Before there were switches, there was the Glock 18, a factory polymer machine pistol with a ridiculous fire rate.
Introduced in 1987, the Glock 18 has attained an almost mythical status among the Glock faithful. Picture in your mind the Glock 17, but now imagine it could rattle off 1,200 rounds per minute. It takes one round .05 seconds to fire. That is a rate of 20 rounds per second (keep in mind there are only 33 rounds in a Glock extended magazine). Wow.
While the G18 is based on the G17, there are eight unique parts, plus a different frame. Gaston Glock knew human nature, and he knew the nature of the gun owner. He knew if he made the G18 an exact copy of the G17 plus the go-faster part or parts, then parts would be swapped and/or replicated. So, he made it in such a manner that even if you had G18 parts, you couldn’t just add them to a G17. They wouldn’t fit.
The Glock 18 shoots at a cyclic rate of 1,200 to 1,400 rounds per minute. That’s fast. I think back to my Marine days when my issued weapon was an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). It had two settings: fast and faster. At the fast setting, it fired 800 rounds per minute. On faster, it fired 1,000 rounds per minute. That’s really fast, and we were taught only to set it at that high rate of fire when it became gunked up and sluggish at the standard setting. I have fired it at the 1,000-rounds-per-minute setting, and I can tell you, it’s ripping fast. Almost like a chainsaw, which makes the name fitting. It’s hard to imagine holding something in your hand that shoots faster than that and is way smaller and lighter. I haven’t fired one, but given my experience with full-auto weapons, I can’t picture the Glock 18 being something you could control, at least not without significant training and hands-on time.
One of the issues found during the G18’s development was that at a cyclic rate of fire that high, there is a lot of friction that generates severe heat. Glock made adjustments to the frame to allow for cooling as the slide cycles. When looking at a G18, it looks like Glock just took a G17, machined in a space for the selector lever, then reassembled the now-modified G17. This isn’t the case, and there are a few key differences, about which Glock is hush-hush. But the end result is that you can’t simply take a G18 slide and mount it to a G17 frame, it won’t fit.
Another popular topic is the Drop-In Auto Sear, commonly referred to as a DIAS. The DIAS replaces the slide plate on a standard G17 and comes in full-auto and select-fire versions. It’s a felony to have one, unless you have the appropriate NFA paperwork, licensing, stamps, etc., but it is far cheaper than purchasing the rare Glock 18 for transfer.
If this is something you can legally get (with paperwork), the next question to be answered is, should you? That is an easy one. No. Sure, full auto is fun, but this is one that should be passed up. A G17 frame is just not made for full auto and running one at 1,200 rounds per minute is going to cause a lot of heat, and that’s a problem.
A Glock 18 has raised slide rails to allow for a larger gap between the frame and the slide, promoting heat dissipation. If you put a DIAS (or other full-auto replicating device) on a non-G18 Glock, the heat created will compromise the polymer frame. At the least it will lead to sporadic operation and function failures, and at the worst could lead to a catastrophic failure. It’s just not worth it.
Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt of Gun Digest’s Glock Reference Guide, 3rd Edition.
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- The Baby Glock Buyer’s Guide
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