Video Transcript
If you're a faithful Glock customer and you are using standard Glock 17 magazines, it may come to a point where you want to make them a little bit easier to grab or you simply just want to add extra ammunition to them. Now there's tons of base pads on the market from all kinds of different companies. Some are better than others and we've used a lot of the different models out there. But one of the ones that we've kept coming back to as just extremely reliable, the base pad doesn't fly off of the magazine cause I've had that issue with other ones out. There are the Arredondo Base Pads. They've been around for a very long time. They're a family owned business and we've loved supporting them and carrying this product. And recently we've started, uh, carrying the +3 base pad, which we're gonna be talking about.
But first let's go ahead and open these and actually show you how to put them on the magazine and what's going on with them. Starting with the +5, you'll see that every single one comes with a higher tension spring. This is simply because the spring and a standard Glock 17 magazine, once you add a bunch of extra mass and just distance inside the magazine is not gonna give enough spring tension to properly propel those rounds to the top to allow adequate cycling of your handgun. So we have the extra spring, the extra power spring, which is great. We absolutely wanna use that, but we also get this nice little tool that's gonna enable us to put the base pad, um, on the actual magazine itself, uh, much easier. But first we have to remove the existing base plate on this Glock team magazine. And we can do this a couple ways. You can use pliers, you can use, you know, a screwdriver or like a little punch to punch the little detail here. If you have a tool such as this true Glock base plate remover, it makes it a little bit easier, but it's not a hundred percent necessary. But I'm gonna use this because I've removed way too many base plates, uh, with pliers and it kind of sucks. So you wanna make sure that you have your thumb covering the rear because this spring is going to shoot outwards and we don't wanna blast the camera men.
And there we go. So the body of the magazine, the small spring, which just so you can see uh, for comparison, is, uh, quite a bit shorter than the new spring that Arredondo is providing, which is definitely a little bit tighter and a little bit harder to reload, but that's good. It means good reliability for the handgun. We're gonna remove the follower from the old spring and we can get rid of that. You'll see on the spring that Arredondo has on one end there's a small follower shaped section. This is where the follower is gonna go. So we're gonna position that with the little rounded area in the front, snaps into place. Nice. They don't always snap into place. If they don't, that's okay. Just ram it up into the magazine and it'll settle and it'll straighten out. Before we get much further, we're gonna wanna remove the top cap off of the base pad. We do this by taking the little tool that Arredondo includes and we're simply gonna clamp it onto both little dents, one on each side. We're going to push inwards and then I just go up inside to push the top of the base plate and remove it. And you can see with the construction, the dents slip into these slots and that's how it's all held together. So we take the body of the magazine, we take the base of the base plate, so not the top cap, and we're just gonna slip that in on top of the magazine all the way to the bottom.
We're now gonna take our spring that has the follower, so that's coming together nicely. We're then gonna take the top cap. So I think you guys could see what's going on. The magazine is now prepared. Once I push this all the way inwards, these little clips are going to clip into the slot right here and that's gonna cause the base plate to not fall apart as you're using it. So we're just gonna push that forward. And there you go. The magazine is assembled. These are clicked into place. I could feel good spring tension. It is stiffer than a standard Glock 17 magazine. So yes, it is a little harder to reload, but they are extremely reliable and I've never had one of these come apart on me. Like some of the other designs out there where there's like a little, roll pin, or not a roll pin, but a little pin that prevents the top plate from sliding off. You lose that top plate slides off and then the spring goes flying. So very reliable magazine, but let's talk about the plus three. So we're gonna do the same thing. We've popped the follower onto the Arredondo spring and we're gonna take the, uh, not the top cap, the the bottom cap of the Arredondo and we're gonna slip that over the top of the, or the base of the magazine or the body of the magazine all the way to the bottom. Spring goes in follower forward, and then we have the top cap and we're just gonna do the exact same thing. We're gonna push it forwards until it clicks into place.
It's gonna hook in from the front like so, so we have it clipped here and then we are simply going to push it till it clicks in. Once you hear it click into position, you're good to go. Same thing with the +5. It's not gonna come undone on you. Maybe under some crazy circumstance out there. It might. but again, you're not dealing with a bunch of other mechanisms and parts. The base pad is not sliding onto the, the magazine itself. It's, you know, getting dropped on straight through, the actual body of the magazine and in an upwards motion into the base plate itself, which makes it very reliable. So there's the plus three right there. It does still have the same form factor of a standard, Glock 17 magazine. It is has that sloped appearance. I personally like having these squared off, uh, you know, +5, uh, base pad just because it does film. Uh, my palm just a little bit easier, but just for some reference for you guys, you can see we've got a couple plus threes right here in Mars Carriers on this Speed Belt.
We've got a +5 right here so you can kind of see the height difference. And then with a Sidecar, if you wanted to carry you know, extended magazine as your extra mag or just make the mag a little bit easier to grab once you actually go to do a reload, uh, this is kind of what the +3 looks like. Nice and sloped, still easy to get to, still easy to grab. The plus five starts to get a little bit longer. I've done it, it's not, it's not horrible, you know, but it does start to kind of get out there a little bit more. Um, and then we'll have to pistol for comparison so you can just see how tall it is. Then we have the plus three like this, which actually ends up being about the same height as the Glock itself once it's in the holster.
If you go to service your magazines or maybe you wanna try out a different base pad out there, I highly recommend you keep the tools that come with the +5 base pad or the +3 base pad. These do make it a lot easier to actually undo the base plate the spring and actually get in there and clean your magazine out for someone who does that. Or if you wanna swap to a different base pad out there, definitely keep these with your, uh, Glock toolkit or you know, whatever. Don't just throw them away unless you have tons of extras so you can, remove the base plate easily. If you have any other questions for us about these particular base plates or some of the other ones on the market, compatibility with our holsters or just base base plates in general for the Glock family of pistols, go ahead and shoot us your question at team@trex-arms.com.