@GJM - None of us here have ever done that. Nuh-uh, not us, nope.
"Everything in life is really simple, provided you don’t know a f—–g thing about it." - Kevin D. Williamson
My comments have not been approved by my employer and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. These are my comments, not my employer's.
In evaluating the G5 23 vs G5 20, I look at three main areas -- shootability, bullet performance and accessory support.
I can shoot the 23 better than the 20. The grip of the 20 is quite large, where the 23 grip feels like a 19. I ended up having to install the medium beaver tail on the 20, to keep my strong thumb from sometimes contacting the bottom of the slide stop with heavy loads, and locking open the pistol with rounds left in the magazine. With the extra weight in the slide the G5 23 feels like a 19 with Gold Dot 124+ P.
The bullet diameter is the same between 10 and 40, so it gets down to load availability. The .40 165 and 180 Gold Dot was incredibly accurate in the 23, shooting sub two inches at 25. The Underwood Lehigh 140 penetrator load was reliable and accurate. In a quest to make 10mm loads "powerful," I think a number of these loads are so heavy they make the Glock 20 less reliable. For a field pistol, once a bullet will penetrate the skull of an animal, more is not necessarily better since "more" makes a pistol harder to place aimed shots quickly.
The 23 has better accessory support than the 20. For example, the LTT Booth grip anchor, Apex trigger and OEM extended mag releases all work on the 23 but are not available on the 20. Unfortunately the 23 will not work in most 19 holsters due to the thicker slide.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
Ok, as suspected and subsequently verified by dynamic use (an IDPA match) and static zero confirmation, the OEM 6.1 sight height was providing a POI some 2" -2.5" lower than the center-hold POA. Discussions with Glock Tech established that while the gun was boresighted and hence had the "proper" rear sight height chosen, it's not necessarily a perfect system, as mine clearly evidenced.
While I could have made the 6.1 sights (in my case, the OEM 6.1 polymer was immediately replaced with a Glock/Meprolight tritium set, with a 6.1 rear) work, "working" would have entailed application of ad hoc sight offsetting. The simple solution was to go to replace the 6.1 rear with a 6.5 rear, which immediately did the trick; a center-hold POA now equals a center of target POI. Life is good.
On the 6.1 rear, I also had to move the rear to the right off center in the dovetail; on the 6.5, I had to drift it a bit to the right for center hits, but not nearly as much as with the previous 6.1. It probably goes to show that there are some variations from sight to sight-another reason to trust but verify...
Oddly, the charts in the current Glock Armorers manual go into some detail in establishing for the Gen5 guns, the ideal set-up is with a 4.1 front and a....wait for it...6.5 rear, or a 4.9 front and a 7.3 rear. How Glock came to the conclusion that the OEM set-up for mine came to be a 4.1 front with a 6.1 rear is beyond me....
I am much more comfortable with my empirically derived sight height setup. Trust, but verify is not a bad motto/mantra....
Best, Jon
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