I personally don’t like to load gun magazines too much. It’s fine at first but after a few hours on the range and a few hundred rounds, loading a mag gets tedious, to say the least. Depending on the gun that you buy, you may get a speed loaders but these are generally just designed to push the follower down at the back. When you load a round, it’ll hit the pin at the back of the loader that pushes the follower down. This causes a stop-and-go motion and I consider this to be an unnatural motion. It’s just one of those things that you have to try for yourself to understand. This type of speed loader helps to speed things up and lessen hand strain but I just think that things can be better.
After some research, I came across the maglula UpLULA, which seems to be one of the most recommended speed loaders on the market. This particular one is advertised to be universally compatible with all magazines that hold 9mm, .357, 10mm, .40, and .45 cal.
Looking at the UpLULA, the product itself is fairly simple. It is spring-loaded and the two sides can be squeezed together. At the top, there’s a lock that allows for the UpLULA to be stored at the compressed size. On one of the sides, there’s a small notch for use with unloading but we’ll get to that in a bit.
To use the UpLULA, we slip it over the top of a magazine with the prong or what maglula calls the steel beak, over the follower. From here, we squeeze the sides of the UpLULA together, then push the whole thing down. This will cause the steel beak to push the follower down, allowing us to load a round. The thing that’s really nice about this speed loader is that it’s the loading motion is very streamline. There’s none of that stop and go as with the manufacturer provided loader. After loading just a few roads, the motion became second nature and I got pretty fast at it. I was actually loading faster with my right hand than my left hand can grab the next round. I would say that this is pretty good.
On my first few attempts at using this product, it seemed like I wasn’t able to fully load a mag with the UpLULA. I have 15 round mags and it seemed like I could only load 14 rounds. It looked like the steel beak was taking too much space in the mag and didn’t allow for loading of the last round. But after some fiddling around, it turns out that I just needed to exert more force. Again, because that steel beak is taking up some real estate in the mag, you’ll have to push down harder than usual. Definitely harder than if you’re using the manufacturer’s speed loader.
Then if you want to unload the mag, you can use the notch that I mentioned earlier. You essentially use that to push the round out of the mag instead of using your thumb. To be honest, I think the thumb method is faster so I’ll likely not be using this feature.
I should also mention that a few different manufacturers make hard shell cases for the UpLULA so if you want to protect your investment, these are a good buy.
Overall, I have to say that I really like the maglula UpLULA. It does exactly what I wanted it to and that is to help me load a magazine faster. I really have no complaints about it but I haven’t used it for very long. Only time will tell if it’ll hold up in terms of durability. Fingers crossed that it’ll last for years to come.
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