John Vlieger, a grandmaster USPSA competitive shooter and US Army veteran, recently launched his company, JV Training Accessories. JV Training Accessories’ core product is a series of weighted magazine inserts that are designed to slip into the most popular double-stack magazine bodies such as those used by Glock, SIG, CZ, Beretta, Walther, Canik and 2011-pattern magazines. The JV Training Accessories Dry Weight Magazine Inserts are designed to fit the widest cross-section of popular double-stack 9mm semi-auto pistols in use today by both competitive shooters and defensive pistol practitioners.
But Weight! There’s More…
One of the goals of high-performance shooting is physical automaticity–the point where the shooter’s manipulation of the handgun and its peripherals is second nature so you can focus mentally on the shooting task at hand, and one of the ways to strive towards automaticity is consistency.
In the context of dry-fire training, this is where working with a magazine that’s sterile but weighs the same as a fully loaded magazine becomes handy as the difference in weight between an empty magazine with a snap cap and a fully-loaded magazine with live rounds is quite noticeable. This change in weight affects how the gun handles and balances, especially when working on motions such as the draw. For more advanced shooters, the “ballast” of a fully loaded pistol can also subtly affect how the gun feels when the shooter transitions between targets. There are many benefits in accounting for every variable in order to make dry-fire practice as realistic as possible while remaining safe.
The weight of these inserts is intended to replicate the weight of a fully loaded pistol magazine without having to use loose dummy rounds or snap caps in order to make dry-fire training safer and more realistic. Using a JV Training Dry Weight Magazine insert also cuts down on the chances of mixing dummy cartridges with live ammunition.
Hands On With The Dry Weight Magazine Inserts
Dry Weight Magazine Inserts are 3-D printed with a high-visibility rubbery-orange filament and then sealed with a quantity of lead shot to bring them up to the weight of a full magazine. JV Training Accessories currently offers five different models, two for 2011 magazines (140 and 170 mm), two for Glocks (Glock G17 and Glock G19 lengths) and finally a “Universal” 140 mm insert that’s designed to work with SIG, Walther, Canik, Beretta, CZ, or any other standard full-size 9 mm double-stack magazine. JV’s Universal Magazine Inserts also include a tab designed to accommodate competition-legal base pads such as those used in sport-shooting divisions like USPSA’s Carry Optics or Limited Divisions, where competitors can use magazines that measure up to 140mm in length. Shooters who don’t use magazines with extended competition base pads can simply cut this tab off to ensure the insert fits into their standard capacity magazines.
I’ve been working with my Glock G34 pistols using the full-size Glock G17 insert. There’s nothing to the installation other than removing the magazine’s guts, setting the insert and replacing the floorplates. The insert is designed to sit lower than the follower’s default resting position to not interfere with the pistol’s slide. Locking the slide back must be manually done, but this also means that end-users can independently practice with snap caps in the chamber while using the Dry Weight Magazine Insert. The top of the insert is contoured differently than the top of the standard fifth-generation Glock magazine follower and since there’s no tension it’s impossible to load the mag accidentally or otherwise. There’s only a small downside, and that’s that the magazine insert tends to wobble while seated in the pistol since there is no tension pushing off the bottom portion of the slide. On the bright side, the extra weight guarantees that this magazine always drops free.
Using my kitchen scale, I took three weights: an empty standard 17-round full-size 9mm Glock mag (78 grams), the same magazine loaded with 17 rounds of 124-grain FMJ ammo (288 grams) and the JV Training Accessories Dry Weight Mag insert for the Glock 17 inside another magazine (308 grams). Considering that a single 124-grain FMJ round weighs 12 grams, a difference of 20 grams between the magazine with Dry Weight insert and the loaded magazine with live rounds is negligible.
The Takeaway
Chances are that Shooting Illustrated readers are already familiar with the concept of dry-fire to some degree. Whether the topic is competition shooting or defensive training, the act of dry-firing plays a huge role in improving handgun handling and end-user familiarization. Dry-fire benefits nearly every aspect of pistol shooting except for recoil control and the actual firing of the pistol. With dry-fire, a student can productively go through the necessary motions to work through their draw, grips, target presentation, sight pictures, trigger-control, transitions, reloads and manipulations–all without firing a shot and racking up the ammo bill. Adding a product that increases realism by introducing extra weight while still maintaining safety and not interfering with the dry-fire practice process may not be a bad idea.
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