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In the early days of IPSC, we obsessed over reloading speed. That obsession led to some of the strangest and most expensive mag funnels you've ever seen. One of the first came from the fertile mind of Bill Wilson. It was simple: a plastic gizmo that had two hooks on it. You took your grips off, hooked it on the grip screw bushings, then put your grips back on.

However, plastic being plastic (this was before it became known as "polymer," mind you), the hooks would break. The solution was to use Super Glue and glue it back in place when one hook broke. (One of them always broke before the other.) When the second one broke, you ended up with a glued-on magazine funnel.

The next step was to make the same thing out of steel, which Bill Wilson still offers. However, your grips would be slightly wedged out at the bottom, which some shooters objected to. So then gunsmiths relieved the grips so as not to disturb the grip angle.

But wider is better, leading a number of gunsmiths, myself included, to begin welding or silver-soldering steel onto the bottom of the frame. Then we'd carve out a funnel to make reloads faster. Some felt that was too obvious, and one gunsmith I know of perfected a process of heating the bottom of the frame red-hot, then slamming a wedge into the mag well to flare out the heated steel. The best simple approach for steel was and is the Smith & Alexander (www.smithandalexander.com) approach: steel "wings" attached to the mainspring housing, wings that form the funnel for the mag well.

When competition shooters went to hi-cap guns, the 1911 went back to the tactical crowd, who were perfectly happy with just a filed-out edge as a funnel.

Well, that has changed. A few years ago the USPSA adopted a provisional division: Single Stack. Basically, it's IPSC as it was in the early 1980s, before comps and the .38 Super came along. As long as your gun fits the IPSC box, doesn't have a compensator or an optical sight, and is a single-stack 1911, you're good to go. Well, competitors being who they are, all the old 1911 technology got brushed off. And many shooters have received the benefits of technical progress since the early 1980s.

One new approach concerns mags wells. TechWell USA (www.techwearusa.com, 631/244-4513) makes a mag funnel that also has a pair of hooks, but those hooks--instead of fastening to the grip screw bushings--hook into the grips themselves. How can this be? Simple: The grips and funnel are made of aluminum. The hooks, instead of going up over the grip screw bushings, go up and out, locking into the grips. If your grips are tight enough to stay on the gun, the mag funnel won't fall off.