After. And my first thought was that somehow I'd buggered up the extractor plunger, the extractor, or possibly even the slide itself. But it turns out that's not the case.Originally Posted by gtmtnbiker98
Did the problems begin before or after the extractor spring "issue?"
The Glock is probably the simplest auto pistol to detail strip out there. It takes a grand total of about three minutes (probably less) to tear the gun down and probably another three minutes to build it back up again with the fresh parts.
Add to that the fact the parts for Glocks are cheap and readily available. Its easy to keep spares and I know that I can find them locally too.
When I'm carrying a Glock as my primary pistol (which I am again now) I usually end up changing the recoil spring out every six months and totally rebuilding it once a year.
I've only seen three trigger return springs break in the past ten years and these were on guns that had seen little or no maintenance over their service life and had been shot a lot. The fact that they made it as long as they did is a surprise. I use an NY! spring in my guns so I don't worry about that part that much anyway.
My current battery of Glocks are all Gen3 guns (because I traded my Gen2's like an idiot). I briefly owned a Gen4 G22 this past fall and was not impressed with that particular gun. I plan to give the Gen4 another try after some time goes by and Glock has a chance to make sure everything works right.
Is the Glock perfect? Hell no. Is it the most accurate pistol and smoothest shooting pistol? Nope. Does it always feel ergonomic and elegant in your hand? Not really.
But is the Glock one of the simplest engineered pistols out there? Yes it is and as such there are fewer things to go wrong and the average person won't have a hard time obtaining and swapping out parts.
I think there's really two different discussions that get pushed together when topics like these come up; there's a difference between "reliability" and "inherent-reliability".
For inherent-reliability IMO the Glock 9mm is the undisputed heavyweight champ (NOT the Gen4's which are just f'ed IMHO and they may not be right until Gen5, but that's another topic...). Fewest parts, simplest execution of performing it's tasks in loading and firing, and very important, THE most reliable magazines in existence. The only way for them to really fail is if a trigger-return spring happens to break (rare these days), or if their spring-rates are set-up improperly causing timing issues (see Gen4).
That said, I'm over 1000rds through a 9mm 1911 (the moodiest of moody pistols) without a single issue. It's reliable not because of it's design, but because I make it so by being informed about what it takes and what to look for as far as problems that can happen and dialing it monitoring it accordingly...
I clean it, I don't need a gunsmith for anything I don't own the right tools for and most importantly I'm aware it will fail if I neglect the effort it requires to have it run.
Since I'm aware of the design's biggest flaws (extractor and mags) I do what I can to mitigate them (Aftec and top-quality mags).
Point I'm trying to make is that even a dreaded 9mm 1911 can be made to run just as, or near as reliably as the Glock, it's really what's required to make it happen that is different. When one chooses a gun, what is best depends on what they can put into it as far as attention, that's probably as important, if not more so than the choice of what brand/platform.
JMHO/YMMV.
Todd, what part did you break on the H&K at the NM AFHF class when you were demoing holding the hammer down?
Also, didn't you screw up something while re-assembling your P30?
I never got around to sending the backup HK45 back for inspection (it was the backup gun that I broke). Probably bent the trigger bar. For folks who don't know, the short story is that I was doing something for which the gun wasn't designed to prove a point, and while the gun continued to fire perfectly reliably, the trigger now breaks so far back it literally has to press into the frame to fire.
I don't remember screwing anything up on the P30's, except that there is the possibility that the gymnastics I relied upon to get the trigger springs installed early on may have led to their being worked too much and diminished their service life. Based on my experience with that spring since that time, I'm less inclined to think that's likely.
which gun had the reassembly issue?
I seem to remember it passed all the function checks but still crapped out in some fashion?
My memory is fuzzy.
That was the HK45. I still believe it was an out-of-spec spring, but some folks are harder to convince than others.
yeah the reliability, caveman-simplicity, and cheap readily available parts and mags make the glock really hard to beat on a purely subjective level. They shoot great too. my only other carry gun is an HK p7, which is, in many ways the anti glock. complex, expensive, and hard to obtain parts for. They do share the same simplicity of use and incredible reliability as glocks though.
My P30l has about 15K rounds I shoot about 1000 rounds a month and the only work I've done on it it's filling up the magazines. So while Glocks are easy to take apart and what not, I rather have a gun that I don't have to take apart.
Eventually they all need to come apart.
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