Whether your goal is to simply swap out your slide-cover plate and frame pins with come personal touches, or building a custom pistol completely from either aftermarket or OEM components, knowing how to detail disassemble your Glock allows you to start from a blank slate, or possibly replace any occasional damaged or worn components.
After verifying your pistol, is unloaded and that the work area is devoid of live ammunition, field-strip the pistol and set the frame aside and remove the recoil assembly and barrel from the slide. (A complete field-stripping guide can be found here.)
Detailed Slide Disassembly
Grasp the rear of the slide firmly in your hand with the slide-cover plate facing upward. Insert a small flat-blade screwdriver or a 3/32-inch pin punch between the lug on the striker and the channel liner. Push and hold down the channel liner down to compress the striker spring. Once compressed, place your strong-hand thumb over the slide-cover plate and gently push the cover plate out of slide.
Place the top of your thumb over the end of the plate as you attempt to remove it, as failing to do so could cause the spring-loaded extractor and plunger assembly beneath to inadvertently launch skyward.
With the slide-cover plate removed, push the striker lug up and remove the complete striker assembly from the slide and set it aside.
(Note: The remaining plastic piece you can see in the slide is the channel liner, which is friction fit and should only be removed if it is damaged.)
Grasp the extractor-depressor bearing with either your fingers or a small flat-blade screwdriver, lift the complete assembly out and set it aside. (At this point, if necessary, the three components that comprise the extractor depressor plunger assembly can be separated further by using your fingers to pull them apart.)
Place the slide on the table, bottom side up and depress the firing-pin safety with a punch. While depressing the safety remove the extractor from its groove in the side, or there’s a chance that rolling the slide to the side while depressing the firing-pin safety may cause the extractor to simply fall out via gravity.
Grasp the firing-pin safety and remove it from the slide. (Note: The safety should have a spring attached to it.) Set the safety/spring and extractor aside.
Detailed Striker Disassembly
The best tool one can use to disassemble the pistol’s striker assembly is a stripped slide, which can be either chucked in a padded vise or placed muzzle-end down on a flat, padded surface.
Using the firing-pin channel as an arbor/mandrel, insert the polymer spacer sleeve of the complete striker assembly backward into the firing-pin channel, taking care to rotate the assembly so the lug of the striker contacts the rear of the slide and doesn’t align with the channel’s elongated notch.
Grasp the firing-pin spring between your thumb and index finger and gradually compress it downward until the spring cups are exposed.
While compressing the firing-pin, carefully remove the spring cups from the striker, set them aside and slowly ease tension from the firing-pin spring, allowing it to expand over the striker prior to removing it.
Finally, remove the striker and polymer spacer sleeve from the slide and set everything aside.
The next installment will cover detailed disassembly of the frame.
