Pin grip safety?

[snokid]

In esp or cdp can you have your grip safety pinned?

I can find where it says that in ssp the safey must be retained but I can't find anything about it in esp or cdp, where someone might want to pin their grip safety..

sno

[Ron Ankeny]

Not a problem, pin it...I did.

[snokid]

thanks Ron I can't tell you the amount of times I didn't get quite the right grip and the trigger wouldn't pull.

sno

[Steve Moneypenny]

There are other possibilities, less permanent than pinning them, one, you can put a pice of shok buff or rubber in-between the back of the saftey, and the MSH, the other is to have a spot of weld put on the MSH so the saftey does not activate...  or do some work to the activation arm on the beavertail its self.

just some alternatives.

steve

[tightloop]

There are no rules which prohibit pinning the grip safety.  I have pinned mine for years, did it when I shot IPSC.   Pinning it is like having a concealed handgun liscense, the fewer folks who know about it, the better.

[jmc9x23]

Mostly all the Master Class shooters in IDPA have the Grip Safety disabled. Some pin it, others cut off the arm internally, and others just put a piece of skateboard tape across it and anchor it under the grips.

[InTheBlack]

Disabling a safety system is obviously against the spirit of the IDPA.  Would you really incur the liability of carrying such a weapon?

If you can't make it go bang with a grip safety, then you certainly wouldn't depend on it to save your life; you would carry another type of gun.

[tightloop]

In the spirit of IDPA has nothing to do with what I personally carry on the street.  I carry a custom Combat Commander with the saftey PINNED and then use the same pistol to shoot IDPA.  Pinned my race gun shooting IPSC for 14 years too.

[Duane Thomas]

"Disabling a safety system is obviously against the spirit of the IDPA.  Would you really incur the liability of carrying such a weapon?

If you can't make it go bang with a grip safety, then you certainly wouldn't depend on it to save your life; you would carry another type of gun."

Y'know, I gave my thoughts on this one before, and I'm really not up for it again. Flexmoney? aka Linkmaster.

[Flexmoney]

lol...you don't want to type it out...

ya think I want to dig it up and link for ya.

Folks...there is a search feature!

[Ron Ankeny]

I called the good folks at IDPA headquarters a year or so ago about this issue. I was told that disabling the grip safety is a common alteration and is specifically allowed because it, "... is in the spirit of the game".

I guess that is the problem with rules, differing opinions and various points of view. How many police departments would allow an officer to carry a 1911 with the grip safety pinned? I suspect the answer is zero.

[Duane Thomas]

"I guess that is the problem with rules, differing opinions and various points of view."

Of course, when it comes to the question of, "What are the rules in IDPA?" the opinion and point of view of IDPA High Command do kind of hold more weight than anyone else'.

[tightloop]

Duane

True even if  they sometimes don't know what they are talking about.

[Shooter G]

The question may be to pin or not to pin my answer for anyone whom needs to do this is dont shoot a 1911 go to a glock. Problem solved!

[Duane Thomas]

Yeah. Right. I shot and carried a Glock 19 for two solid years, in the process putting over 14,000 rounds through it. There's a reason I'm shooting and carrying a 1911 these days.

[GordonB]

uhh... care to elaborate on that?

[Flexmoney]

Probably had something to do with the 8 pound trigger and the off-center Heinie sights.

 

(Just teasing)

[Duane Thomas]

Oh boy, here we go: for one thing, I had to go through six Glocks, 17s, 19s and 23s, before I found one that worked 100 percent of the time. The reason I was willing to put that much time and effort into the search was that I love the Glock trigger action. Really, to get a gun much easier to fire than a Glock you've got to go to a 1911. I used to joke, "The ultimate handgun would be a Glock that works as reliably as a SIG." Having found that magic Glock 19 I proceeeded to shoot the hell out of it. This was my concealed carry gun, my match gun, my shooting class gun.

A friend of a friend is Sid Woodcock. Sid is in his mid-'70s and he's been seriously into the martial arts since he was seven. He's one of the few honest-to-God, no possibility of bulls**t, 10th-degree black belts you'll ever meet. He was a founding member of the OSS during World War II and stayed with them after the war when they became the CIA. He's the only Occidental who ever trained at the old Shaolin temple before the Communists tore it down. He designed the Detonics Combatmaster. (Okay, we don't hold that last against him.)

Anyway, Sid's an avid shooter, and our mutual friend Gray Cassidy relayed to me, as I was rhapsodizing over my G19, that in Sid's experience the Glock was a 10,000 round gun. Use it up, throw it away, get a new one. To which I sneered and said, "Well, the gun on my hip has 8,500 rounds through it without a single malfunction. If it's gonna start puking on me, it better hurry." 10,000 rounds, it was like you flipped a switch and the thing started acting up. The malfunctions I had were always the same: the empty cartridge casing extracted out of the chamber but didn't clear the ejection port, it wound up above the chamber, still horizontal and parallel with the barrel but trapped between barrel hood and breech face. Now, that's a bad malfunction. Because the cartridge casing's ABOVE the extractor, a tap-rack-bang drill won't clear it out, an extended malfunction clearance drill won't clear it out. You've got to lock the slide to the rear and go in with your fingers to physically pry the casing out of place.

Allow me to digress for a moment. One thing I really like about guns like the 1911 is that the "walls" of metal to either side of the breech face narrow in toward the top. There's a reason for that, it stops the sort of malfunctions I'm mentioning since the cartridge casing CAN'T float up the breech face. On guns like the Glock that use the Petter system where the barrel hood locks into the ejection port, by contrast, the "walls" to either side of the breech face are straight which is why this sort of thing can happen.

I was so in love with this gun I tried to find the problem. I actually put another 4,000 rounds through the thing in the process of doing so. Different magazines, different ammo types, it didn't matter, it still happened. And it started happening two weeks before the state IDPA championships which I dearly wanted to win. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Another seeming digression: Dave Handa is one of those guys who's constantly going to gun classes - you know the type, he's been to Gunsite more times than Jeff Cooper - and he always carries with him this huge multi-compartment box full of Glock parts to sell. If someone at the class wants a new set of sights, a New York trigger, a 3.5 pound connector or a partridge in a pear tree, Dave can hook them up. So Dave gets to see a lot of high mileage Glocks. When I told him my problem he started laughing: "My Glock 19 did the exact same thing after 7,000 rounds." He cured the problem by bending the ejector up. The only thing we could come up with as an explanation was that, over time, the plastic frame had either warped slightly, or the frame rails had come "loose" a bit, allowing the ejector to hit the empty cartridge casing too low. Instead of propelling the case out of the gun it "ticked" the bottom of the casing and drove it straight up. And there I am with an unfireable weapon in my hands. Well, I wasn't up for putting as much stress on an ejector as it would take to bend it upward enough to make a difference, especially on a gun design that is somewhat known for breaking ejectors already, so the Glock 19 and I parted company.

An interesting note, after Dave told me his litany of broken trigger springs, cracked trigger bars, chipped extractors, broken ejectors, cracked slides, etc. that he's seen on Glocks, I asked him, "Then how do you explain the articles that say, 'I took this Glock and fired 100,000 rounds through it without a single malfunction, and cleaned it only four times.'" Dave's reply: "I think they're lying."

Along about this time I began to hear the reports of Glock .40s KBing. Not good.

A local instructor had his G23 carry gun beat itself into unserviceability within 6,000 rounds. What happened was, at the juncture of the barrel hood and front of the ejection port, the two surfaces started to peen each other. The instructor told me, "I was out assisting at one of Massad Ayoob's classes, and doing a little shooting myself. I noticed about one out of every 10 shots would hit way above the others. Well, I figured it wasn't ME doing that so I started watching the gun. I figured out the problem was that occasionally the slide wasn't going fully forward because of the peening and the gun was firing out of battery. Over time it just got worse and worse, until finally the firing pin strike was so far off-center the gun wouldn't even fire."

I also had the opportunity to examine an local IPSC shooter's G23 that had cracked the frame after 10,000 rounds of Major loads. It was MOST impressive. When the G27 came out, within a month a local gunshop had three of things come back into the shop because they just beat themselves to death. I began to figure out that stuffing a cartridge with peak pressures equivalent to a .357 Magnum and recoil on a level with many .45 ACP loads into a gun the size of a reasonably smallish 9mm was maybe not the greatest idea in the world, from the standpoint of longevity of the piece.

But still, in the back of my mind, I remembered how much I'd loved my G19. And I'd had numerous Glockaholics tell me, "If you want a Glock you can KNOW will work, get one of the original cobblestone Glock 17s.  Back when the Glock was being made to military standards!" So a few years later I did. I said to myself, "Okay, I'm gonna give the Glock ONE more chance." Got an MPDC (Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia, the first police department in America to adopt the Glock 17, in case you were wondering) turn-in G17. Examining the gun internally, it appeared to have been fired very little, if at all. Started shooting it. And it was love all over again. Made it my carry gun, started seriously dry firing to get back into that great trigger action.

Went out to the range one day. At this point I've only put about 300 rounds through my new Glock. Since I wanted to put some more of my carry load through the thing, I decided to just step up to the line, draw and fire out the magazine with 18 Winchester Silvertips. Draw, aim, pull the trigger....

CLICK.

There's not even a firing pin strike on the chambered round's primer. I say to myself, "Oh no, this can't be what I think it is." Pull the gun apart, sure enough, the tip of the firing pin sheered off while I was dry firing. Thank God I didn't need that thing for self-defense before I found the problem because I was carrying an inert gun there for a few days.

So much for the Glock's "one last chance."

Was that in-depth enough for you?

(Edited by Duane Thomas at 2:16 pm on Sep. 10, 2002)

[Shooter G]

Duane,

               I can understand why you turned away from the Glock after reading your "in depth" story. I myself shoot a 3rd Gen Glock 34 9mm I  bought it brand new and have shot about 65,000 rounds with it, the only change that I have made is a titanium striker and have had no gun problems at all.

So if you were to ask me to bet my life on a Glock than I would and do.

[tightloop]

Hey, Spiderman, I have 95K through my Commander, nothing broken, bent or not working.  When the Glock has been around for 91 years and still carries the mail, I will try it again.  I like Duane tried to love a Glock, and put 7500 rounds thru mine trying to learn the trigger, couldn't .  Even got John McNally to do a trigge job on the 4th one I had, great trigger for a Glock, but it still had crappy magazines that would not fall out, slide wouldn't stay back after last shot, plastic sights, warping frame and poor ergonomics for my hand.  Went back to the 1911.

But, thanks for your input, probably a great gun for YOU!!!

[John Dunn]

What is "KBing" and "lol", is there a post somewhere that lists the common abbreviations used by the more experienced forum dwellers?  Thanks.

[Duane Thomas]

Ka-Boom. Laugh Out Loud.

Those two ideas don't necessarily follow each other, mind.

[Duane Thomas]

Scott,

I've just about come to the conclusion that certain gun types don't like certain people. Glocks don't like me. Fortunately SIG P226s, P228s and P239s, the Browning Hi-Power and top-end 1911s seem to love me, so all is not lost. If Glocks love you, OTOH, more power to ya, dude!

[Flexmoney]

DT....talk about throwing gas on the fire...I'm glad you got that out of your system.  (Probably felt good to let it go?)

A couple things...

-  (this one is just for fun)  I didn't know the Shaolin could curse a gun?!?!?

-  The early 40 caliber Glocks didn't have the extra pin in the locking block.  Sounds like the 40's that you referenced might have been early models.  That lack of the extra pin may, or may not, have been a factor.

-  Dean Speir has a website that addresses some of the problems with Glocks.  A lot of your experiences seem to be covered there as well.  Good reading.

http://communities.prodigy.net/sportsrec/g...-glock-dir.html

Look especially at the NYPD G19 problems and also the firing out of battery stuff.

-------------

Tightloop,

I'm thinking it's a safe bet that your Commander is mucho different from the original 1911 of 91 years ago.  I'll take a Glock over an original 1911 any day.  (The Glock is now into it's third decade...80's, 90's & 00's.)

A double-wide 2011...that might work for me though.

[the duck of death]

*Quote*

So much for the Glock's "one last chance."

Was that in-depth enough for you?

Odd I don't read stories like this on GT.  I like my Glock, however, its refreshing to hear the other side of the dark side.  Thanks for the insight.

*Quote*

What is "KBing" and "lol", is there a post somewhere that lists the common abbreviations used by the more experienced forum dwellers?  

Try http://www.kb.indiana.edu./data/adkc.html

(Edited by the duck of death at 2:51 pm on Sep. 10, 2002)