I needed a few extra magazines for my new BLR 308 What surprised me was the one's marked .308 were about $25.00 more than the same ones marked as .243 and/or .358 Winchester. Being as I've reloaded all of these rounds over the years and know the 308 is the "mother" for the 243 and the 358, I figured there wasn't any difference the mags. The .243 magazines worked "out-of-the-box" on my 308 with zero issues. I cycled about 300 rounds with no problems at all. What did catch me off-guard was I was getting ejection jams when using the 358 mags. A look showed why (photo below) - the 308 has a chamfer that the 358 was missing. To fix the issue I used a small cross-cut aluminum file and added in the missing chamfer. After the fix, it now feeds and ejects with no issues. I'm just wondering if the 358 mags were just made wrong, or possibly early models before Browning added in the chamfer? P.S. I'm a Machinist with over 40 Years in the trade, so adding in the chamfer was no problem to me. I thought about disassembling the mags and milling the flat, but a file did the trick just fine. After photo below: I left the chamfer on the "light" side just in case I needed to actually mill it to size. After a few hundred cycles I figured it works fine, so don't fix it.
Good information to know. Thanks for posting. It would be interesting to know if the 358 mag would still work in the 358.
