THE MOD SQUAD

Modifications: The Good, the Bad, and the Cosmetic

We’ve all seen cars with modifications of varying effectiveness. Some are functional, some are debatable, and some are of questionable aesthetics (not that it’s any of our business how other people dress up their own Barbie doll). The car in the header photo is interesting in that it shows what are probably three different owners’ worth of mods; a Sentra SE-R that appears as though it once might have been used for autocrossing and now looks like a JC Whitney catalog threw up on it.

It makes an excellent lead-in, however, for discussing some of the legion of modifications that are available for polymer-framed striker-fired pistols in general and Glocks in particular. Some are practically necessary, some are of dubious utility, and some are purely cosmetic and personal preference. If this article proves useful, we’ll look at some other popular platforms, like 1911-pattern pistols and revolvers, in later articles.

Grip Texturing and Contouring

One of the most common modifications is increasing the grippiness of the polymer frame. From the dawn of the Gen1 Glocks in the 1980s, with their somewhat slippery-when-wet pebble-like texture that wrapped around the full 360 degrees of the grip, people have sought to make their Drastic Plastic more solidly locked to their firing hand.

Robar in Arizona was one of the first companies to do these grip alterations, and it was especially important to have professional vendors do this sort of work in that era. This was before chassis-mounted lockwork and non-serialized modular grip frames, so if you broke out your soldering iron or wood-burning tool and went to work on your Glock and messed it up, well… you’d done screwed up your pistol and needed to buy a new one.

After doing light sculpting on the frame to the customer’s request, Robar would coat the whole thing in a sort of pickup truck bed liner-like compound and apply the texture to that. Other companies, such as Boresight Solutions and Bowie Tactical Concepts (as well as brave and confident shade tree home pistolsmiths) would texture the frame itself.

If you decide to texture the frame, be aware that the temptation to get too aggressive with the texturing is a strong one. Very coarse texturing will definitely lock the pistol in place in your grip, but it can also leave your hands raw and bleeding at the end of a 500+ round weekend training class. It can also be uncomfortable to wear against your skin and abrade your cover garments. Be realistic when judging how much texture you really need.

Hand-in-hand (ha ha get it?) with texturing comes contouring the grip. Some of these mods can be virtually necessary, such as a reduction of the grip circumference to ease the trigger reach for shooters who are not shopping in the XL-size section at the glove store.

Other grip mods are for more convenience in pointing. The “Razorback” mod from the aforementioned Boresight Solutions comes to mind. Built up on the backstrap of the pistol and contoured and textured to blend seamlessly, this helps with the tendency of the pistol to “point high” for some people and can be especially helpful with the acquisition of the dot in MRDS-equipped guns.

Trigger Guard Relief and Glock Knuckle

One modification whose utility may not be immediately apparent to a newer shooter is relieving the frame at the immediate rear of the trigger guard. The obvious benefit of this is allowing the pistol to sit lower in the shooter’s grip, bringing the bore axis down further.

However, skilled pistolsmiths will also radically smooth that juncture. If you are a normal person who is just getting into the training or competition scene, you’ve probably fired fifty or a hundred rounds through your pistol in a typical range session up until this point. Now you’re in a situation where you may be firing hundreds of rounds a day with dozens of repetitions of drawing and holstering, and without that particular modification, you will soon learn the joys of “Glock knuckle”.

That’s a phenomenon caused by the angle where the Glock’s trigger guard meets the frontstrap of the grip, often exacerbated by the faint mold line on the frame, and it will leave the knuckle of your strong-side trigger finger raw and angry until it eventually sprouts a callus. Scooping that bit of the frame out and polishing it smooth will greatly reduce the incidence of this.

Extended Controls

Other common modifications include extended or “tactical” magazine and slide releases. (Yes, yes, I know that Glock insists that part isn’t for “releasing” the slide, yet they’ve made an extended version of it to assist in doing so since the early competition G17Ls hit the market way back when the Berlin Wall was still a thing.)

The thing is, Glock’s factory extended mag and slide releases are a little too extended to function optimally on a defense pistol. The hot ticket used to be to get one of the mag releases used on the long slide “gamer” Glocks and use a Dremel or some sandpaper to round off their sharp corners for a carry gun, but now you can buy a Vickers Tactical mag release from Tango Down, likewise for the slide release.

Questionable Modifications

“What about the more questionable mods?”, you ask, “Which are those?”

My personal best example of that is triggers. The Glock trigger is less than ideally comfortable for extended shooting, and arguments can be made for the utility of a flat-faced trigger that breaks when the shoe is vertical, perpendicular to the frame. The problem is that so many aftermarket Glock triggers play fast and loose with reducing the take-up that it’s unwise to use them for carry. Some brands popular on the forums have so much reduction in take-up that you can look up the mag well with a flashlight and see that even at rest, they’ve already largely defeated the firing pin safety on a Glock. If that doesn’t pucker your distal sphincter, I don’t know what would.

The only aftermarket brands I use on my personal Glocks are the SSVi Tyr and the Overwatch Precision TAC trigger. The safest bet, though, is to just stick with the factory unit.

The other questionable mod is an aftermarket magazine well. With a Glock, you’re already inserting a tapered magazine into a cavernous magwell, and reloading is so vastly unlikely in defensive usage that it’s hard to argue that the Harder To Conceal juice is worth the possible Tenth-of-a-Second squeeze. I have an RCS Freya magwell on my personal Glock 37, but it’s used for bowling pin matches and the occasional class, and so any reduction in concealability is largely academic.

Cosmetic Modifications

Finally, we come to the largely cosmetic modifications of extremely dubious utility.

The first one that comes to mind is the various textured barrels, often coated with a titanium nitride finish, that look so cool peeking through speed holes machined in the slide.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a gold barrel that has flutes or golf ball dimples or whatever. If that’s how you want to dress up your Barbie doll, well, it’s your Barbie doll and you can dress it however you want. Just be honest with yourself that you’re doing it because it looks nice and makes you happy.

The speed holes in the slide are a little more complex. In the abstract, they do lighten the slide, reducing reciprocating mass, allowing the use of lighter recoil springs and making the pistol track flatter in recoil, especially if you’re using a compensator…but now you’re going to be sorting spring weights and ammo loadings for reliability like you were trying to sort out a .38 Super USPSA Open gun, and isn’t that what we buy Glocks to avoid?

Besides, adding mods to allow you to hose out rounds faster, with lower splits, might not be advisable for a carry gun, when you think about it.

To return to the automotive analogy, I recall a book on practical street tuning of cars written back in the Eighties. Among the parts to avoid, they showed some high-strength racing axles. The caption stated something like “If you are driving a car on the street with enough power to twist or break the factory axle, you’re probably reading this from a jail cell. This is pure racing esoterica; there must be a million better places to spend your money.”

You can dress your Barbie however you want, but hopefully, this has helped you consider where best to allocate your budget.