The Glock 21 saga endeth

Remember this Glock?

It came to me last month, slightly less than functional. I talked to the seller and found that this pistol had not been fired much, but it had been lubricated with WD-40, which every gunnie knows is bad--BAD--for your firearms as it turns to varnish over timeand gums the works up.

Sure enough, I took the firing pin assembly out, cleaned the assembly and the channel, and got quite a bit of waxy brown gunk out of there. Reassembled, it felt pretty good. So I took it back out to the range, only to get more "clicks" where I was expecting "bangs".

So I came back to the Lair, got online to Glockmeister, and ordered a couple of new springs and several other Glock spares, since many Glock parts are interchangeable between the models and I've got a few that I need to keep running at present. Whenever I order a replacement gun part, I always order more than one, figuring it it broke once, it'll break again someday so I'd best have a replacement on hand in the parts box.

A few days went by and the parts came...and lo and behold, I'd ordered the wrong spring. Joy.

I promptly made another order for the right parts, but I wanted to shoot NOW, darn it. So, confirming that the spring and most associated parts are pretty much common between the Glocks, I pulled a cherry Glock 22 apart and nabbed it's firing pin assembly, planning to snake its spring and replace it when the spares showed up.

But then I got "smart". Why not just toss the whole firing pin assembly into the Glock 21 instead of going to all the trouble to strip it down and re-assemble it again later? Those springs and their little retaining clips can be a bugger to manipulate back into place.

So because I'm all smart (like Wile E. Coyote smart) I put the Glock 22's firing pin assembly into the 21's slide. It fit, and the gun dry-fired without a problem. Then I took it back out to the range to show them all how "this time" I had it fixed.

This time I got nothing but clicks. Couldn't get a "bang" out of it to save my life.
So how did this happen? I'm smart, right? What went wrong? well a quick check showed that while most of the parts in the assembly are universal, the firing pin itself is not, the .40 pin being just a bit shorter than the .45 pin. And there's no reason for me not to have caught that when looking through the schematics. (Super Genius indeed.)

Well finally the correct spring came and I put it in. Then it was back out to the range yet again yesterday for what would be the fourth test-firing episode. The range guys were taking bets this time as I loaded it up.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! It actually WORKS! Finally! It was just WD-40 gunk and that old spring, which I noticed was significantly shorter than the new one. And 150 rounds fired confirmed that it's working reliably now.

So now it'll get cleaned up and put in the safe until I can get new, taller night-sights for it (the old ones are dead anyway), a threaded barrel, a suppressor, and a light (and maybe a laser) for the rail. This one will then become the new bedside pistol, giving me the ability to respond to threats without worrying about hearing damage in the bargain.

A fully functional Glock 21.

I'm happy.