Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
Wow. Long freakin’ day. Today was the one-day Glock armorers course at the police department. See, Glock will send a couple of their guys out with Pelican cases full of cool stuff to teach your class, at $150 a head, on how to fix the guns that dont need fixing. Trouble is, in a small department like this one, getting 20 guys together who are a) interested in the course and b) have a department willing to front the greenbacks is pretty tough. So, whats an agency to do? Why, you open it up to anyone who wants to come! As a result, it was 37 people including local PD, various sheriffs agencies, forest service, one treasury guy, one IRS guy (what the hell?), some IPSC folks and one low-profile preparedness freak – yours truly.
This class was nine hours. Let me put that into perspective. The average Glock has 36 parts. The course was nine hours. If you spent fifteen minutes covering every single individual part in the gun you could fill nine hours. It doesnt even take nine hours to make the gun! Much of the class was history and development and a huge amount of gun safety rules since the class was mostly law enforcement who had their guns with them. The safety lectures were punctuated with graphic photos of gunshot hands and limbs. Owie.
How was the course? Good. Learned a bunch of stuff I did not know. There were plenty of interesting anecdotes. (“Glock changed this part in 1997 because [agency] told us they kept breaking [part]“.) It reinforced my belief that the Glock is probably the only gun on the market right now that hits the high levels of reliability, durability, ubiquity, affordability and versatility that Im looking for in an autopistol. No, it isnt perfect, but it suits my needs better than anything on the market right now.
We completely, totally, and undeniably removed every single part (except the sights) from the slide and frame. We learned how to check the safeties, check for worn/broken parts, check recoil springs, check the firing pin, check…everything, where to lube/not lube, troubleshoot, etc, etc. The Glock really is pretty simple to detail strip and diagnose.
The practical upshot is that if I had a business card I could slap “Certified Glock Armorer” on it. Theres also the ability to order spare parts from Glock but, really, you can get almost all that stuff from the guys at Lone Wolf. The instructor admitted that “Glock Perfection” isnt always perfect and we talked about parts that seemed prone to breakage, parts that had to be redesigned, etc.
Two interesting things about the instructor: first, he never said anything bad about the competition. Secondly, he never, ever, ever used the word ‘plastic’. It is ‘polymer’. I genuinely believe that part of his training course at Glock to be an instructor probably included stern admonitions to never refer to the Glocks as ‘plastic’.
He mentioned that Glock has set up a factory in the US now to make slides and frames, so all Glocks in the US will be made in the US. This opens up interesting possibilities because some Glock stuff cannot be brought into the US because of import restrictions, such as their .380 automatic. If it is made in the US, however, it isnt an issue. I’m hoping this means at some point Glock will make a .22 caliber model or at least a conversion kit. The .380, by the by, while not available to us peons is available on special order on police letterhead. Go figure. The US plant also means Glock could do military contract stuff since the requirements for that sort of thing usually require the gun to be made in the country that is giving the contract. (Hence, Beretta USA.)
To be honest, the course was good but I dont think you really learned anything of substance that you would not learn from Lone Wolfs book about Glocks. The advantage here was that you had someone you could bounce questions off of and someone who could show you the correct way to do things when you hit a wall.
In addition to the instructor there was the regional Glock LE rep who brought along samples of the RTF Glocks and the new Gen 4 Glocks. The Gen 4 is nice, but other than the adjustable backstrap and new textured grip it wasnt anything special. What was important to note was that these 4th gen guns will incorporate some parts changes that will not necessarily be backwards-compatible with older guns. For example, the 4th gen recoil assemblies will not interchange with 3rd gen. The guy is going to email me a list of parts that will/wont be backwards compatible and I’ll post it when I get it.
All in all it was entertaining, although probably a lot longer than it needed to be.
