AR-DIY: Painting Magazines

With the lower receiver that I have, being the Texas Special Edition, the cutout star in the magazine well presents an interesting opportunity for me to play around with painted magazines. The idea is to paint the magazine only at the top so that the color will be visible through the star. While the steps to paint magazines are pretty straight forward, I'll walk y'all through the way I decided to do things.

First, the picture below shows a 20 round PMAG peaking through the star cutout. Black on black does not pop very much, if at all.

The things you will need to paint your magazine are:

• A magazine to paint
• Cleaner/Degreaser (rubbing alcohol works just fine in a pinch)
• Paint of choice (I recommend spray paint for the simplicity, and a type that specifically bonds to plastic or metal depending on the magazine you're painting)
• Painters tape
• Disposable gloves (optional)

Before this step, I forgot to show the cleaning step. Just get a paper towel with some cleaner on it an rub down the area you're going to paint. Afterwards, carefully mask off any areas you don't want paint to get to while not touching the cleaned areas with your bare hands. I recommend masking off the top at the very least to keep paint out of the magazine's internals and wearing gloves.

Using light coats, begin painting the magazine. Lots of light coats will give you a better result than a few heavy coats, as you avoid runs and uneven paint.

After a good five or six coats, my magazine looked like this when fully dry! Next time, I'll do a better job of making sure the masking tape is fully stuck on the magazine so I get a sharp painted edge. Even so, this one still came out great.

Here is the painted magazine inserted into the lower. Looking super cool! This is a fun and simple way to customize your magazines, and can also help with identifying which mags are yours when at the range with lots of other similar magazines everywhere.

Next time, I'm also going to paint just the side of the magazine facing the star cutout. The magazine catch is scraping up the paint on the opposite side, and there's really no need for paint to be anywhere else besides right under the star.

This was a fun project that only took me a few minutes to do. I absolutely would recommend anyone do this to their mags, even if only for aesthetic reasons like me. Coming up, more AR-15 parts!

'Till next time.

-AA