At a recent charity match, I won not one, but two CAM magazine loaders donated to the match courtesy of Benny at The Pack. These mag loaders work by pulling 10 rounds at a time straight off a factory ammo box and stripping them super quickly into a pistol magazine. The CAM loader competes with the UpLULA, the Caldwell Universal Pistol Magazine Loader, and kind of with the style of basic loader that Glock and other manufacturers includes with their pistols. ETS chose to go with a more specific use case: loading 9mm or 40 S&W single or double stack magazines from factory boxes of ammo, and make reloading as fast as possible.
I shoot 3 gun, and in 3 gun it’s useful to be able to reload all your mags quickly after shooting a stage. Using a mag loader is a nice creature comfort and this one loads em FAST.
ETS CAM Magazine Loader Design
The CAM Magazine loader uses very few moving parts and that’s good to see. It uses a pathway inside the mag loader body to force rounds down and then back into the magazines. It pulls 10 rounds out of a factory box of ammo by grabbing onto the rim of each round. You can either strip off rounds by the 10 if you go lengthwise or by 5 if you grab rounds on the short end of a typical 50 round box. The CAM loader is all plastic.
Using the ETS CAM Magazine Loader
The official how to video describes oiling the inside and guide rails to slick it up, so I gave it a quick swab of light oil. After that, it just worked. I tried Glock 17 mags and CZ75 mags and they worked a treat. 1911 9mm mags didn’t work because they were too long to fit.
CAM Magazine Loader vs MagLula UpLULA
UpLULA Pros:
- More compact
- Fits more styles of magazine/cartridges
- Can be fed from an ice cream pail of reloaded ammo or factory boxes
- Doesn’t require to be oiled
CAM Loader Pros:
- Much faster: about 6-10X faster to load a mag
- Don’t even have to touch the ammo
If you shoot ISPC or 3 gun and use factory ammo in factory boxes, this is by far the best way to roll. You can reload your mags lightning so fast it’s silly.
So if that sounds like something you need, check it out.
