The "Truth" about the Glock! I found this Today. Depending on who you listen to, the Glock is either the greatest pistol ever devised, or a hand grenade with an unpredictable fuse. Well, like most things, the truth can be found somewhere in the middle. The Glock is far from the “Perfection” that their marketing department purports, but what gun isn’t? Guns by nature have to make a number of compromises to make them practical machines, and how each maker deals with those compromises determines how the pistol comes out. And no makers compromises have generated more controversy than Glock’s, and why is that? Well I would submit that the Glock is so controversial because there are so damn many of them out there, and whenever there are a ton of something, it tends to become an easy target. Because of the widespread use of the Glock by US law enforcement, most every flaw of the Glock has managed to get an inordinate amount of internet press from all the “experts.” Most every supposed flaw (I call them development opportunities) has been dealt with by Glock, with the exception of one: the chamber support. Notice I didn’t say “unsupported” chamber, and the reason I didn’t say that is because that would be an inaccurate statement, Glock’s chambers are supported, they’re just less supported than much of the competition. This situation is to blame by many shooters and reloaders for the many “kB!”s (ka-Boom, or catastrophic failures) we’ve all heard about with Glocks . But is the chamber support really to blame? Well, we have a situation where you could say both yes and no to this question and still be correct … assigning blame to this situation takes us into a very subjective area, and that’s where all the controversy begins. First, let me point out that this controversy is about 100 times hotter in the US than most any other nation that makes liberal use of the Glock – and why is that? Well, the US does a whole lot more handloading and general sport/practice shooting than people outside the US. We place a higher value on handgun proficiency than other nations who view the handgun as a side affair. In our efforts to shoot a lot, Americans turn to ways to lower the cost of staying proficient, and this leads us to reloading, buying commercially reloaded ammunition, or having someone load ammunition for you. And when we do this, we now begin playing with fire, mostly because of the Glock chamber support. Every time a cartridge case is fired it is “work hardened” and then further work hardened when we re-size it for reloading. Each time we do this the case is weakened ever so slightly, but each time the cartridge case is reloaded again, the weakening of the case increases exponentially, eventually to the point where the case will fail regardless of the gun you put it in. The higher the operating pressure of the cartridge is, the more this situation is exacerbated. There are a dizzying number of other factors so I’ll just stick to the more visible ones for simplicity’s sake. Very early on there was a good number of failures in the Glock 22 which were traced back to a certain lot of AA #5 powder, as well as other factors such as the use of cast bullets which exacerbated the problem. The Glock makes use of a polygonal bore – which is no better and no worse than a conventional land and grove barrel, they’re just different. Now that I’ve said that, of course the proponents of each type of barrel will quickly send me all sorts of hate mail detailing all the technical factors of why one is better than the other. So let me qualify my statement a bit, by saying that in a service style pistol, my opinion is that the differences are too small to sweat … that is unless you’re wanting to use cast bullet in your reloads. For most handguns and most barrels, pressure testing has shown cast bullets to produce less pressure, and when you think about it, it’s rather intuitive. Cast lead is softer than a copper jacket and generally deforms to mirror the barrel easier, which is to say; it takes less pressure for a cast bullet to cut into the lands of a conventional barrel. But lead has one trait that doesn’t lend itself well to a polygonal barrel; it’s a bit “grabby,” for lack of a better term. A polygonal barrel starts off with much more contact on the bullet than a conventional barrel, and the grabbiness (technical term) of lead causes a quick spike in pressure the instant the bullet touches the polygonal rifling. Add this to a near SAAMI maximum pressure cartridge, and very quickly you’re in an over-pressure situation. Now factor in a weakened case held in a barrel with less support than other barrels and it’s easy to see the base of the case blowing out, leading to the famous “kB!” So is this a failure of the Glock? My personal opinion, it is not, it’s a failure of the shooter to RTFM (Read The F@#$ing Manual). However, shooters may have set themselves up for failure Long decades of shooters ignoring the manual that comes with their new blaster may have set shooters up for failure. Lawyers…and doesn’t it always come down to lawyers? Long yeas ago, lawyers in all their infinite knowledge thought it would be a good idea to put language in an instruction manual that advised the user to never use reloaded ammunition, in some vein effort to save them from some litigation that they were likely to get anyhow. American shooters quickly recognized it for what it was, BS lawyer speak, and went about using reloaded ammunition in their guns, mostly with impunity (for those with common sense…Darwin go the rest). Along comes a gun whose manual gives the same advice, only now they REALLY mean it. Well, American shooters didn’t know any better and just ignored what the manual said, some to their own demise, or at least the demise of their hands. Feature or Flaw? So we now find ourselves at a crossroads, is this a feature or a flaw?0 From what I’ve written thus far, I think one would be inclined to call the less supported chamber a flaw. But that’s because I haven’t really given the Glock a fair shake yet, and talked about why the chamber is less supported. In order to have this discussion, we can’t view this situation 100% from here and now, we have to go back to the ’80′s when the Glock came on the scene. Prior to the ’80′s many auto pistols (with some notable exceptions that I won’t get into, because that will just generate a whole new debate) lacked the 100% reliability that we so often now take for granted. Remember the term “jamamatic?” Sometime in the ’80′s that all started to go away, and in that department Glock lead the way. Gaston Glock was all too aware of the more common complaints of auto pistols when he set about creating his truly revolutionary plastic pistol. One of the contributing factors of auto pistol reliability is feed angle from the magazine, the steeper the angle, the more engineering challenges you’re going to have making that pistol feed well. Shallower feed angles result in less tilting of the cartridge, essentially a straighter shot into the chamber. It should be somewhat obvious that such a setup would result in greater reliability, and indeed it did. Glock carefully laid out his design criteria, which was an auto-pistol created for military and law enforcement service; civilian sales was very much a side affair. When crating a handgun, every designer must create it with the cartridge in mind and know what the design strengths and limitations of the cartridge are. Glock simply put a little more reliance on the design of the cartridge than other engineers have in order to err on the side of reliability with the ammunition being fully up to spec; i.e. new factory ammunition. All of this is a fancy technical way to say, when Glock says to stick with factory ammunition, they really mean it. Oh sure, there are oodles of guys out there who have been handloading for their Glocks for decades and haven’t had a problem. Congratulations, but please don’t take offense if I choose not to join you. So what some internet experts see as a flaw (and to someone who demands a gun use handloads, perhaps it is), I see as a well thought out design feature to give the Glock every last edge in feeding factory ammunition under the most demanding circumstances.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000
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