"Trigger jobs" On Striker Fired Pistols

[tomjohnson]

Back in the day, when I was shooting 1911s, the first thing we would do with a new gun was find the best pistolsmith available to do a trigger job. This was essential. Now, there are guys all over the place it seems who can seriously improve the trigger pull on striker fired pistols. I have done this with some M&Ps with great results. Crisp and as light as you want, certainly lighter than I want, if that's your goal.

My question is whether anyone sees a danger in doing this? I know nothing about gunsmithing and I certainly don't want to create some sort of safety issue. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Many thanks

[WDR]

Putting a case of ammo through the gun will likely smooth out the trigger and help your marksmanship too.

(I say that having been a trigger tinkerer in the past)

[JRB]

This is very much a 'how long is a rope?' sort of question.

If any part of the pistol's safety features depend on a heavier trigger pull, you're compromising that by reducing trigger pull weight or trigger travel distance. Whether or not that is an acceptable compromise depends entirely on the purpose of that pistol and where/how it will be used.


Default answer and safe answer is to leave all of your carry guns in factory spec whenever possible.

[Erick Gelhaus]

I've used aftermarket trigger parts to clean up the triggers on M&Ps and Glocks.

My M&Ps have all gotten Apex duty carry action enhancement kits in them. Never have had any issues, in any venue, with them.

During the 3+ years I carried a Glock on duty, I switched it to a Robar'd NP3 fire control group after a year of box stock gun. No issues functionally there.

[vcdgrips]

I am very late 20th century with my Glock “trigger jobs.” For a gun I would bet my life on:

1. OEM 5.5 lb trigger return spring
2. OEM “-“ minus connector
3. 1 and 2 are mated with the rest of the fire control group so they “feel” like my others. This can take a bit of trial and error
4. Dot of lithium bearing grease on the connector, gun otherwise lubricated well and appropriately
5. Lots of dry fire/live fire

If I was going non OEM, I concur with EG that Apex would likely be my first choice. FWIW.

If the gun was a range toy- I would defer to others as that is outside my lane/purview as I only train,practice and “compete” with cognates of my EDC gun (s)


YMMV

[TheRoland]

Back in the day, when I was shooting 1911s, the first thing we would do with a new gun was find the best pistolsmith available to do a trigger job. This was essential. Now, there are guys all over the place it seems who can seriously improve the trigger pull on striker fired pistols. I have done this with some M&Ps with great results. Crisp and as light as you want, certainly lighter than I want, if that's your goal.

My question is whether anyone sees a danger in doing this? I know nothing about gunsmithing and I certainly don't want to create some sort of safety issue. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Many thanks

I have personally seen M&P 1.0s made drop-unsafe after trigger-jobs by very careful and qualified gunsmiths, who rounded the firing pin block plunger slightly too much. If you're going beyond what Apex's drop-in part does on that thing, I think it could very likely be unsafe.

IMHO a lot of striker-fired systems are like this, where it's not obvious even to experienced, nationally-known pistol-smiths how close the tolerances are and how much is too much. A ton of engineering goes into modern guns, and even very talented pistol-smiths are not as smart as an entire building full of engineers with CAD.

[Darth_Uno]

I am very late 20th century with my Glock “trigger jobs.” For a gun I would bet my life on:

1. OEM 5.5 lb trigger return spring
2. OEM “-“ minus connector

YMMV

After much dicking around with springs, connectors, and aftermarket triggers I've settled on the same thing. Minus connector and SP00357 smooth trigger (doesn't change the trigger pull, I just like the smooth face better). And that's it.

I think one or two of mine has a Ghost Rocket connector. IME the connector is the one thing you can usually upgrade to smooth out the trigger without affecting reliability, if you leave everything else alone.

I want my Glocks to a) go bang when they're supposed to, and b) not go bang when they're not supposed to. "But my gun runs just fine with X and Y and Z!" Yes, I'm sure it does. But I personally have turned reliable weapons into unreliable weapons, then back into reliable weapons by putting factory parts back in.

[1Rangemaster]

Some organizations will prohibit aftermarket parts. On Glocks, one can be too "enthusiastic" with a dremel, etc., and create a burst fire weapon-no bueno. Some of the competition trigger jobs scare me, frankly.
My older generations have a minus connector in some;I have found unmodified GEN5 pistols to have nice Glock triggers after some break in, and just shoot them with a rolling trigger action.
YMMV, of course, but I would be cautious modifying.

[TCinVA]

My question is whether anyone sees a danger in doing this?

Plenty.

Companies like Glock have accumulated incredibly detailed and precise data on how their manufacturing processes work. Just as a simple example, how many Glock 17 frames can one of their polymer molds produce before it is replaced? Injection molds wear with every use. There comes a point in time where the quality of the molded product degrades outside of desired tolerances. What are those tolerances? How do those tolerances interact with the tolerances of the stamped steel components mated up with the frames? What clearances between parts are necessary to ensure the correct interaction of critical parts so that safety systems built into the gun work as designed?

Glock knows all of that. It's highly detailed proprietary information that essentially allows Glock to make Glock pistols. They don't share that data with anyone else.

Glock makes adjustments to their production processes that only Glock knows about. These changes are not advertised or explained. As an example, I have a Gen3 G17 that will not work with certain aftermarket accessories like a Crimson Trace grip or a Grip Force Adapter because the dimensions of the backstrap from that production run are slightly different from the way other Gen3 G17 frames are made. Why? Nobody outside Glock knows. Could be a molding issue, a materials issue...anyone's guess.

The aftermarket is left to essentially look at a number of produced specimens to try and reverse engineer parts and additions that will work on the guns. Trouble with that is that it is difficult to get a handle on what the big picture looks like by examining a sample of pistols. Glock makes handguns by the thousand and they know their processes very well. It's difficult to find someone who can buy pistols by the thousand, acquiring them across various production runs and examining them in detail to get a precise understanding of exactly how parts and clearances vary.

Take the safety in the trigger of a Glock pistol. It is there to stop the trigger from being driven to the rear purely on inertia if the pistol is dropped. Glock's production specifies specific dimensions for that design element based on their proprietary knowledge of production and internal testing. If someone comes along with another trigger and replicates the trigger safety exactly it might not work at all in the different trigger with a different weight, shape etc. How does this interact with variances in the size of the trigger hole in the frame in 100,000 different pistols? It's near to impossible for most people making aftermarket fire control bits to actually say with any authority.

What happens when you have one of the pistols that Glock lets out the door that passed all their QC and function checks, but has several elements inside the gun that are on the extreme ends of what they will pass? How will aftermarket parts interact with that particular specimen?

I know of at least a dozen instances of a dropped Glock pistol with modified fire control parts launching a round. Generally when a loaded semi-auto falls it ends up falling with the muzzle oriented upwards because the weight of the loaded magazine is heaviest. In one instance a Glock owner's spouse just missed taking a JHP to the face because the holstered handgun was sitting on top of a blanket that got yanked. In another the owner himself had a JHP go through his hair, narrowly missing him. I was recently made aware of an instance where a Glock owner was actually shot in the face when his holstered pistol fell off a nightstand.

The companies who made the triggers used in those guns likely all would tell you their triggers are safe and pass all the armorer level safety checks you'd do on a Glock...but they'll tell you that without actually examining the specific pistol in question or without performing detailed examination, analysis, and testing on that particular specimen. Their stuff might work great on 90% of the guns their part will fit into...but do they know that? Do they know the tolerances on their own production? Do they know how those interact with the variations in clearances and tolerances of Glock pistols? How many guns did they test it on, and from how many different production runs? How was the testing done? What instrumentation was used in the testing?

Once you start asking these kinds of questions things get real quiet because nobody has good answers. Glock isn't running around whispering proprietary information into the ears of aftermarket manufacturers and it's unlikely you will find many aftermarket manufacturers who are even willing to discuss the issue, much less detail exactly how they went about determining their product was "safe" in Glock pistols. I suspect that if we examined lots of manufacturers out there and how they "test" we would find their notion of testing to be downright laughable.

Even from companies that normally have a very good reputation, there are occasions where they have a problem even they don't know about until their parts get into customer guns and cause issues. I have firsthand experience with a Ghost connector that was out of spec and turned a customized Glock 17 pistol into a gun that would launch bullets as long as you hold down the trigger. After seeing the problem, confirming that it was a problem, stripping the pistol to see that the striker was staying forward as long as the trigger was pressed (Turning the Glock into an open bolt SMG, essentially) it was sent back and after examination and backtracking it turns out Ghost had some duff connectors get past QC and into the wild. That didn't happen because the company is evil or bad, it's just one of those things that happens.

Would it have been a problem in any of the other Glocks at that class? Was there something about that particular gun that made it especially susceptible? I don't know. I do know that it was that specific specimen manifesting a problem that resulted in the backtracking to specific production of the part, customers being notified and replacements being arranged for. And that isn't even the first or only time that's happened to guns I've personally had interaction with. I've encountered the proverbial canary in the coal mine about fire control bits three times now, the last one being just this year. All happening because I was at a class or helping with a class and somebody had a problem with their gun, I checked it out myself and saw something wasn't right and that kicked off a chain reaction. (With some people actually blaming me...although all I ever did was dryfire or shoot the gun and go "It's not supposed to work like that")

Now if you weren't experiencing the problem with that specific series of Ghost connector in your gun, would you know or care that somebody in Culpeper, Va. showed up to class with a gun that would Glock 18 if you pinned the trigger? I'm sure if I'd went on Glocktalk and related what happened I'd have been shouted down by "I've never had a problem" even though I personally held a problem in my hands, knew the smith that customized the gun and got the dope on what happened directly from him and the customer who owned the gun.

On the internet no one knows you're a horse. Or something.

So is there a potential danger? Yes.

How prevalent is that danger? I don't know. But here's the real problem: I'm not exceptionally stupid or poorly researched in this area. I am not the foremost expert but the problem is that people who can realistically bound the risk are precious few and far between.

All I can tell you is that when I see a striker-fired pistol with problems the first thing I ask is whether or not it's had any fire control parts messed with. The answer is almost always "Yes." I've seen some guns come from the factory with their own issues. I recently had a client with two Shield + pistols and one would release the striker after you stopped applying pressure to the trigger. That one was right out of the box. But in almost every instance the gun has had various bits replaced.

When I look into verified instances of accidental discharge (meaning the person holding the gun wasn't pressing the trigger) modified trigger bits are present.

When I see a Glock not working properly in a class setting (usually failures to reset or failures to fire) I'll ask what has been changed and I usually get a list of parts from various aftermarket companies, including parts the manufacturer themselves says to only use in a competition gun that isn't going to be carried loaded.

My general rule has been this:

If I am going to put aftermarket fire control bits into a striker-fired gun I only use Apex.

I only use Apex because I have some level of familiarity with how obsessive they are about producing products that don't negatively impact safety or function, and I have some level of familiarity with how much testing they do and the kinds of instrumentation they use in assuring their stuff works as intended. I'm also somewhat familiar with Apex scrapping a lot of finished product because they encountered a problem with the way it was being produced and chose to lose money before letting product that was going to potentially cause problems in a small percentage of guns out the door.

But my general advice to folks who are carrying a striker-fired gun for social purposes is to leave it alone.

Now keep in mind that I'm saying that while I'm carrying a heavily modified striker-fired pistol AIWB. But the mods come from Apex and I actually have a certification on installing them...which I'm only doing on my guns, not anyone else's.

[FrankB]

After carrying and shooting revolvers almost exclusively for the past two years, a stock Glock trigger feels like a finely tuned 1911. I used to put Apex kits straight into my M&P semiautomatics, mostly to get rid of the stock hinged trigger shoe.