An interesting Sten mag variation: Anyone else ever seen one?

[stencollector]

Apologies to the Bren purists for posting about the lowly sten in your section, but there is no sten section, and this is about as close to the sten subject as I can find on the milsurps forum. If this offends the moderators, please feel free to move it to wherever it is better suited.

I was recently adjusting the pop rivets on a bunch of sten magazines I have, to take them from zero rounds, where they had been pinned, to 5 rounds, which is the current legal limit for these mags here in Canada. But one magazine I had did not act like the others. It looked slightly different....a little more rounded on the edges. It was the "seamless" type of magazine body which is somewhat common amongst British made mags, and you can just make out the weld on the one side where the metal was fused together. The spring would not pull out until I removed the rivet from the mag body onto the platform. (note for legal reasons, I leapfrog the platform so that I do not have a fully functional magazine, which would be very illegal in this country). Once I got the platform with spring out, the reason was obvious.....the mag had a plastic/nylon type platform.





I could find no markings on the platform, but on the body was a small C/l\, but not in the usual spot where they are normally found on either the Kalvinator of Canada or on the LongBranch marked mags. They usually have the C-broadarrow about 1/4" from the top front edge of the magazine....this mag has it about 1/2 from the bottom leading edge.

So has anyone else ever seen a sten mag of this type? The platform shows a slight nick where it hits against the forward edge of the magazine lip....perhaps this led to a problem of wear and this style magazine did not continue in production.

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[Vincent]

Interesting.

The only plastic ones I've seen are the Tapco's and it's not one of them.

Attachment 40894Attachment 40895Attachment 40896

I am pretty sure the Tapco sten mags were discontinued. I never could get the one I have to feed reliably.

[stencollector]

Thanks for that Vincent.

I had one other board member email me that he found one of these followers in a mag many years ago. I believe this to be Cdn military, and not an after market product, based on the source and time period of the magazines.

I have several thousand demilled sten magazines which have passed over my workbench, and I have never seen one like this before.

[Vincent]

It must have been made late in the production run. Or maybe a later replacement part?

It's interesting that it's made from plastic/nylon but still has the high friction shape.

Thanks for posting it. I will let you know if I run across one like it.