OK thanks ... and as for the wood magazines, I have recently bought some that were over-sized, and were too tight a fit; stretching the leather on a hundred-year-old holster and pulling the stitches seems more harmful than good. Besides being a bit too large in cross-section, their round bases were placed way too far back, to close to the flat spine, and would not seat into the notch of the pocket. They would just deform the pccket and stretch the leather and seams. After sending them back, I then bought five wooden mags from another source, and four were correct in size ( cross-section ) but one was a bit small. However all of them had over-sized bases, placed again too far back toward the rear flat spine, and they were overall shorter than a real magazine with a bullet in it, as well as having a top profile that was not at all equal to a real magazine.
The whole point of a wood magazine, I believe, is to replicate a real magazine and keep the entire leather pocket in the habit of holding a full magazine so the leather does not crush or collapse.
Anyway, I removed the oversized round bases, and put some smaller bases on, made from 1/2" oak dowel cut to 1-7/8" length. The half-inch dowel is a bit smaller than the real thing, but better to use than oversize, since the pockets' notches will not be subject to deformation as long as the base fits into them and the magazine bottoms out, touching the bottom of the pocket. (Dowels at the local hardware stores run in fractional inch sizes rather than metric, and I did not want to go thru the steps to mill down oversized oak dowels.
Also 'had to move the magazine bases forward by enlarging the round seat of the bases, relocating the bases forward, then filling the space behind with wood and putty to restore the shape. Then I filed (belt-sanded) some of those orange plastic 9mm practice rounds and glued/pinned them (23 gauge trim finish pins air-nailed ) to the top of the magazines to replicate the shape and length of a loaded magazine.
I noticed that my WWI holsters had such snug mag pockets that even the follower button had made a small expression in the leather where it showed a full magazine had long ago been kept for enough time to imprint its shape. I then found some stainless steel screws with heads the diameter of the mag follower button and located it where it would be on a loaded magazine. 'Had to file the head a little flatter after it was put in the wood, but now the customized wood magazine fits the pocket nearly perfect, fills it without stretching any more, and touches the bottom of the pocket with the fake plastic round-nose bullet, while the base rests in the notch.
'Quite alot of messing about with a simple wood magazine, and they are sort of ugly, but that is what it took to make a useful substitute out of the wood mags I bought, without just starting over from scratch. The basic wood shape was already a good start.
