Originally Posted by KevH
SNIP...To me the Gen3's feel like the handshake of an old friend.
... SNIP
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Yep, that is a pretty good way to put it and exactly why I carry a G34 as a work gun daily.
Sights and a spring change, otherwise bone stock.
It is like the Energizer Bunny and I just don't mess with it.
Ive had a gen 3 g19 for about a decade now. Got my cpl with it. Its always felt fat in my hands and the mag release is tiny and remains stiff and irritating after all these years. The trigger safety gets irritating after a few hundred rounds, but ive found that to be the same with every glock ive ever owned. To be fair, Its always been reliable with everything ive fed it and my mom could shoot it decently.
Hopefully ill be trading it towards an APX soon.
And people still look at me funny when I say I still use a 40 year old 1911
Here I was going to post in this thread about how I'm still happy with my Gen 2 G19, but now @Lost River has me looking at surprisingly cheap Gen 3 G21's available on the used market.
This site is expensive.
LOL, glad to help!
So I am being conservative when I say that between my first one , (a very early production gun, though technically speaking a Gen2) and a couple personally owned Gen 3 G21s, plus my issued one, I was pretty far north of 50K. I doubt I ever hit 100, but I never kept track. This was from the ealy 90s through the early 2000s. I used to tear off the ends of the cartons of the 1k flaps of primers that went through my dillon 550 but got tired of that and tossed them eventually. Plus when I went to an agency where I became an FI, and had access to copious amounts of ammo, I pretty much stopped loading .45. It also was during that time that due to my work schedule and other factors that my competition shooting really dropped off substantially.
Talking with a couple people who knew about such things, I understand that 1 SFOD-D looked at them very early on, but passed due to reliability. I believe this was due to the very early ones had some growing pains with the magazines. That was resolved many years ago though. Mine have been absolutely amazingly reliable. In fact a lot of my local matches back in the day that I won (in my class/division) were not due to anything other than the fact that my gun always went BANG no matter how dirty. There were guys that were faster/better, but their race guns puked, when mine did not. simple as that.
It was just plain rock solid reliable, and accurate. They are bigger guns, but they are about the softest shooting .45s I have ever played with.
I can't remember the year, I think it was 03-04 maybe?
Anyways, I am friends with a gentleman by the name of John Shaw. Older USPSA/IPSC shooters may recognize the name. Newer guys probably not, but he was a big name in the early days of the sport and won a bunch of titles. Anyways, he has a school down in Mississippi called Mid-South Institute. A lot of .Mil outfits used to go through there, especially Navy.
Back to the point, I went down to the school to run through it. I ran my G21. It is a very high volume school. You don't tape targets after the first morning of determining your "no-miss pace", and there is extremely little standing around.
You also do not pick up brass. John pays people to pick up brass for you. His philosophy was that certain guys time was far too valuable to be spent picking up brass. When you are not shooting, you should be listening to an instructor and loading magazines. Nothing else.
So to the point, I ran slightly over 5,000 rounds in 3.5 days through my .45 Glock 21. Zero malfunctions. I also never cleaned it. I simply added more oil. I wanted to see when it would choke. I added a fair bit of oil, more than is call for per specs, but I am a believer in lubricating metal to metal contact points. The gun was filthy. I was running hot 230 grain Blazer ball ammo. The gun just ran and ran. The range has a bunch of self resetting steel, so we simply shot, and shot. And taped fingers as I recall.
The only thing I finally did was clean off the tritium front sight, as it was so carboned up you could not see it very well. This was for the final shoot house stuff after we were done with the automated steel ranges. That was probably the most pistol shooting I have shot in such a compressed time frame.
The punchline is that Glock 21s really run.
To some degree, a Gen 3 pistol is a step forward for me.
The path of least resistance will seldom get you where you need to be.
So where do you get new gen 3s?
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What parts are interchangeable between a Gen 3 and Gen 4 Glock?
Bud's has them....or pretty much any gunshop in California...although I would not buy a new Gen3 now.
Honestly, I think the Gen5 is an improvement in most ways if you're just starting out in Glock land. My Gen3's just work for me because I already had them.
Last edited by KevH; 04-18-2019 at 09:16 PM.
I think people in general get more caught up on the new things then they should.
The older vintage gen 3 g17s are the most reliable and best models. This is what Glock reliability and durability was built on. I have gen 5s but that is just how it shaked out since I moved from HKs to Glocks once the gen 5s came out.
Honestly if I had 3-5 pre 2009 gen 3 g17s I would be totally happy/content and not feel the need to look for grass that is greener on the other side.
I think a Gen 3 Glock, especially in 9mm is a great pistol. I still have a bunch, and my wife and I shot them for years. With the rough intro of the Gen 4 pistols, the Gen 3 Glock pistols seemed a safer choice for some time.
While the Gen 3 pistols are quite shootable, and there can be variation by individual pistols, I think that overall, the Gen 5 pistols are superior. Typically they are more accurate, the texture is better for me, the magwells make reloads easier, with the new cut they eject like an HK, they can be optics ready, they are more durable by design, and the triggers are some of the best out of the box triggers Glock has produced.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
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