Enhanced or flared magwells are an upgrade within the firearm industry that are springing up like wildfires. Some companies are methodically engineering and designing these components – like Tyrant Designs – while others are simply doing it to join the bandwagon. Similarly, consumers feel like they should add one to their pistol, but they do not understand the “why” behind it. The general purpose for a flared magwell is to make magazine insertions into your magazine well (magwell) go more smoothly. It is meant to create a stronger funneling action to guide the magazine home. This is important because it allows for no-look magazine insertions and faster speed reloads. Whether it is a need for improvement in the area of self-defense or competition shooting, the confident ability to swiftly and accurately reload is important to a lot of gun owners.
As mentioned before, it does not matter what discipline of shooting you are practicing because most people want to be able to reload quicker and flared magwells assist in that. Often times with the garments we are wearing or the gear we are toting on our person, there can be hang-ups that occur when reloading. Either the stress of competition shooting or self-defense can be enough to fluster us into a poor reload. By having a larger mouth or opening to the magazine well (larger flare), our Neanderthal gross-motor skills can take over in high-stress scenarios to ensure our magazine makes its way home. What a flared magwell does is decrease the amount of precision required to insert a magazine. Moreover, we can be a fumbling-mess and hopefully still get the job done.
An additional benefit to flared magwells is they can act as a ledge to spread the recoil impulse into the bottom of the gripping hand. This will translate into less muzzle rise, a quicker return to your sight picture being on target, and generally faster shooting. Also, balancing the improved functionality a flared magwell affords the shooter with the increase in weight to the firearm is a delicate process. You don’t want a flared magwell that weighs as much as a cinder block, but you also don’t want to add feathery, micro-ounces either.
While flared magwells are often associated with race/competition guns, they have absolutely found their way home to the everyday shooter and concealed carry enthusiast. When we are working to defeat stress and get more rounds downrange – either on paper or an evil doer – we want to ensure the alignment and velocity of our magazine into our gun is as good as it can be. We want that to be such an intuitive process that if you get close enough the magazine almost finds its way home on its own.
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