5 Facts About Glock You Probably Didn’t Know

USA -(Ammoland.com)- There are a ton of facts about America’s most popular poly pistol that most people don’t know but here are 10 things that you probably didn’t know about Glock, even if you are a passionate gun enthusiast. Many of these facts are pulled from the excellent book by Paul Barrett called Glock: The Rise Of America’s Gun.

While many feel that the Glock is uninteresting, there are some facts about the pistol’s development and other interesting facts that might grab your attention.

Maritime Spring Cups Standard?

Traditionally Glock has not offered the coveted maritime spring cups to civilian Glock owners, much less offered a pistol with them installed from the factory.

The maritime cups are designed to allow water to flow past the spring cups after the pistol is submerged in water. With standard spring cups, the striker can become hydro locked and fail to have enough speed to ignite a primer if there is water in the striker channel.

The Glock 19X is the only pistol that Glock has ever offered to the public with Maritime spring cups installed from the factory officially. Now my personal Glock 34 Gen 5 also shipped with the maritime springs cups but Glock’s parts order form only states that replacements are available for the 19X. If you are an armorer that needs to replace the easily lost parts, Glock requires that the armorer must include the serial number of the pistol being repaired.

Obviously, the Maritime spring cups are available for purchase by LEO armorers and on the secondhand market.

Left Handed Test Firing?

When the first Glock pistol was being designed, Gaston Glock hadn’t really ventured into firearm manufacturing and predictably did not have the testing facilities that Glock now has.

Gaston built a firing range in his basement to test the crude prototypes after eating dinner. While one might expect Gaston to construct a fixture to test the pistols in, he instead used his left hand and only shot alone.

Why his left hand? That way if the gun blew up, he still had his right hand to draw mechanical plans.

Birth Of The Glock Grip Angle

The infamous Glock grip angle that many hate to love and love to hate was something that Gaston felt was an extremely important element of the pistol’s design. In order to more fully understand the thought process behind the grip angle that Gaston chose, one has to understand that military doctrine of the time was to shoot a pistol with one hand, body bladed to the target.

Gaston invited several guests to join him at his vacation home in Velden, Austria and asked those guests several questions about what they wanted from a military sidearm. One of the design elements that Gaston intended to figure out was what angle the grip should be.

He passed mockups of pistols made from pieces of wood nailed together around and asked his guests to aim at something with both their eyes open, as well as their eyes closed. The thought process was that aiming the new sidearm should be instinctual and shouldn’t take much effort.

The consensus among his guests was that a grip angle of 22-degrees was ideal, but Gaston later reduced the angle slightly somewhere in between 20 to 21 degrees.

Die Hard 2 Was The Glock’s First Movie Appearance

Die Hard 2 was the Glock 17′s first big appearance in a film, and it was slated to be the gun of choice for the bad guy. Glock didn’t much care that the pistol was not being used by the hero and was merely happy that their pistol was going to get some exposure in a Hollywood blockbuster.

Birth of the Ghost Gun. Now you might recall the scene where Bruce Willis refers to the mythical Glock 7 as “made from porcelain” and wonder why the heck someone who knew better didn’t speak up and stop the stupidity.

The onset Armorer from Cinema Weaponry, Mike Papac, tried to talk the movie-makers out of using that line since it was grossly untrue. Papac says that the folks in charge of the movie flat out wouldn’t budge and that the line was written into the script and that was the end of the conversation. 

For now and ever more every gun banning Democrat and media hack will use this line to call for banning plastic and 3D printed guns, to save the children.

Glock 17 Was Not Named For Its Capacity

Gaston Glock was a reasonably prolific inventor and already had 16 patents on file when he started work on what would later become the Glock 17. Since the pistol design would be his 17th patent, he called the design the Glock 17. The coincidence with the capacity of the pistol was nothing more than circumstantial.

Gaston holds a variety of patents that have nothing to do with firearms. Those patents include a folding spade that was designed as an entrenching tool, a method for removal of heavy metals, as well as a patent for a method of treating vaginitis…ewe.  Now I know you did not know that about Glock.

About Patrick R.

Patrick is a firearms enthusiast that values the quest for not only the best possible gear setup but also pragmatic ways to improve his shooting skills across a wide range of disciplines. He values truthful, honest information above all else and had committed to cutting through marketing fluff to deliver the truth. You can find the rest of his work on FirearmRack.com as well as on the YouTube channel Firearm Rack or Instagram at @thepatrickroberts.

The post 5 Facts About Glock You Probably Didn’t Know appeared first on AmmoLand.com.