Catastrophic Gen 4 Glock 17 Failure on Reassembly (Assembly Error Resolved)

[scootle]

Scootle - I'm going to contact HK and ask them to send me the correct page(s) from their armorer's manual dealing with this. If it's harder to resolve on the VP9 compared to the G17, then it may be more likely to break a part if you don't handle it whatever way they deem best. If I can get it, I'll post what it says.

That would be useful info... look forward to seeing if you find the official H&K armorer pages. Knowing what I had done, and following a thread on this issue over on HKPro, it still took a good 10 minutes or so of fiddling with the exposed guide rod, the slide, barrel, and takedown lever to finally get things apart. After finally managing to get the takedown lever rotated into the unlocked position (it was stuck locked), the final iteration involved pressing the trigger as a final step and everything slid apart like nothing had happened. Talk about a sigh of relief.

Everything seems to be working fine otherwise now... took the VP9 to the range yesterday and everything was right as rain. Needless to say, I am a little extra-careful when reassembling things after a field-strip now...

[SpeedRacer]

Never had it happen on a Glock, but have on other pistols. Seems like an issue that happens to new shooters that don't know better, and experienced shooters who have done it so many times they get complacent when reassembling. A long time ago I got in the habit of reassembling with the slide on it's side tilted down slightly (sights toward ground) so I can see that everything is in place as I slide it onto the frame.

[Funtogun]

I've had this same problem. I was fitting a factory threaded barrel on a Gen4 and let the recoil rod assembly slip off just as I was pulling the slide back to reassemble the pistol. Was a pain in the neck to get back off.