After recently adopting the Glock 42 as my new pocket carry I set about upgrading it like any true American. The sights were the obvious biggest need so I looked around fearing I wouldn't find exactly what I wanted and I didn't... Time to improvise.
What I wanted in a rear sight:
- Tritium dots, plain, without any color rings
- Serrated rear face
- Short enough to not reach the rear of the slide where it can be a worse snag hazzard and interferes with a claw grip
- Set screw to lock it in place
- U-notch window which I prefer for reasons I cannot defend because I barely even notice the rear notch when shooting
What I wanted in a front sight:
- Tritium dot with Yellow or Green color ring as my eyes struggle to pick up red and orange sight blades.
- A blade that did not entirely fill the rear notch in my vision when aiming... The short G42 slide exacerbates this issue.
- Drive the Dot POI
After much searching I settled upon the Truglo Tritium Pro Night Sights as the closest I could find to my desires. The rear sight was exactly what I wished for and the front sight was decently close... It was a touch wider than I prefer and it had a white color ring which I pick up almost as well as yellow/green, but it did hit where I put the front sight.
I could have stopped there and been adequately happy with my choice but I'm an incurable perfectionist and tinkerer so I forged ahead. I knew that Trijicon made a front sight that was exactly what I wished for and they sold it individually so against my wallet's better judgement I bought it... The Trijicon HD XR font sight. This gave me the narrower blade and bright yellow dot that I prefer.
Mixing these two sights together gave me the sight picture I desired but not the shooting results... Turns out the Truglo front sight blade is 0.195 tall while the Trijicon is 0.215 which resulted in my mash-up shooting about 2 inches low at 7 yards... Not an acceptable result for a perfectionist.
Closer examination of the HD front sight showed me that for whatever reason Trijicon installed the trit vial lower down the blade than one might expect, leaving a relatively large amount of steel above the dot. You all can see what I mean by looking at the picture below from the Trijicon website. In fact I was able to see that the dot height was basically the same height for the Trijicon as the Truglo. If I carefully lined up the front and rear dots of my mash-up the tip of the Trijicon blade was lifted above the rear sight window. This observation led me to believe that if I was to file down the front sight not only was there enough material there to allow this but it may also have everything line up correctly, both dots and sight silhouettes.
More thinking on how best to do this properly kept me pondering for a while. I knew if I didn't keep the blade square and sharp it would drive me nuts and all I had to work with was hand tools and maybe the Dremel.
Finally genius struck and I realized that the design of the Glock itself could solve much of the issue... Installing the front sight kept it vertical to the slide and the flat square shape of the slide meant I could clamp it down as well. Laying the slide on its side, clamped down, allowed me to use a diamond stone from my Wicked Edge sharpener to file down the sight while keeping everything square. The stones happen to be square blocks that have a plastic border, allowing me to slide them back and forth without affecting the square.
It took a few minutes but it worked brilliantly... The picture I took will hopefully better explain what I did. A Birchwood Casey Flat Black paint pen was used to cover over the new shiny surface.
And yes, the dots now line up when the front blade is even with the rear window and it all hits to POA at 7 yards.
So now I have my perfect iron sights, and after the price plus shipping and taxes it only cost me about $200 on a $400 gun, lol.