It says "ultimate" right on the package!

Over the years, I have used all manner of loading assist devices for rimfire magazines, ranging from little plastic collars for depressing the follower button on pistol magazines to elaborate gizmos with knobs and windlasses and transfer cases for filling large-capacity aftermarket 10/22 magazines.

While they all did, in fact, assist in getting rounds into the magazine with varying degrees of success, my satisfaction with them tended to be inversely proportional to the advertising claims. It would not be an understatement to say that most of the more elaborate 10/22 loaders left me feeling like a kid who ordered Sea Monkeys and discovered that she did not, in fact, get little mer-people who would build elaborate undersea Disney castles in her goldfish bowl. Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Several people had recommended the "Ultimate Cliploader" for my Ruger pistol magazines and so, with a jaded sigh, I added it to my Amazon wish list, intending to purchase it myself for range use this summer. One Anonymous Reader beat me to the punch and sent it to me, and so the other morning when I had to run down to MCF&G to drop off my annual dues anyway, I dropped fifty rounds of deuce-deuce (the advertised capacity of the Cliploader) into a little ziploc and headed for the range.

Behold:

Fifty rounds, five ten-round mags, a pistol, a gizmo, and destructions. The latter are extremely important to me, for I am ten-thumbed.

The first step was easy: Open gizmo and dump rounds in. Okay, I can do that. Then you just jiggle the whole thing around some until a bunch of the rimmed cartridges drop nose down into the little trough...

Insert a magazine. The opening is not wide enough to accommodate the button on the side, so the follower is automagically depressed. Tip the whole assembly vertical and the rounds drop into the mag. You may have to 'pump' the magazine in and out a time or two to seat the last couple rounds.

On two magazines the tenth round didn't seat and dropped out of the gizmo when the mag was withdrawn, so I just picked it up and popped it in manually.

Et voila! The loading, she is finished! Literally in about as much time as it would have taken me to load maybe a mag-and-a-half, and far less time than it took to compose this blog post, I had loaded all five magazines. This was a new sensation for me: Satisfaction with a rimfire loading aid.

Thank you, Anonymous Reader! I would like to give you a great big internet hug! This thing really is Ultimate! How had I lived without it this long?

My only worry is that I'm going to get all addicted to the ease of using it and then break it, leaving myself feeling all lost and bereft at the range. I am going to order a second one, just in case, and set it aside. (And think what great stocking stuffers these will make come Christmas!)