The History and FUTURE of Glock

now I know this is the three millionth video on YouTube about Glocks but something has happened relatively recently that makes me personally more excited about the Glock platform than any time over the last 40 years so stick with me and I'll explain it so the reason that there are three million videos about Glock is because it's actually a very important and influential firearm you can actually divide uh modern handguns up into sort of two categories the before Glocks when everything was made out of steel and had Hammer fired mechanisms and was made a certain way and the afterglocks is made of largely plastic and is Striker Fired in nine millimeter in double stack and but the internal mechanisms are also pretty different and that is significant I realize that there's also three million Glock videos because people like to pit the Tactical Tupperware against the two World Wars All-American Champion right here now let's show them some good old-fashioned American Swagger [Music] you on in the comments section of this very video but uh try to keep it a little clean I hate rude behavior in a man won't tolerate it also in the comment section I'm sure some of you are wondering where Kevin Costner is but this video is actually well it belongs to somebody else you take care of yourself but let's get back to the Glock story which begins in around 1980 a gentleman named Gaston Glock is an engineer he's making some stuff in his garage and he has a day job at another Factory and in his garage he is making curtain rods he is making entrenching tools and he's making knives for the Austrian military and because of these these last two jobs where he's actually supplying things to the Austrian military he happens to overhear a conversation about the Austrian Army needing a new service pistol at the time they were using this particular P-38 well actually not this particular one this particular one is not Austrian my favorite movie is The Sound of Music but they needed a replacement sidearm and Gaston Glock overheard the conversation and asked if he would be allowed to enter a contender in the military trials and they said of course uh without really expecting that he would be able to pull it off because as nice as his entrenching tools and knives allegedly were there's a pretty big difference between a knife which is you know usually one piece of metal and then an injection molded plastic part and a military sidearm few more parts usually it's a little more going on Not only was Gaston Glock building all of these things in his garage he had a metal stamping machine and he had a small injection molding machine he also had very little experience with pistols and so as soon as he heard about these new military trials he went out and he bought a few Firearms he bought a Beretta so that he could get some experience with that he bought a CZ 75 and of course he also bought a P-38 so that he could have some pistol experience and he started shooting them in his basement that was step one of his design and research project and then step two was to get a whole bunch of military guys because he did not have much military experience he got them all together in a room and he got together a wish list of things that they would like to see in a military sidearm and then step three was to build this um I'm kind of not joking it appears that the process was those three steps and this is where the legend of Glock kind of begins there's people on the internet who say obviously he's a genius engineer to invent something like this essentially from scratch and then there's other people who say no all of the parts of this gun are ideas whose time had come it was inevitable that people would start doing all of the things that he did and who's right uh I think both sides are correct there are a whole bunch of really fascinating technological advancements that had just happened in the early 1980s late 1970s and none of glock's competitors were really capitalizing on those things but also it's really hard to picture someone who isn't a really excellent engineer pulling off something like this now one of the defining features of the Glock is of course the plastic injection molded frame and it's important to note that this is not the first plastic gun Remington had been making plastic stocked rifles since the mid 60s and then H and K actually tried to make a plastic framed pistol in 1970. it was called the Volks pistol 70 and it's actually very interesting we have this idea now this assumption which is you know supported by all of the facts that says that Heckler and doesn't particularly like civilians they only want to sell to militaries and they only want to sell high quality fancy stuff but in 1970 they made the vp70 specifically to give to the citizenry and it was a fully automatic pistol with a shoulder brace so that people could defend themselves against Russian Invaders unfortunately it wasn't a great pistol but it definitely proved that you could make a plastic receiver so what Glock did was take a whole bunch of modern Technologies which had been proven but they just weren't being used by the firearm industry and he rolled them all into one so if you compare the Glock with this 1911 you can see that this very complicated metal frame here on the 1911 it has to be machined out of Steel by hand or by relatively expensive Advanced machines is a big part of the difficulty and the expense of manufacture all of that stuff gets made in just a few seconds in an injection molding machine out of the material that costs Pennies on the dollar and there's a bunch of other things that happen when you switch to this material this is now very very corrosion resistant and because it has a little bit of flexibility to it it's not only lighter but it absorbs some of the recoil and it takes up any sort of slop in any of your internal components that may not fit absolutely perfectly the way that your precision machine steel parts have to changing the material of the frame or the receiver or the lower whatever you want to call it does more than just change the manufacturing of that one part it has some pretty Sigma significant ramifications for all of the internals and it allows you to engineer it in a very different way to illustrate that I'm going to try to take a part of this 1911 if I can remember how it's been several years since I've done this last and uh oh yeah I knew I was going the wrong way if I can just remember where this catch point is here okay [Music] now this is very easy to disassemble which is why I chose this particular part to look at this is the slide stop or slide release of the 1911 which has to be very carefully machined out of steel and so this ends up being a relatively time intensive and expensive part to produce even today with machine injected metals and various other things that people do to make these now let's look at the exact same part on the Glock and see what differences we might notice I've done this a little bit more recently but I'm still not exactly Glock armor there we go and I forgot which way you have to jiggle this to get it out this is the Glock slide stop or slide release and as you can see it's not milled out of metal it is punch pressed out of a single piece of sheet steel this takes a fair amount of time to cut and carefully Mill this can be punched out in seconds and then looks like two or three bending operations so this is a far cheaper part to manufacture and it really is designed around some of the advantages you get from these different materials and you might say well this carefully milled Precision Steel part is going to be stronger than this sheet metal part which is uh incredibly filthy this is coming out of my personal gen 3 Glock and it is uh looking pretty good I would say this is a stronger part if you make it out of proper tool steel and this is a much weaker part that is fairly bendable but it only has to be strong in One Direction because of the way the Glock actually designed this part to go in here it only needs to be strong in the direction where the part is actually strong now for the embarrassingly slow reassembly part I don't want to talk about every single part in the Glock but it actually wouldn't take that long because the gun that he delivered to the Austrian military for trials had only 33 or 34 Parts in it which is roughly half of some of the other guns that were being tested and the military trials went incredibly well he was able to cream all of the competition in those experiments with his prototype which was actually technically it was this one now the timing was on his side yet again because technically he didn't need to beat everybody in the competition behind the scenes people who decided that they really really wanted to choose for the Austrian military sidearm and Austrian manufactured pistol which means clock didn't have to beat anybody except for steyer dire at the time made really good rifles but their pistol was a complete disaster but that's a little bit immaterial because his prototype out ran every single thing in the competition and it was the clear and obvious choice and it was chosen and then he was able to start manufacturing it and he had an additional advantage over all of the other manufacturers any one of these pistol manufacturers could have begun experimenting with these Technologies except that they already had factories set up to make things the old way set up to Mill Parts very carefully and very meticulously and work inside of Metal Frames that have a lot of small delicate parts that have to be really really carefully puts together sometimes and fit using the materials that they've been using for hundreds of years any of them could have updated their factories but the cost of upgrading all of those tools whoever went first was going to start the Avalanche and it turned out to be Glock he had the downside of needing to invent this thing from scratch but he also had the advantage of building the factory around this thing from scratch and since that factory was really really good at making these really really good guns really really cheaply Glock wanted to sell those outside of Austria and that is when the world learned about Gaston Glocks Glock 17. it has that name because it was the 17th patent he had received it's actually kind of mind-boggling to me that a weapon that is this comprehensively new and reliable and functional is uh pad number 17. not sure how many revisions but uh it's spraying kind of fully formed into the world in that early 1980s period and a lot of people in the world kind of went crazy that punk pulled a Glock seven of them you know what that is it's a porcelain gun made in Germany doesn't show up on your airport X-ray machines they're gonna cost more than you make it a month you'd be surprised what I'm making a month and that's not just Hollywood doing its normal Hollywood thing of not understanding how guns work that was a pretty common news story at the time when Glocks were new Newsweek carried that story a whole bunch of people were just panicking about this magical plastic gun that escaped all kinds of detection but why the big secret people are smart they can handle it the person the smart people are dumb panicky dangerous animals and you know it but after a while uh that Panic kind of wore off and people began to look at this thing more carefully and they realized that this was an extremely comfortable extremely reliable extremely high capacity extremely user-friendly extremely easy to maintain and extremely affordable handgun platform and things changed obviously uh Hollywood prop houses loved this thing for all the reasons that I mentioned as well as people who were using it in the real world you have a backup weapon never had the need get yourself a Glock lose that nickel plated sizzy pistol it comes a very common sight in films and in television and the music industry the music industry loved this thing too because in addition to all of those qualities it also rhymes with a bunch of stuff and so it's in a whole bunch of music which uh we'll listen to some of it right now oh yeah I think uh yeah let's not listen to it right now but as this grows in popularity Gaston Glock is able to benefit from another bit of perfect timing the early 1980s is a point in which the police force of America is wanting to modernize a lot of them are still running revolvers and those that aren't are running things like this Smith and Wesson model 39 it's a very capable gun in the pre-glock world steel framed Hammer fired all the things that every pre-glock gun has in common and Smith Wesson owned a complete and total Monopoly on police sales at that point and that's rapidly changed with the appearance of the Glock I noticed on the boat you finally went with the Glock clock 40 just like yours kind of sort of want to emulate you it's gonna be my mentor and all Not only was there a tremendous uh profit margin on this thing for Glock but they were able to undercut uh every other competitor that they had and this right here fit perfectly into a lot of cultural changes that were happening in law enforcement at the time the ideas of modern policing were changing something that required less training and less maintenance but actually gave more capability to the officer was a pretty easy sell these things are so cool yeah they shoot underwater you can pour sand in them and they'll shoot every time it's a good choice and so of course when Glocks are on the hip of every police officer that you run into and they're in most of the movies and they're in most of the TV shows and they're being talked about in music from all sorts of genres uh it's no surprise that this became a very popular weapon for private purchase as well thank you foreign cultural shift that is going on is kind of interesting to study it's so clear and it's so obvious that this gun changes almost everything in the firearm industry at the same time that it changes a lot of stuff in the Hollywood and music and police industries that it's gotten a fair amount of attention from people who are outside of the firearm industry people have talked about the cultural ramifications there this is in kind of interesting ways and one decent example of this is the book Glock the rise of America's gun by Paul Barrett and he tries to capture what is this thing that happened what is the Mystique of the Glock what made it America's gun the dark glamor of the Glock you know went up the dark glamor but like a lot of Outsider journalists he does a very good job of capturing the details but I think that he kind of misses the point because this didn't actually become America's gun this became the next generation of how Firearms are made this became the next generation of how the entire world makes handguns it's only America's gun because it is the world's gun every firearm manufacturer that used to make a steel framed Hammer fire gun post Glock also makes a Glock style firearm and again there is more to the Glock style than just a injection molded plastic receiver and a striker-fired internal system but the internals in this are made the way that Glocks internals are made the coatings on the metals are the same as these Coatings Glock pioneered a whole bunch of Technologies not from scratch but introduce them to the firearm industry in a way that they were universally adopted cze made the classic 75 a classic Browning style gun now they also have a Glock style the P10 this is the full sized and [Music] every single manufacturer from the pre-glock era now makes a post Glock era handgun it isn't that this gun has Mystique it's a dark glamor in fact it's kind of the opposite of that the value of this gun is the pure utilitarian engineering and Manufacturing technology matures here and thanks to Gaston clock uh doing a good enough job that this thing is actually the perfect demo of those Technologies every other firearm manufacturer has a clear path forward this is the Walther uh and you can see that they're doing what Glock has done using all the Technologies and Manufacturing capabilities that Glock has to roll out their own guns it is a sea change in the way that weapons are made not so much in the larger culture and Paul Bearer doesn't really fully understand the engineering side this is mostly about how they sold guns to police departments and he delves into a lot of the weird Glock company stuff which admittedly there's there's quite a bit of they sold a lot of Glocks to a lot of police departments through kind of dodgy means like at strip clubs and things which is you know I'm pretty sure that's government acquisition par for the course in the 80s and there's other parts the Glock company that read a little bit like an Australian yes I said Australian soap opera things like various embezzlement schemes and some of glock's own business partners hiring Hitmen to come and get them and he for some reason isn't armed with this very handy self-defense weapon and has them battled him with his bare hands and his Victorious and goes on to marry much much younger women inside of his company it's uh yeah it's it's a whole thing if that's the sort of thing you're looking for read the book everything else I think really comes down to the engineering the manufacturer and then the wider adoption by the public so now let's talk a little bit about the objections or complaints of some of the gun control folks because as we've talked about in past videos there is a lot of concern from people who are worried about Firearms about military style Firearms military-grade weapons military style assault weapons military weapons of war military-style semi-automatic weapons military style assault weapons that are military style military style weapons designed to kill as many people as possible now believe it or not there's not that many guns that were actually designed specifically for militaries but this was this was very specifically designed to win a military contract for the Austrian Army and yet the features that this gun has its low price point it's high reliability the fact that it is very easy and simple to shoot the fact that it is very safe when it comes to its operation the fact that it can be easily cleaned and upgraded even by someone like myself this is a really excellent uh set of attributes for the private civilian gun owner not just the military and the idea that law enforcement or military personnel are going to have completely different needs for their service pistols their self-defense sidearms than the citizenry who also are going to have self-defense responsibilities in relatively similar scenarios and the use of deadly force is authorized in order to save lives well of course it makes sense that they would want the same level of tools when it comes to the capacity of the weapon when it comes to the price of the weapon the reliability of the weapon the ability to shoot the weapon they're going to want the same things and this third generation uh handgun technology is what everybody is going to want whether it is made by glock whether it is made by Walther whether it is made by CZ or whether it is made by other companies specifically building on the Glock model and that is something that is very very exciting to me this is my personal Glock that I purchased at a Texas gun show it was a police trade-in it had an awful lot of rounds to it when I bought it I put an awful lot more rounds through it it is a gen 3 Glock which in my opinion is more or less perfect well obviously it wasn't perfect because I cut the grip off so it would take Glock 19 mags and I changed the sights out but the Glock gen 3 gun is pretty amazing as a technology platform and now that a number of glock's patents have expired the Glock has stopped just being a product from a single company and it has become a platform we have seen the AR-15 grow in its popularity and its capability when it is a platform any manufacturer can make AR-15s or AR-15 parts or invent new ways of doing things on that AR-15 platform and the Gen 3 Glock has now reached that level of accessibility so there have been companies for years that have made aftermarket parts for Glocks it is the Undisputed market leader it has market dominance in a way that Smith Wesson did 40 years ago and because of that every holster maker like T-Rex arms makes a Glock holster every slide manufacturer makes a Glock slide there are companies out there that only make Glock parts because it has the widest adoption of any platform and now there are companies who are making essentially Glocks this right here is a shadow system Shadow system I believe was one of the first to start essentially building Glock clones this way so this is for all intents and purposes a Glock a gen 3 Glock it looks different but all of the internal parts could be swapped in and out of this gen 3 free Glock and this right here is a Palmetto Armory dagger the exact same design philosophy even though uh you know the Aesthetics are a little bit different and then this over here is a polymer 80 lower and a polymer 80 slide and again you can put all the internals from all these guns into these things and the number of companies that make these internals that make triggers that make slide stop release extractor all the different bits and pieces there are so many of them so the options as you are building out a gun like this polymer 80 frame allows you to do are almost Limitless the options if you are doing maintenance on a firearm and you need something to replace a broken extractor are almost Limitless as well there's a lot of reasons to support a decentralized weapon platform as opposed to just a single product and so that's one of the reasons that I am extremely excited about this development which isn't to say that that I don't still like my actual original Glock this thing is uh approximately 20 years old based on the fact that it had uh Clinton assault weapon ban era mags with it when I bought it and the age of the tritium and some other things but I am excited about a wider decentralized platform there's another thing that critics of firearms and Firearm companies often bring up when they bring up specific companies in the fire industry they often will say well this is a company that only cares about money this is a company that doesn't care about the human cost of their weapons being out on the street I'd like to thank you all for reminding me why we have the presumption of innocence in the United States of America and now that I've been in the firearm industry for over 10 years I actually don't think that that's true of most companies most companies actually have more of a mission than just the bottom line they actually are eager to get really quality tools into the hands of their customers so that their customers can pursue recreational Hobbies or the defense of life and limb they actually want more for their customers uh than you know just their customers money and Glock is kind of the exception that proves the rule especially at the beginning Gaston Glock did not build this thing because he loved Firearms uh he had to go out and get some Firearms to shoot in his basement before he even really had a basis for for working on this thing he built this thing solely to get uh the money from a government contract now today Glock is a very large company it employs a lot of amazing people people who love shooting people who love the idea of self-defense people who love serving those people who serve others with life-saving equipment but it is true that Glock is a little bit not a soulless company but I would say a little bit less has a little bit less of a mission than some of the others and so when I see a company like Palmetto State Armory building on the technology of Glock manufacturing building on this new platform that is available and extending it and making it more accessible to more people at a lower price and really trying to squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of the manufacturing technology that we have today and the engineering that Gaston put into this platform here I find that very exciting they have a very clear mission to arm people so that they are able to defend themselves that is really exciting it's even more exciting to me than this gun that I personally love and when I see polymer 80 building lowers uh that you can buy at 80 completion and finish yourself at home without doing a whole bunch of extra paperwork that is very exciting to me and when the ATF rate specifically focused on them to try to get them shut down and they fought back using every legal tool that they're our disposal that's very exciting to me as well so T-Rex arms is very excited to continue to support the Glock platform we've been making holsters for the shadow systems line for a long time we're supporting the PSA Daggers by the time you watch this video we're going to be supporting the polymer 80 frames and builds as well now it's just a race between whether we can finish that holster line or finish this video first but we are excited to support these extra platform supporters now not all of them this is actually a very cool thing we can't commit to supporting everybody that makes a Glock clone because the beauty of this decentralized platform is it's almost Limitless Lone Wolf just announced that they are making a Glock clone the number of people who will be pumping out gen 3 compatible Glock clones is going to be through the roof so I can't actually commit to making holsters for every single one of them but we are very excited excited about the platform and we are going to be working to support it moving forwards especially the ones that we have just mentioned guys who really pushed the envelope of expanding the platform and had very specific missions that they wanted uh to achieve and that's again very exciting to me as much as I love the story of Glock and the engineering that went into it and all the different parts of this this particular puzzle and then obviously you know my personal emotional attachment to this particular gun that I've carried for a very long time the mission that is represented by some of these other companies and the opportunity of the platform that is extremely exciting that is the thing that I'm going to keep watching for and you should keep watching for it too thank you so this uh gen one Glock 17 is actually reproduction we don't have a gun quite that old most of these guns uh they're they're historic Firearms but they're actually not quite old enough uh to be from the right era except for this one this one is uh two-wolt and this uh classic P-38 leather flap holster has an even more interesting story than the firearm bless we'll uh we'll get to that some other day

Channel: T.REX ARMS

Views: 469,356

Keywords: gaston glock, manufacturing technolog, third gen, isaac botkin, lucas botkin, trex arms, glock 7, glock 19, psa dagger, decentralization, glock platform, shadow systems, polymer80, p80, tommy lee jones, trex-arms, t.rex arms, trexarms

Id: DIg6tay24YA

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023