without any pressure exerted "up" from the bottom of the magazine towards the top. With just one single A-Zoom dummy in the magazine, there's insufficient weight in the mag to pull it down towards the ground, but trust me, if you insert a full magazine into the magwell and let it come to rest afterwards, it will settle into this position. The case does not contact the ejector.
With the picture that has the dummy round pointing left, because of the camera angle, this is not as apparent. Trust me, however, when I say that the gap remains. I selected this picture intentionally, however, as you can see instead how the rim of the cartridge aligns with the defect in the ejector. More on this in the next set of pictures.
^ The three pictures above shows what it looks like as a longer-than-frame XDm magazine is inserted with a bit more force. No, not "excessive" force
- if you have a truncated-frame XD or Xdm like the XD-SC or "Compact" variants of the XDm, you can easily prove this to yourself by stripping off the slide and performing your usual reloads. This kind of contact between the top cartridge of the stack -and even the magazine itself- versus the ejector can easily come about under the forces of a typical and routine reload.
This occurs when the magazine body is longer than the grip frame of the XD/XDm simply because there is no integral magazine stop for this weapon aside from the length of the grip frame. This is why use of the factory X-Tension on the truncated-frame guns, when full-length magazines are used, is so important.
And no, there's no difference with the slide on.....
^ These two pictures are taken with the slide on the gun. The top of the cartridge is making contact with the ejector in a manner that's the same with all the other pictures shown and to-be-shown, below.
Now, going to my training/range-use 4.5-inch, full-size Xdm (9mm model, purchased second-hand from a trusted member in the online firearms enthusiast community with a reported 300 rounds fired), which is currently somewhere north o 50,000 rounds fired (please see next post due to attachment size limit)......
