Posted: 11/9/2014 4:02:59 PM EDT
| So this is probably more of an incompetent gunsmith problem more than anything else. But has anyone had any issues with warren sights fitting their xdm? My gunsmith said they were notorious for taking a lot of work to get on. Well, now I'm holding the trijicon front post in my hand. I never even fired the handgun. So do the after market sights need a lot of fitting , or has anyone had any similar issues? Or did an incompetent "gunsmith" destroy my set of warren sights? |
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Quoted:
So this is probably more of an incompetent gunsmith problem more than anything else. But has anyone had any issues with warren sights fitting their xdm? My gunsmith said they were notorious for taking a lot of work to get on. Well, now I'm holding the trijicon front post in my hand. I never even fired the handgun. So do the after market sights need a lot of fitting , or has anyone had any similar issues? Or did an incompetent "gunsmith" destroy my set of warren sights? XDs can take quite a bit of fitting. Fitting is not rocket science, just time consuming. And what you are paying a gunsmith to do. I take it the front sight blade is broken? He owes you the replacement. |
| I just noticed front post was way off. I could take it on/off from the left easily. Easily as in it will likely just fall out from the left side. I can see where he sanded it down (and even noticed burs he left on my slide!) they are closed today so I'm impatiently waiting going there tomorrow. At first it never appeared to be loose |
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in my experience and from what my smith told me, XD sights are installed in the factory with Thor's hammer. Why they don't size their dovetail better to the sights or vice versa, unsure.
I wonder if stretched the dovetail and maybe they are designed to be pushed out one way and your smith went the other. |
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Quoted:
I just noticed front post was way off. I could take it on/off from the left easily. Easily as in it will likely just fall out from the left side. I can see where he sanded it down (and even noticed burs he left on my slide!) they are closed today so I'm impatiently waiting going there tomorrow. At first it never appeared to be loose He took too much off in fitting. Requires replacement. |
| The curse of living in small town America. Was the only gun shop in the area and I didn't want to buy all the tools. Well, he should stop buying his entire wardrobe from 5.11's online catalogue, because come tomorrow he will be buying me a new trijicon post. This is my carry gun too! Now I have to get all the tools or drive 3 hours to the next closest gunsmith. |
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Quoted:
The curse of living in small town America. Was the only gun shop in the area and I didn't want to buy all the tools. Well, he should stop buying his entire wardrobe from 5.11's online catalogue, because come tomorrow he will be buying me a new trijicon post. This is my carry gun too! Now I have to get all the tools or drive 3 hours to the next closest gunsmith. You do know you can send the slide to a competent pistol smith. |
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1. Buy a backup gun.
2. Send your XDm slide to http://xdman.com/ for sight replacement 3. ??? 4. Profit 
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| Having installed thousands of XD/XDM sights, it is my opinion that Trijicon are the WORST sights to install. They harden them too hard for the average gunsmith to install without breaking a few of them. A file won't touch them without a lot of work and so we see people taking them to a grinding wheel. I use a surface grinder to fit them, and they still are a pain in the butt. |
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Loose front sights are unfortunately pretty common. Ajames is your guy if you want to send it out. However, you can fix it yourself if you don’t want to go without your gun, here is what you have to do. First, you need to make the sight slightly bigger. The way you do this is to put the sight upside down on a vice and gently tap the bottom dovetail with a small punch and hammer. What this will do is to slightly peen and distort the dovetail which will make it have better contact with the slide. Second, you will now need to push the sight into the slide. The best way to do this is with a good slide pusher. The one I use is the one made by Pistolgear – see here: Third, once you have pushed the sight in and centered it properly – I used a pair of dial calipers – the sharp end. Fourth - You need to glue the slights in. Use Loctite 620 which is a "retaining compound”. Do not mistake this for the regular red loctite because that is a thread lock and you cannot use that here since there is no thread. What you have is a gap between the dovetail and the grove on the slide and you need something that can bond material with as much as 0.015” clearance – that would be Loctite 620. Not a cheap solution but a tried and true one that is guaranteed to work. |
| I brought it back to that guy to see what he had to say. He was nice about it and set it again by mending the dovetail like you said. He was baffled on how. I'm glad I had a sight post again, but now I'll never be 100% confident that it will happen again. Never thought it would happen the first time. I'll start doing it myself from now on. Thanks for all the good info everyone. |