Customized Pistol: SDT Glock 23 Gen 3 Pistol Build

A few years ago, UN12 released a buyer’s guide detailing custom work from some of the industry’s leading customizers of Glock slides (UN12 Issue 009, circa November/December 2021). At that time, we were able to lay hands on an example of Zaffiri Precision’s work for a Glock 23 Gen 3.

It was my dad’s pistol, and he ran that slide on a stock frame in the ensuing years and was very happy with it. Given the slide’s much more aggressive aesthetic, we were a little surprised at his enthusiasm for it.

More recently, I decided I wanted to gift him a new Gen 3 frame to more effectively round out the pistol build in terms of both ergonomics and the overall look. Frankly, the Zaffiri slide visually overpowered the stock Glock frame.

In attending pistol classes at the now-defunct Front Sight Training Institute outside Las Vegas, he had decided he wanted to improve grip while training beneath the hot Nevada desert sun, so he remedied the problem with some swatches of grip tape. While functional, the tape left a bit to be desired in the aesthetics department.

A couple years after publishing the slide guide, we put together a profile on a company called Sonoran Defense Technologies in the greater Phoenix area of Arizona (UN12 Issue 018). SDT’s expertise is laser stippling, with a focus on Glock frame polymer along with select offerings for polymer-frame CZ pistols.

While researching the article, we found ourselves gravitating positively to the look of the SDT offerings. We decided one of their stippling packages would make a perfect match for the Zaffiri slide, along with improving the aesthetics and ergonomics for Dad’s G23.

Rather than taking the Glock apart and shipping the existing frame for stippling—we wanted it to be a surprise, after all—we decided to source a brand-new OEM frame for the project. SDT was able to help in this regard, making it a one-stop shop for both the new component and the stipple package.

SDT offers a variety of subtle but visually pleasing surface textures largely based on natural patterns found on the local wildlife in the company’s home environs of the Sonoran Desert—i.e., rattlesnakes. The SDT patterns are named after the snakes themselves.

The standard pattern for high-grip, high-wear areas on the frame like the grip’s front and backstrap is called Cerberus (after Crotalus cerberus, the Arizona black rattlesnake). Another of the company’s signature patterns is Atrox (after Crotalus atrox, or Western diamondback), which is a more structured grid-type pattern with raised points in each square.

These are the two patterns we selected for our new frame. SDT offers a variety of designs that allow you to combine two stipple patterns, called Hybrid packages. We selected the Hybrid Alpha, which would combine the more aggressive Cerberus texture on the high-purchase areas of the frame with Atrox on the other surfaces, like the sides of the grip.

Some thought went into the decision, as we wanted a relatively wide intermediate area on the left side of the grip to display a custom logo, which would be the Marine Corps globe & anchor in honor of Dad’s service. The Hybrid Alpha allowed that but also tapers the intermediate Atrox pattern toward the top in order to maximize the high-traction Cerberus stippling at the grip’s top, where the meat of the index finger and thumb make contact on the outside and inside of the grip, respectively.

After selecting your stippling package and patterns on the SDT website, a series of drop-down menus lets you choose various other features and upgrades you may want to add. We chose a double undercut on the trigger guard and removal of the stock Glock “finger grooves” to allow for a more comfortable modified grip on the gun, a scallop for the magazine catch to enhance that control’s functionality, and, of course, the Marines logo on the grip’s left side, so the shooter can admire it when he’s holding the pistol. The SDT rattlesnake logo is placed on the grip’s opposite side.

For a complete custom build SDT offers Cerakote services through industry partners, in as simple or as intricate a color scheme as you want to make it. We opted to leave it regular old black in order to simplify the process, shorten the overall wait time, and because we feel the black frame matches well with the triangle multi-cam pattern on the slide we received from Zaffiri and still renders the overall look relatively subtle.

Revisiting the slide, the cut is a variation on Zaffiri’s ZPS.2, for which nowadays they cut their own blanks. You can tell this one is an earlier cut using a stock Glock slide because the corner windows at the front are one fewer (four versus five per corner), and the cocking serrations are vertical versus forward-slanting as Zaffiri now mills them. Still, the old Marine loves it and we ain’t inclined to fix what ain’t broke.

An RMR optic cut is of course positioned up top and hosts a Holosun 507C red dot. The red dot is paired with Night Fision suppressor-height tritium iron sights. And for further targeting redundancy, a simple Omega pistol laser sight is affixed to the frame underneath the muzzle.

The rest of the Glock was assembled using OEM-spec components from GlockStore. And the old grip-taped Gen 3 frame now hosts a .22LR slide assembly, which previously had no frame of its own… proving that nothing goes to waste in the UN12 family. Now we’ve got two pistols where previously there was only one.

Sources

Sonoran Defense Technologies
sonorandefense.com

Zaffiri Precision
zaffiriprecision.com