Built to be simple, easy to maintain, and a breeze to reload quickly, Glocks have been the go-to weapon for many police forces and security firms around the world ever since they were first invented back in 1982.

As Gaston Glock, an Austrian engineer, businessman, and firearm connoisseur was examining the guns available on the market at the time – he concluded that he liked none of them. Thus, he determined that he needed to manufacture his own line of handguns that will have a polymer frame, a copyrighted SAFE ACTION™ system, and that will proudly carry his last name.

The result is a small but mighty handgun beloved by anyone who comes in contact with it. Its simplicity and effectiveness have not diminished over time. It is also ideal for indoor range training. Indeed, what Michail Khalashnikov did for assault rifles, Gaston Glock did for handguns. (Well, at least for the western market. The Russians, as per usual, have their own line of handguns, most notably the famous Makarov series.)

Anyway, in this article, we’re going to talk about a particular part of a Glock – its magazine. To be precise, we will talk about how you can disassemble one for purposes of maintenance and replacing old or damaged parts.

Without further ado, here’s the deal.

Why is cleaning gun magazines important?

Carrying a gun in your pocket or holster will make the magazine pick up some lint and other impurities in time. To be fair, unless there is a big chunk of debris that falls right into a magazine ‘head-first’, so to speak, a magazine malfunctioning because it got some belly-button wool stuck in its lower crevices is highly unlikely.

Guns such as AR-15 Rifles for Sale Online are made to be durable, reliable, and function in all kinds of inhospitable conditions – from deserts of Northern Africa to rainforests of Vietnam.

That said, every gun owner worth their salt knows that cleaning your magazine every once in a while can be a great way to ensure the whole thing is as clean as a whistle at all times – which means you don’t have to worry about jams or other magazine-related issues ever again.

Plus, taking a Glock magazine apart is a piece of cake, so if you’re taking apart the other sections of your gun, you might as well take the magazine apart and clean it along with the other parts.

Parts of a Glock magazine

When Gaston Glock first invented the famous handgun, he went for simplicity and ease of use before everything else. Hence, today’s Glock is a 9mm weapon that you can rest assured will work like a charm in all sorts of conditions, whether it’s snug in pistol holsters or held in hand.

Its magazine, as simple as it is reliable, consists of five parts and you can easily take it apart and reassemble it in seconds. Here are the parts of this magazine:

• Spring – … pushes upwards on the follower. As you shoot, the bullets stored in the tube are pushed by this spring so they can be fed into the barrel.
• Tube – … is a part that stores the bullets. Glock have double-stacked magazines and typically hold 17 bullets. (Although there are versions out there that give you two extra bullets, so you have 19 with an optional floor plate. Extended magazine versions can hold 24 or up to 33 rounds.)
• Follower – … sits on top of the spring and represents the bed onto which you load the bullets. It has a specific shape so it can allow double-stacking and it also plays the role of guiding the bullets into the gun’s chamber.
• Floor Plate – … is the bottom part of the magazine that seals and secures it from below.
• Insert/Lock Plate – … is placed between the floor plate and the spring. When the two parts ‘lock’, the magazine is assembled and ready for use.

The necessary tools & safety gear

Disassembling a Glock magazine is not exactly nuclear science.

The whole procedure requires only one tool. (And we’re using the word ‘tool’ in a rather broad sense here.)

A Glock handgun has a special button on the bottom of the floor plate that, when depressed, will disengage the lock and allow you to access the other parts of the magazine. An important thing to mention here would be that the spring that comes as a part of a Glock magazine will likely be under pressure, so don’t be surprised if it springs out toward you when you punch in the button.

To be on the safe side, you might want to wear a pair of safety goggles.

As for punching in the hole, you can use anything that’s strong enough to push this button. A plastic pen would not be a good choice here. You will need something stronger, preferably made out of metal and with a circumference of 3/32 or 5/32 inches.

Disassembling a Glock magazine

A Glock magazine is an entirely mechanical contraption that can be disassembled by pushing a single button.

Other than the spring, which is thin and wiry, there is no real threat of damaging the other parts of the magazine, once you’ve taken it apart. That said, keeping the magazine parts on the workbench or on a garage table, or wherever it is you’re taking it apart, is desirable, as fall damage can produce unsightly paint chipping and other annoying minor bends.

Anyway, here’s how to take apart a Glock magazine with the help of only a small metal pointy object to start things off.

Press the hole in the floor plate

Using the said pointy object, (there is a so-called Glock Armorer Tool that you can use specifically for this purpose), punch the hole located on the bottom of the Glock magazine. You will have to insert the tool hard and deep and then once it’s in, you can move it downwards to crack-open the sliding floor plate.

Once the plate starts sliding off a little bit, you can remove it altogether with your hands.

Using leverage, unlock the floor plate

Other than depressing the said button, using leverage to dislodge the floor plate and get it to start sliding downward is the next step. Using a professionally-made Glock mag-unlocker tool can be great for this purpose, as it comes with both the pointy part for insertion and the handle for applying pressure and leveraging the plate downward.

Typically, offline and online gun and ammo stores, such as those selling natchez glock magazines, also sell these small but massively useful magazine prying tools.

Hold the spring with thumb & slide the plate forward

As the floor plate is coming off, it is important to place your thumb on the part of the magazine that is being revealed as you’re getting rid of this plate.

Inside the magazine, there is a spring that will be under pressure, so it will ‘want’ to spring out of the now wide-open magazine bottom. (This is why you want to place the thumb there first, to prevent spring from going AWOL.)

Once you feel that you’re keeping the pressurized spring under control with your thumb, you can finish sliding off the plate.

Remove the spring

Last but not least, carefully remove the spring.

With it, you will see a lock plate emerge first, so take it off the spring. Another part that will be attached to the spring is the aforementioned follower, which sits at the very top of the spring.

By removing the spring with these two components attached to it, you will have completely disassembled the Glock magazine and you can proceed to clean the parts, examine them, take a picture next to them, you name it!

Conclusion

All in all, disassembling a Glock magazine is a rather straightforward business that requires only a single tool. (Although you don’t even need that if you have a sturdy piece of thin metal you can use instead.)

Cleanliness is a major part of gun safety, so taking good care of your magazines as well as other parts of your gun is essential to keeping them running as smoothly as a greased lighting.