I Like Stuff That Works

I think I may finally be able to carry a 10mm Glock with some confidence. Today I installed a Crimson Trace Lasergrip on my Glock 29, which is a compact pistol.

Long ago, when people with Confederate flags roamed the earth openly and Bruce Jenner was a man, I bought a Glock 29 and put a Lasermax laser in it. I had a benighted notion that it actually mattered if the laser beam was aligned perfectly with the gun’s barrel, and I also thought the Crimson Trace couldn’t be adjusted. In reality, when you’re forced to use a pistol with a laser, you’re in a situation in which a little misalignment means absolutely nothing, and the sight has two screws that let you move the beam to your point of impact.

A Lasermax is a guide rod with a laser in it, so it’s pretty well aligned with the barrel no matter what.

The Lasermax eats batteries like crazy. Install them today, and they’ll be dead a year from now. Also, in order to use a Lasermax, you have to push your Glock’s slide lock to the left before you shoot. Lasermax includes special slide locks with their lasers. Finally, my Lasermax has a cap that holds the batteries in, and after a time, these caps fall apart. It took something like 10 years in my case, but I didn’t like it.

One of the things they always tell you about emergency equipment is that it has to be simple. If you have to remember to do three things before you can fire a round, you’re likely to forget two of them, and then you get shot. This is why I carry my gun with a round in the chamber. The world is full of stories of people who got shot because they hadn’t chambered rounds.

I was always concerned that a) my batteries might be dead when I needed the laser, and b) I would fail to turn it on in a timely manner. A Crimson Trace doesn’t pose these problems. The batteries last for years, and as soon as you pick the gun up, the laser is on.

There are a lot of people who hate lasers, and that mystifies me, because they really, really work. You can shoot a 12-gauge shotgun accurately from the hip with a laser. Ask me how I know. The projectiles really do go where you point the laser.

I’ve seen people say you shouldn’t depend on a laser. As if you’re suddenly going to forget how to shoot if your laser doesn’t work. “Which end do the bullets come out of again?” Every gun owner should become a good shot, but once you’ve done that, a laser can’t do anything but help. If it fails to turn on, you’re no worse off than you were before you bought it.

I know how to shoot, so it’s too late for me to become a person who “depends on a laser.”

I don’t know, but I suspect that a laser would help with putting multiple shots in a small area quickly. Reacquiring a sight picture takes time, but any idiot can point a laser in a hurry.

You can tell I haven’t practiced multiple-shot drills with lasers. Sorry. It sounds like a great idea.

I am enduring a reloading hiatus. I have lost confidence in my powder scale. It’s a Lyman something or other. Maybe it’s deteriorating from age. It seems to drift a lot. Scales have gotten accurate and cheap since I bought it, so I ordered a new scale for about twenty bucks. Amazon is taking forever to ship it, and I don’t want to eat up my brass making cartridges that may have too little powder in them.

I’m thinking of making some 9mm defensive ammo. Somewhat irresponsibly, after my dad died, I started carrying the Glock 26 I bought him, without thinking about, or updating, the ammunition. I have a lot of target ammo, and I have a lot of brass and lead bullets, but I have precious little defensive ammunition.

I could buy defensive ammo, but it’s always overpriced, and that discourages practice. Nobody wants to put 100 rounds of 80-cent pistol ammo into a target. Defensive ammo is sold in tiny boxes, like jewelry, and the natural tendency is to treat it like a Faberge egg collection.

I also put Truglo sights on my new 10mm. It was quite a pain. In the past, I had always ordered Glocks with night sights installed, but I didn’t see anything like that available this time around. I learned that you have to have a tiny 3/16″ nut driver to remove the front sight. My choice was a Wiha precision nut driver, not the ones gun-related companies make. Wiha makes great tools. I don’t trust a gun company’s Chinese offering, especially when it’s more expensive.

To remove the rear sight, I needed a sight pusher. The rear sight was hard plastic, and it was pressed sideways into a dovetail. There was no way a punch was taking it out. I bought a fancy sight pusher from NC Star.

I thought the sight pusher was a good tool, because I saw gunsmiths using them on Youtube. In reality, it was very crude. It had a bunch of screws in it to provide pressure, they went through aluminum, and none were lubricated. There were a couple of screws that were supposed to rotate in tight steel pockets, and they weren’t greased, either. They kept locking up. I worked on the pusher for quite some time, opening things up, adding grease, and so on.

It works. No doubt about that. But you need to spend the first half hour working on the tool itself.

I am tempted to scrap the aluminum frame and make a better one from steel on the mill.

Now the sights are installed. The old rear sight was in so tight, the sight pusher deformed it. If I ever went crazy and wanted it back, I would have to buy a new one.

I may not be a gunsmith, but a lot of the time, I can buy tools and use them myself for an amount comparable to what a gunsmith would charge. That seems like the smart choice. When a job is done, I have a tool and some new skill, as contrasted with nothing.

It’s nice to have both carry guns functioning correctly. Now if I can just get the spot of dried pipe dope off the 9mm.