1911-Glock maintance

As Larry Vickers​ said in my 1911 class, "If you are going to treat your gun like a push lawnmower, buy a Glock". No denial that 1911's do require more maintenance. 1911's are heavy, and they hold fewer rounds. Whereas the Glock drop in parts truly means that, with a lot of 1911 drop in may mean some fitting required.

In all the years I've been teaching and training I have seen both 1911's and Glock's fail, so does that mean we shouldn't buy either one of them, Perhaps there is another?, A magical war club that will never break down, or wear out or fail? Well maybe a real war club made out of a hard enough material, since clubs have been around since nearly the dawn of man, we have made them pretty fool proof.

As mentioned above seen both of them fail, and likely seen more Glock's go down than 1911's, but there are more striker fired guns coming to class. I would place most of the failures on ammo, then on magazines, then lack of lubrication. (Yes Glock's are suppose to run dry, but they run better with at least a bit of oil.)

When I was in the Glock Instructor course 1/3rd of the guns failed (IE: Stopped working) on day one, came down to total lack of cleaning, and ammo being used. I have also seen issues with aftermarket magazines made for Glocks.

With the 1911's most of the time they are just dry, and even production guns are tight enough that spells trouble. Next in is magazines, and I've seen them right out of the box fail to run, switch out to a quality magazine  and then they shoot. I really believe the manufacturers should step up there,, and supply at least one quality mag. with each gun they sell. One class I had 2 students with 1911's and both had ordered ammo from the same reman. company and neither gun wanted to function I finally put some of their ammo in my gun and it wouldn't work either, but it would run in a striker fired pistol. We didn't have a chronograph, but surmise that batch was loaded a bit on the light side, and just wasn't enough to cycle the heavier slide.

I've seen where both guns were run hard and put away wet, one 1911 in particular, it was a 38 Super that had been shot so much, you could run the slide back and forth with one finger. How the spring managed to get the slide back in battery is beyond me.

Another area I've seen failures is with the fiddlers,  they start changing out parts, and springs trying to make it better, Come on guys run it a while before doing that. Also if the suppliers state if you change "this", you really should change "that", you really should change "that".

Are our choices wrong? Not at all, we just have to understand and know the limitations of your choice. You have to learn about your gun and how to maintain it, not just how to modify it.

Buy quality ammo, and magazines, change springs when you should, clean it when you should, not just when you get around to it.  

I am pretty certain that If John Browning was around today with modern machining and materials the 1911 would not look like it does, nor am I inclined to believe it would look like a Glock (Even Browning saw the limitations of the 1911 and although unfinished before his death the BHP  was his effort to simplify and improve the design). If Gaston Glock had to go back to the turn of the 20th century, I'm sure the pistol would not look like what we have today.

Both are proven platforms, and maybe, just maybe, we ought to spend more time shooting them than comparing them.