Polished Glock Barrel "How To"

I had a little free time today and decided to "mod" my new Glock 17 RTF2.



I got this idea yesterday from talking to one of the guys that work at the range/gun store. He was showing off his Glock 23 with polished barrel, slide release, takedown pins, and slide takedown. I really liked the look of the polished barrel, and told him I have thought about purchasing one for my M&P. He then explains that he did all the polishing himself! I had never really heard of doing this yourself, but apparently it's kind of common.

I thought I would just throw this little "how to" up just in case someone else like my self has never seen this process.

This is a cheap/free mod and I really like the end product. Plus it's super easy. I give this a DIY difficulty ranking of 2 and an Elbow Grease ranking of 3 (scrubbing bugs of my front bumper is harder).

Tools/Materials needed: Scotchbrite Scrubbing pads, Flitz Metal Polish, cotton towel/tshirt/cloth

Optional Materials: Dremel w/ fine wire brush and felt polish disks, Brasso, Ultra fine 0000 Steel wool.


Step Uno: Remove barrel from gun and wash in warm water with dish soap to degrease.

Step B: Submerge barrel in White Vinegar for 3-5 hours. (this causes oxidation in the finish and makes it easier to remove. Also, I used rice vinegar because thats the only thing I had and it worked fine)

Step Tree: Remove Barrel from vinegar and dry with towel.

Step Fo: Put a couple drops of Flitz on the barrel and start scrubbing with the green scotchbrite pads! (this picture was literally 2 minutes after I took the barrel out of the vinegar)

The muzzle end of the barrel still has the factory finish, see how the chamber is shiny?!

side note: the directions on the flitz bottle say not to let the compound dry. So, I would apply flitz, scrub a section, wipe clean, apply more flitz, scrub section with a clean portion of scrub pad, wipe clean, repeat.

Step 5: Wash barrel again in soapy water.
This was after 45 minutes of just polishing by hand and washing off with soap. All areas which would be seen while installed in the gun look great at this point, but I decided to go ahead and get all the tough spots (like under the locking lugs).

Step 5a: (optional) use brasso and steel wool to really get a good "chrome" shine. also use dremel to polish feed ramp and little nooks and crannies. Wash in soapy water again and proceed to step 6.
polished feed ramp

Step 6: Clean barrel rifling however you normally choose after shooting. (solvents, brushes, clp, boresnake, whatev..) and apply small amount of gun oil to polished area of barrel, wipe clean and reapply. leaving a small coat of until next use.

finished product installed

 

Nice write up! I'll keep this in mind the next time I'm cleaning my G23

 

I was really surprised how easy it was and it's makes cleaning the barrel a lot easier.

it's the same principle as a chrome AR bolt. gunk just wipes right off.

 

nice!

 

just better keep up on the maintaining the shine, it will oxidize a lot faster that way. Flitz will help a tremendous amount in keeping the shine. Flitz is pretty amazing shit, i use it all the time. Looks good tho, I have often thought about getting my glock 23 slide coated with a silver coating so it would look like the glocks used in the movies "Bad Boys 2" and "Takers".

 

Ahh but thats the beauty of the glock! The barrel and slide are treated with the "tenifer" process. Which seals the pores in the metal. So rust is a no go. I know a guy that stripped his whole slide to give it that look you are talking about.

 

the slide yes, barrel, no, hence the texture that you have on the glocks slide. The barrel recieves too much friction and rubbing to recieve this coating, and most barrels out there are either stainless, or simply blued. ive used my springfield so much (duty weapon) the the barrel is almost all silver anyways, and for my g23, its getting there, it doesnt get used as much as the xd-m.

 

I made sure to do the homework before I stripped down a $150 dollar barrel. Turns out a lot of manufactures use this process they all just try to make it sound unique. they need to do this shit to ARs and quit with the annodizing.

Glock Ges.m.b.H., an Austrian firearms manufacturer, utilizes the Tenifer process to protect the barrels and slides of the pistols they manufacture. The finish on a Glock pistol is the third and final hardening process. It is 0.05 mm (0.0020 in) thick and produces a 64 Rockwell C hardness rating via a 500 °C (932 °F) nitride bath. The final matte, non-glare finish meets or exceeds stainless steel specifications, is 85% more corrosion resistant than a hard chrome finish, and is 99.9% salt-water corrosion resistant. After the Tenifer process, a black Parkerized finish is applied and the slide is protected even if the finish were to wear off. Besides Glock several other pistol manufacturers like Smith & Wesson and Springfield Armory, Inc. also use ferritic nitrocarburizing for finishing parts like barrels and slides but they call it Melonite finish.

and straight from glock,
TENIFER
The name GLOCK has become synonymous for progressive material technologies in the world of arms. The Tenifer surface treatment process for barrel and slide has set standards in this regard. The Tenifer process optimizes the molecular structure of the metal surfaces, achieving a degree of hardness which comes close to that of diamond. In addition to extreme scratch resistance, it results in maximum corrosion resistance

 

I like my ugly gun to be distinguishable from other ugly guns

 

yours is a gen4, this must be new. my glock is 4 years old, and the only "bulletproof" part of it is the slide.

 

not much glint at all, I mean it's shiny and all but not like putting windex on your DUBs. The black and stainless look like they go together, it's not overwhelming.

and I know what you mean.. black, black, black, FDE, black, black...

 

Still not sure whether you aren't polishing OFF the tenifer, if that's the outermost part of the finish. Or is the tenifer process not a coating but a chemical change to the metal? It's unclear based on what I'm reading.

Looks cool though, I may wanna do this to my G17 zombie sidearm.

 

Righteous

Can anyone speak to whether Glock would still take care of anything that were to go wrong if unrelated to the barrel? Obviously this has voided warranty written all over it.

 

tenifer case hardens the everything it coats its my understanding that when you strip it off of a barrel like that you just lowered its thresh hold for higher pressure rounds. glock does not forge their barrels they case harden their slides and barrels with tenifer. the melonite finish that smith&wesson and springfield are the same thing tenifer is an additive to the process as is melonite. the melonite is black in color is black in color and the tenifer is actually a dark gray.

my friend at my local range is an armorer of all three models of pistol and we have been hanging out a good bit he is giving me lessons in precision reloading lol. so i'm constantly picking his brain for as much info about my guns as i can.

fyi s&w forges the barrel and slide of the m&p's springfield also does this then coats the parts with the same finish so theirs are forged and then case hardened - the tenifer additive as they opt for melonite which is actually equal to or better in certain ways than the tenifer. although i never had any issues with any of my glocks and i love the tenifer finish on them its extremely durable more so than most others but, my m&p has also held up extremely well and feels very similar to me. the melonite process is exactly the same as the tenifer process and both finishes case harden any metal they are used on.

 

people like to believe that the tenifer penetrates the metal and hardens it all the way through but, that is simply impossible to do. it is a coating albeit a very good one and a very hard one somewhere in the neighborhood of low to mid 60 on the rockwell scale.

but, it is a surface coating usually applied extremely thin. so if sanded or removed chemically if thats even possible it does basically remove the case hardening the finish was providing. if you did this to an m&p or a xd/ xd-m it may not produce any negative results seeing as how they are forged as well so the metal itself is hardened then further case hardened by the finish. glock on the other hand not so much imo i would be cautious with this type of procedure. its not like your just polishing a small portion like the feed ramp its the whole barrel.

a friend of mine referred me to this link it explains the tenifer/melonite process a little better than i can. don't get me wrong its a nice looking barrel after its all polished up but, imo its not a good idea.
http://www.burlingtoneng.com/melonite.html

 

straight from the mouth of an armorer on Glock's payroll, "as long as you can still read the lettering on the slide and barrel you havent gone too deep" so thats what I go by. If the coating is as hard as diamonds a little Flitz and scrub pads aint doing shit to affect it. Only the parkerizing is removed.

 

Glock is still making slides with the silly crescent-shaped serrations?

 

haters gon' hate

and no.. the frames were too rough for women.. and men with soft hands