Glock 45 1000 Round Review

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I'm John McWade with 85 41 tactical and this is our review of the brand new Glock 45 nine-millimeter handgun now this guns only been out for a couple of weeks and we snapped up a regular copy of it a regular retail copy of it as soon as we could to actually get out get some trigger time on it and bring you our impressions now we've got a thousand rounds actually about 1100 Plus rounds on this handgun at this point in time and so we've got a pretty good idea of how it stacks up versus its other brothers in the Glock lineup now a little bit of history on the Glock 45 this pistol is a little bit of a departure in Glocks lineup because it does not follow the same overall pattern as previous guns all the way back to the gen 1 guns there was a pretty good correlation between slide length and grip length and when they moved up into the next generations they maintained that same ratio of slide length to grip length through each of the models and now they took a little bit of a side road on that when they announced the Glock 19 X at the beginning of the year the Glock 19 X utilized a Glock 19 slide but a Glock 17 grip length so you had a 17 round magazine but the more concealable 19 length slide there were some other issues with the Glock 19 with the type of magazine well that it had on it this little step that it had at the front of the grip and some other things that caused it to kind of be its own thing when Glock announced the generation 5 pistols now the internals in the Glock 19 X are generation 5 internals but the design on the outside of the handgun had some cues from the generation 4 pistols and then had kind of its own thing going on as well well the Glock 45 is definitely a generation 5 pistol it shares a lot of same design features as the generation 5 Glock 17 and the generation 5 Glock 19 which we don't have a copy of right here I purchased my Gen 5 Glock 17 after the 19 X was announced because once I took a look at the 19 X and shot the 19 X I really had no desire to purchase it whatsoever there were a couple of things that were missing from the 19 X that the 17 Gen 5 had that I thought made it a better idea or a better solution for what I wanted to do a couple of the main features are the flared magazine well you've got a natural built-in magazine flare in here so you don't need to go add an external piece on like a lot of people were doing for carry mag wells and things of that nature which allowed me to utilize the 17 in production class in competition and have that advantage without having to actually put anything on that would push me out of that class of course it does have the ambidextrous slide release on here so those you that are lefties you can swap the mag release over and have a full left-sided pistol or a left-handed pistol which is a really nice option again for those guys that do shoot left-handed out there it has the the new 2 pin design that the Gen fives went to kind of harkening back to the earlier Glocks but the rest of the internals really are not a huge departure from the generation 4 pistols the trigger prutte there the trigger pull is greatly improved in the Gen fives over the Gen fours but a lot of guys will go to aftermarket triggers in the Glocks pretty quickly if they are doing any kind of competition work with them for a carry pistol the factory trigger is just fine in fact for most competitions defensive type competitions the stock trigger is going to be just fine although the Gen 5 that I have here I haven't had any desire to go in and switch out the connector or any of that stuff it's just fine right now I do have a Glock triggers competition trigger then we may be putting in here shortly the some things going on with that while they hammered out their Gen 5 design but we may circle back around and get to that so enough of the Glock 17 because you came here to see the Glock 45 so I wanted to talk about the 17 because a lot of those features are generation 5 features that are found in the Glock 45 so we still get the enlarged magazine well we still get the ambidextrous slide release we still get all the same internals that we just talked about on the generation 5 Glock 17 a couple of the big differences though is you will notice on the 17 that there is this Halfmoon cut out in the front of the magwell and the purpose behind that is on the new magazines there is a lip on the front edge of the magazine so when the magazine is inserted if you have a jam and you need to strip that magazine out you now have access to this larger floor plate to be able to strip the mag with some force and you still of course have the cutout in the back of the mag well that you could reach reaching up into the recess of the grip here so you can pincher it with both fingers and pull your magazine out so that's a little bit of a nice feature but the problem that we have there is that this magazine this generation 5 magazine will not fit in 19 X's again 19 X did its own thing with this little lip on the front of the grip so Jen five magazines won't work in that generation five pistol it doesn't make a huge amount of sense but that Halfmoon cut was released on the 17 and then on the Glock 19 when they initially came out and a lot of users were complaining especially on the 19th at that cut out and then the lip on the magazine was pinching their pinky finger if it extended down over the edge of the grip so Glock has removed that Halfmoon cut on the 17 the 19 and now the 45 has never had it so going forward they have resolved that on the at least the mos pistols I believe it will be coming into the regular Gen 5 pistols as well but the magazines with the hook on them the new generation 5 standard magazines will fit in the Glock 45 just fine the only disadvantages you don't have that extra room to pull those out now the advantage though is with this design pretty much everything else out there will fit so all the previous design magazines all the legacy magazines Magpul GL mags all that will fit in the Glock 45 and now again this is a Glock 17 length grip and a Glock 19 length slide so 19 magazines will not fit in here has to be 17 or larger magazine so a lot of the 21 round magazines out there the Glock 30 round magazines or the regular Glock 17 plus 2 mags will fit just fine in the Glock 45 so there are some additional changes in the magazine so you notice that we have that orange follower again that is a generation 5 feature kind of nice overall they really updated the magazines again I just wish they hadn't have put that lip on there because that does interfere with some mag wells and obviously this is a 19 that I've got here with a mag wheel we'll talk about this in a minute but if you have a mag well on a previous generation for gun than the generation 5 magazines may not fit now moving on to the other huge cosmetic difference that we have here is you notice we have front cocking serrations now this seems to be a loved it or hated feature for me I love having front cocking serrations because it is very simple when you go to load the handgun to simply grab your magazine insert your magazine [ __ ] it and then immediately come back up now it's not the greatest thing in administrative mode but if you are shooting on the clock and you have to go from an unloaded handgun on the table to cocked and ready then that is a whole lot quicker than power stroking the gun then coming back and coming up now from a regular training standpoint if you are loading the handgun then power stroking over the top coming back to your shoulder and then gripping the gun has a whole lot less potential to short stroke the slide cause malfunctions double feeds all kinds of other things but if you know what you are doing then coming over and charging the handgun with front cocking serrations is a viable option the one reason that I really like it is you end a string a fire you're getting ready to put your handgun up if for whatever reason you need to check the condition of the chamber or maybe something felt funky or whatever it's very easy just to roll over the pistol glance into your chamber release it holster up and then you're good to go now there are a range of opinions on press checks I do press checks fairly routinely I have not had press checks cause a problem but part of that is the way that I do them the fact that I will press check and then lower the slide and it's usually before a whole string activity and when I holster I holster it with my thumb on the back of the slide that makes sure that the slide is locked in battery as I put the weapon in the holster this is critical because some holsters can push the slide out of battery when you holster up and then when you go to draw the handgun the slide may not pop back into battery and you may get a click when you wanted a bang obviously that is a bad thing now the nice thing about the front cocking serrations on the Glock 45 is if you don't like them and you don't want to use them they're not in the way there are value added there's something I don't have to pay extra for like I do if I sent the slide off to have cocking serrations machined into it they come from the factory so the factory finishes intact all the factory marks are in the right place so we don't have roll marks having to interrupt the serrations or have the serrations cut through the roll marks so everything looks a whole lot more finished it just works well and if you don't like cocking serrations you don't have to use them one other really nice feature on the Glock 45 that I believe Glock has fixed going forward on all the newer generation 5 pistols is they have bull-nosed the frame to match the slide previously and all my early Gen 5 Glock 17 the bolos on the slide does not match up with the bevel on the frame so if there's a little bit of a gap there this is purely aesthetic it doesn't have anything to do with the way the handgun functions but I'm glad that they resolved that on the 45 now the function of the pistol we took it through a thousand round test and really a thousand rounds for a Glock is nothing we use Blaser 115 grain training ammunition I did get a chance to shoot some hollow-point defensive ammunition through it we only really had one malfunction through the entire run and that was a failure to lock back on an empty magazine and I actually believe the contributing factor to that is the shooter that this malfunction occurred on was wearing heavy gloves while I was shooting he tends to shoot with a very exaggerated thumbs forward grip so I believe it is possible that he engaged the slide release and had it held down and so the slide just cycled over the empty magazine and did not lock back it's a fairly common problem if you run an aggressive thumbs forward grip and you wear gloves because you don't feel when you ride up over that slide stop so it is something you have to be aware of I've had to modify my grip over the years so that my thumbs are not cocked as aggressively forward so that I prevent engaging that slide stop the rest of it though the gun performed absolutely flawlessly and we shot this thing mag after mag after mag to the point where the slide was so hot you couldn't manipulate it without in gloves you could obviously shoot the handgun without gloves on because the polymer stays cool enough through even exaggerated firing cycles that you have no problems gripping the handgun but when you run your thumb up to release the slide on a magazine change you would burn your thumb and even with the gloves that I was utilizing I was using a set of mechanics zero-point-five gloves they were actually not providing me enough protection between my thumb and the side of the slide and I was starting to get very uncomfortable every time I went to drop the slide so we did get it very hot we didn't lubricated it at all it came right out of the box and went right into the firing cycle and we didn't have any problems at all this is not surprising this is pretty much what I expected from a Glock now we did do some tests that were intended to cause the gun to malfunction I did do some limb parachuting one of the styles of limb parachuting that I did was just simply holding the gun with my middle finger and my thumb behind the handgun to catch it when it recoils and then pulling the trigger with my index finger and through that the gun fire just fine it recoiled it ejected we didn't have any problems there now the other form of limp wrist malfunction that we did is holding the handgun very very low as low as you possibly can while still getting your finger on the trigger and depressing the trigger safety and allowing the handgun to fire and then to recoil backwards on its own now this will normally cause a malfunction in a semi-automatic handgun at least a blowback operated semi-automatic handgun and I wanted to see how the Glock would handle it with the difference in the slide length and the grip length and it managed to eject the cartridge some of the time most of the time it wouldn't even eject the cartridge it would just reach aim burr the fired cartridge and in the problem there is the slide actually takes the energy from the shot to push it to the rear but you have to have a decent grip on the frame in order to resist that rearward motion with the frame it's much easier for the frame just to go with the slide since you have the recoil spring in there resisting the slides motion so if you grip it down to low the frame just goes with the slide you don't get enough rearward travel for the slide and it's just a matter of physics the gun can't operate when you do that and again when I was doing it I was doing it with the intention that I knew it was gonna malfunction I just wanted to see how the mode of malfunction went if it's stove-piped or if it just wouldn't eject and it just didn't eject at all so something to keep in mind don't hold the handgun like that now there are a bunch of arguments out there on limp wrist malfunctions and if it's a viable test or a reasonable test or not but hey we were looking for stuff to do as we fired through a thousand rounds so I went ahead and shot it through that you can hold the handgun very very loosely and it will still function as long as you have a high grip if you hold the handgun really really low even if you have a tight grip it's gonna malfunction so that's one just to keep in mind now I did go through a number of different drills where I loaded a empty magazine with one round in the chamber just to test if the handgun locked back I did this for two consecutive seventeen round magazines and it locked back on every single shot part of that was because earlier in the test we had that failure to lock back so I wanted to make sure that I couldn't reproduce that which I was unable to do so staying clear of the slide release so no problems at all and the generation five magazines worked absolutely flawlessly throughout the test we shot generation five magazines earlier generation metal line magazines there were all metal line drop free magazines we also shot Magpul GL magazines both the standard 17s and also the 21 round GL magazines and they all function very well we didn't have any et s magazines with us to try so that was the one magazine type that I didn't try but with all the factory Glock magazines and the Magpul GLS the pistol functioned absolutely fine function just as it should and all of those magazines dropped free now a couple of words on the features the magazine well I'm a big fan of this magazine well on here because it really adds a minimal amount of bulk on the magazine and it really does add a good deal of functionality these flares clear out the edge of the frame far enough that you're not constantly catching the edge of the magazine on the edge of the frame if you do a lot of dry-fire manipulations then you know when you're doing it with an empty magazine with no dummy rounds in it occasionally you will hook that magazine on the edge of the frame here and that really has not been a problem doing these manipulations faster and faster and faster even with empty magazines with no dummy cartridges in them so I really like that and again the added functionality of you have that on there but it doesn't bump you out to a different class because Glock has included it as a factory feature so if you were going with the Gen 5 g34 that's a great thing to have for a competition gun now I want to talk a little bit about who the Glock 45 is for because we have the Glock 19 we have the Glock 17 we've had them for years who would buy a Glock 45 instead of a 17 or a 19 well it's a really interesting question and it's one that I fought with when I purchased the Glock 45 Glock didn't send this to us I bought it with my own money that's gonna go into our collection I wasn't sure initially if it was one that I was going to keep beyond our test and evaluation or if it was going to get resold on the secondary market first of all my hand is perfectly sized for the Glock 19 and I have a Gen 4 19 sitting right here and as I rub my hand around it you'll see that you can just barely see the magazine well sticking out below it now if I didn't have the magazine well on it you would just see the edge of the factory mag well or the edge of the grip sticking out there so my hand is perfectly sized for the 19 grip my daily carry is a Gen 4 19 so I have the 15-round magazine capacity the perfect length grip and I have an abbreviated slide that carries very easily in appendix mode and I don't have any problem sitting down for long periods in a car sitting down at a chair it doesn't dig into anything important so for me the 19 length slide and the 19 frame is perfect there's really no reason for me to go to a Glock 40 5 because the 19 conceals very well when you're concealing a handgun generally the problem to conceal is the grip the grip is what sticks out and prints the grip is what pushes against your t-shirt bangs into other things or if you carry behind the hip the grip is what pushes against your seatback and wants to twist the gun out of position while you're sitting in a car or sitting in an office chair so the longer grip can generally be a problem and if you don't need it then you don't want it so shooters like me that have no problems with the 19 probably don't need the 45 and you have probably better off just purchasing a Gen 5 Glock 19 now if you have larger hands and the Glock 17 grip fits you but you shoot a lot of competition you shoot a lot of stuff or you carry your handgun outside the pants then the Glock 17 is probably going to be a better option if you carry your handgun with a tack light on it all the time a larger tack light like a surefire x300 then the Glock 17 is going to be a better option because if you notice the tack light sticks out further than the muzzle of the handgun if we take this same tack light and we put it on the 45 you see it sticks out forward of the handgun so you don't save anything here and you get the longer sight radius of the 17 slide you get the greater velocity of the longer 17 barrel so it's pluses all around now where the 45 really comes in is if you carry appendix like I do you have slightly larger hands that stick off the bottom of the xix frame then the 45 is going to be a good option if you're a police officer and the nine-millimeter Glocks are authorized for carry then the 45 may be a good option for you because you can stick that tack light on it you can have your high lumen output tack light you can wear it in your duty holster you have 17 rounds in the handgun you can carry plus 2 or whatever magazines in your mag carrier and you can have a good all-around duty handgun you sacrifice a little bit of velocity and you sacrifice a little bit of sight radius but you gain the ability when you clock out and you go off duty to take this handgun out drop it in an off-duty holster or a concealment holster and be able to have a nice smaller package but still retain that 17 round capacity and still retain that grip size that favors larger hands additionally if you run a smaller light now this is a Oh light Piell mini Valkyrie that we have right here but the surefire XC ones or the enforce a PLC's are the same general size blueprint now we have a TAC light that does not extend any further than the extent of the muzzle and again you have a nice overall package that you can fight with but that conceals very easily especially if you run in the appendix carry mode so overall this handgun I think will appeal to somebody that still wants a full sized fighting handgun once a more comfortable to carry handgun than the 17 and has slightly larger hands that really is the demographic that I think this is targeted at now I'll keep it because when I go into gloved hand mode if I take this out to handgun classes etc things like that and I'm still drawing from appendix or still drawing from concealment then the added length will help me out a little bit I do like the flared magwell I do like how they remove the cutout from the front so there are a lot of things over this handgun that I really do like also of course the front cocking serrations now I still have the factory glock plastic sights on here because I have not decided on if I'm just gonna run them to see how long before I damage them or if I'm gonna go ahead and swap these out with some of the other iron sights that are on the market right now I've got Dawson precision sights on the Glock 17 and I really like those guys I am gonna talk about night sights versus plastic sites versus fiber optic sights in a completely different video coming up so make sure you watch out for that now I've made it through this whole video without really talking about this guy here now this is a Glock 17r SR Glock 19 Gen 4 as I mentioned earlier and this is built up kind of on the roland special pattern of guns now we can go into a whole different video about what a roland special is and why it was designed but this is a compensated Glock 19 so we have a kkm compensator and barrel in here we have a surefire XH 35 TAC light on here I've got a Magpul mag well and we have a shield RMS red dot sight on here so overall this is supposed to be a concealable open class handgun basically something that you can carry in a concealed carry fashion but when you have to draw it and use it it gives nothing away it is almost a full race gun in capability so this is one of those aspects I think where now you will see rolling special type guns being built on the Glock 45 now you have the benefit of when you add the compensator to it you are still staying about 17 length with the compensator actually about Glock 34 lengths it's a little bit longer than 17 so Glock 34 length with the compensator but if you switched over and built this guy on a Glock 45 now you have the full-size grip the 17 grip that you can get gloved hands on a whole lot easier so if you're gonna build up a rolling special say maybe you were not a SWAT situation where you could carry one of these as a duty gun then you can build that up on this guy carry it in a regular duty holster they will fit in the RDS holsters from Safariland and then you'll be good to go you have that full size grip now I generally when I am running the rolling special I have Glock 17 mags with a plus 2 extension on them so I still get a good deal of magazine capacity I'm not gaining any magazine capacity going to the 45 but I am gaining that grip length and my hand doesn't feel as crunched up on the grip running the 45 versus running the 19 with the mag well like this so if you are on the market to build a rolling special than the 45 or waiting until they introduced the 45 mos may be a really good option now people love or I hate the mos platform it's worked just fine for us I do a couple different things like I glue the plates on when I mount them so that the plates not gonna move around or come loose and we really haven't any issues with the plates moving around after I install them but if you don't want that go ahead and just pick up a Glock 45 and have the slide machine for an rmr or an RMS or whatever your preferred optic is and you'll be good to go drop that compensator on there and you will have a full 17 grip in a standard rolling special type compt 19 slide so hopefully that clears up for who the Glock 45 really will work well for if you should buy Glock 45 or if you go with the 19 or the 17 that is about all for this video if you guys have any questions or comments over anything we've covered please leave it in the comment section below or send it to us on Facebook or Twitter if you liked the video please make sure you like share and subscribe and make sure you hit that little Bell icon so you're notified when we release new content and until next time get out and shoot

Channel: 8541 Tactical

Views: 160,190

Rating: 4.7934651 out of 5

Keywords: John McQuay, 8541 Tactical, LoneWolfUSMC, Mail Call Mondays, Police, Sniper, USMC, Questions, Review, Rifle, Long Range, Precision, Glock 45, 9x19, 9mm, semi-automatic, handgun

Id: SFDzWHZiCtQ

Length: 30min 51sec (1851 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 13 2018