Advantages of Polymer Magazines: Making the Switch

If you purchase a new Savage centerfire rifle today, you will notice something a little different from our rifles of the past. We've made a rolling change with our magazines, introducing improved polymer magazines that now comes standard with our Axis and 110 rifle lines. This new magazine offers the same great reliability as our previous magazines, but with a few new improvements that will help improve the feel and performance of your rifle! 

New Savage Magazine

The new Savage polymer magazine was precision engineered and designed to not only help improve rifle performance, but to remain durable and effective for use in the toughest conditions. Both the design and build quality were put through various levels of testing before rolling out in our newest rifles.

Build Quality

Our new polymer magazines are built with a high-grade glass filled nylon, which is the type of polymer that is often found in industrial applications. This gives it a great blend of high strength and rigidity, while also allowing these magazines to remain incredibly lightweight. Polymer magazines can also be precision engineered from 3D modelling, allowing them to be built to much tighter and repeatable tolerances when compared to stamped metal magazines. These two aspects produce a magazine with a high build quality that offers repeatable, predictable performance. 

Magazine Design

When our engineers were designing these magazines, the main goal was to ensure that the magazine assisted in making rifles run smoother, feed more efficiently, and provide for an overall improved shooting experience. To do this, the magazine was designed to work optimally with a specific list of over 30 cartridges. 

When a magazine is designed around a specific cartridge, it is optimized to feed and perform better than if it were fit into a generic magazine with "close enough" dimensions. Traditional stamped metal magazines are often designed for only a few select cartridges and then adapted to fit other cartridges  with similar case dimensions. The design idea of these new polymer magazines provides a magazine that can be used across a wide variety of rifles with the same level of reliable performance.  

While the magazine is designed to work across various cartridges, some slight design differences are needed for using magnum vs. standard cartridges. If you have multiple Savage rifles in both standard and magnum cartridges, you'll notice a slight difference on the side tabs of your new polymer magazine. As shown in the image below, magnum cartridge magazines will have a grey tab, while standard cartridge magazines will have a black tab. This helps ensure that you can recognize and use the correct magazine for your specific cartridge and your rifle. 

The grey tab that indicates a magnum cartridge magazine

The black tab indicates a standard cartridge magazine

Advantages of Polymer Magazines

For decades, metal has been known as the king of reliability and functionality. While metal magazines work great, new polymers have leveled the playing field. Today's polymer magazines are just as durable and offer improvements over traditional metal magazines.

Durability

Older, outdated polymers were known for being brittle. Today's polymers are much stronger and more durable, especially the nylon polymer used to make our new magazines. These magazines have been sent through a series of durability tests to ensure that they will survive those hard hunts, or the occasional slip of the hand on the range. Drop tests, stress testing, and recoil testing with repeated fire through magnum caliber rifles up to 300 Win Mag and 7mm Backcountry are all part of the testing process to push these magazines to their limits. 

One of polymer's biggest advantages is its resistance to the environment. Polymer is completely corrosion resistant, allowing you to get your mags wet in rain and snow without having to worry about the potential for rust jamming up your magazine or bolt. Polymer is also unaffected by extreme temperatures, and won't expand or swell when it gets too hot or cold. The textured finish of polymer magazines also helps add a little extra purchase when you go to insert it into the rifle, helping make loading in wet weather easier. 

Improved Performance

Polymer magazines don't just provide an upgrade in durability; they also provide a noticeable improvement in performance.

• More consistent feeding: There are a few ways that polymer magazines achieve more consistent feeding. First, the feed lips have a more consistent shape, owed to a repeatable and exact polymer molding process with tighter tolerances. A more consistent shape leads to more consistent feeding, and improved feeding performance. The feed geometry of the magazine was also fine tuned to improve reliability and reduce instances where cartridges hang up within the magazine. 
• Smoother feeding: The smoothness of the action is important to many rifle shooters, and the magazine has more to do with that than you might think. Polymer magazines provide a smoother, more consistent surface for the bolt to travel on. This improves the smoothness of the action and provides a better feeling bolt operation. The more consistent feed lips also help with less hang-ups when feeding, since they are much better at retaining their shape and less likely to become deformed. The magazine follower is also self-lubricating and slicker, helping to further improve the smoother feeling of the bolt.

• Lighter weight: Polymer is a much lighter material than metal. With an expanding focus in today's market on rifles that are light, durable, and effective for challenging hunting conditions, we wanted to offer a magazine that would match those same requirements. Polymer magazines help cut down on the rifle's weight, and make carrying extra mags less of a burden on backcountry hunts.

Why Did We Make the Switch?

We've used metal magazines in our centerfire rifles for decades. So, why make the switch now? It all comes down to customer feedback and continuous improvement to help make our rifles better and more user friendly!

Customer Feedback

For years, we've been taking in your feedback and figuring out how to use it to improve our rifles. Much of that feedback has been centered around the smoothness that you have experienced when running our 110 or Axis rifles, along with some users experiencing issues with magazines feeding properly. We've introduced these new polymer magazines as one way to help address some of those issues. As we've mentioned earlier, they're smoother, more consistent, and feed more reliably, all of which help your rifles run even better than before.

Another key design aspect of these new magazines was parts compatibility, both with rifles of the future and today's existing Savage models. These new magazines are backwards compatible, and will work with Axis and 110 models utilizing the most recent metal magazine design. So if you're in need of a new magazine for an older rifle, these new magazines will give you the benefits of the new polymer design while still functioning properly in your older Savage rifle. 

Function of new magazines cannot be guaranteed with all older Savage rifles depending on age and model. To verify if a new polymer magazine will function in your rifle, please contact our customer service department at 1 (800) 370-0708 Monday - Friday 8 AM - 5 PM EST.

Improving Performance

We're focused on improving performance and the shooting experience for every hunter and shooter, and the smoothness, reliable feeding, and durability of polymer magazines helps make the experience that much better. Using magazines that feel smoother and feed better doesn't just improve reliability, but it also enhances the overall quality of the rifle you're using. We know that, ultimately, your rifle is a tool to help put meat on the table, bring home a trophy, or bring home some hardware. With improvements to the magazine design, we're helping make that tool run just a little bit smoother every time you cycle the action.

Your magazine may feel like just a small part of your rifle, but it can have a large impact on the rifle's feel and function! This new magazine design won't just help improve feeding and reliability, but will help make your Savage rifle more enjoyable to use in the field and on the range. The next time you're checking out a newer Model 110 or Axis rifle at your local Savage dealer, take some time to work the action to see what a difference a new magazine can make!