Malfunction Monday

Breaking Stuff-
By Pudge

I know Mack is going to chime in and try to make me feel bad because I broke an almighty Glock part. I’ll preface this by saying that it wasn’t a true piece of tupperware but it still had their guts. I somehow managed to break, not the normal way, a Glock firing pin. This is the first one I’ve broken like this, but surprisingly (or not), I’ve broken 2 other %100 Glocks prior to this. I’m what you would consider “hard on stuff.”

Oh no! I broke perfection! (And I found a unique way to do it.)

Look at that clean break!

 

So, let’s look at some facts and then try to diagnose this break. (A quick aside, I was only able to find one other article on the entire interwebs about a similarly broken firing pin.) Not exact numbers, but I have fired roughly four thousand rounds of NATO spec 9mm, another two thousand rounds of various ammunition, mostly steel cased, and probably put about another two thousand dry fires on my “Not-a-Glock”.

How did I find out it broke? Thank goodness I was dry firing when I found it. I was shooting invisible holes in my light switches and all of a sudden, my trigger wouldn’t reset. I looked in from the rear of the slide and it didn’t appear anything was catching. I then took the slide off and saw the rear portion of the firing pin that catches on the trigger bar was floating back and forth. So, off came the striker plate and out falls all my little striker pieces including a new piece that wasn’t supposed to be there. After pulling apart some other tupperware like pieces and swapping parts like Tuco in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, I got that gun running again. But now I’m standing by for everyone’s favorite Counter-Jockey/Glock Armorer to make sure I don’t break anything else.

I spent awhile scouring the depths of gun forums everywhere looking for what may have caused this or similar mishaps only to find a single, one-page conversation about the same type of break. After all this searching, the creator of this conversation never actually pin-pointed why it broke. Luckily, I get to be around amazing men every day that put Uncle Sam’s hard-earned tax dollars to work. After a quick conversation with our Company armorer, it appears that the culprit is definitely the NATO spec ammo. (NATO spec 9mm is usually hotter than normal +P so it has some oomph to it.) He also confirmed that while an odd break, it is not out of the norm for guys who put a lot of NATO spec ammo through their guns and has happened to a fairly good number of people in my Company. We shoot the wonderful plastic fantastics that come in 15 and 17 round flavors for work.

This just reiterates that no matter how “Perfect” your firearm may be, it is always good to have a spare or some spare parts for just these occasions. Welp, time to get back out there and see what else I can break!