Everyone wants accuracy, and regardless of your level of gunsmithing services, you can help.

If a customer wants their handgun to be more accurate, you can refer them to a premium gunsmith for a couple grand worth of hand tuning. That doesn’t do much for your bottom line, and most customers won’t want to shave an inch or two off their 25-yard groups badly enough to drop four figures on the project. On the other hand, there are things you can do in your store with basic gunsmithing skills that can make a significant performance difference.

There are two general categories of accuracy improvements. One is arguably mental, although there is a physical element to it. The other is purely mechanical. Let’s explore.

Mental and Mechanical

How many times has a customer brought a gun back to your store to inquire about adjusting the sights? “It’s hitting low and left, so I want to figure out how to adjust the sights.” You’ve likely heard that, or something similar, on many occasions.

While some factory handguns do ship with point of impact that varies a bit from point of aim, most are well calibrated out of the box. The sights have to be really, really out of whack to see a substantial difference between point of impact and point of aim at handgun distances. Technically, there’s also the potential variable of ammo-type. Yes, every type of ammo shoots to a slightly different point of impact, even if bullets are of the same weight.

Then again, it’s not a huge difference. In fact, the only time I’ve seen point of impact shifts measured in the “multiple inches” category is when shooting specialty ammo that’s ultra-light or extra heavy compared to the norm.

So, back to the inquiring customer. As you know, the odds are in your favor if you guess that their problem is more of a technique issue than a mechanical one. Whether milking the gun, jerking the trigger or trying to time the shot with a last-millisecond trigger yank, these “sights out of alignment” problems are almost always a result of the shooter moving the gun while pressing the trigger.

It’s easy to do. Most handguns have trigger weights ranging from 3 to 12 pounds. Most handguns weigh less than 3 pounds, with many hovering just over a single pound. When you need to exert 5 or 10 pounds of force on a, let’s say, 2-pound object, that object will want to move. The more time and physical movement required to exert that force prior to a trigger break, the more likely the shooter is to allow the gun to shift off target. In other words, the customer is fighting the trigger.

According to Paul Erhardt at Apex Tactical, “When you’re in a fight for your life, the last thing you want to be fighting is your trigger.”

Well said. A quality trigger doesn’t just help you shoot well when plinking on the range or during competition; it matters in defensive encounters too. Just ask law enforcement officers saddled with those ultra-heavy triggers deemed “safer” by know-it-all politicians and lawyers.

Technically, trigger management is a mental problem. In theory, we all ought to be able to make a perfect trigger press regardless of trigger weight and feel, within reason of course. In reality, there are mechanical fixes that can make that perfect trigger movement much easier. A trigger upgrade can make a huge difference in accuracy. Not because it changes the mechanical accuracy potential of the handgun, but because it facilitates the shooter executing a perfect trigger press. What’s a perfect trigger press? One that is intentional and safe while not moving the gun.

Trigger Upgrades

A good trigger isn’t just one that offers lighter pull weight. Distance and sensation come into play too. A 4-pound trigger that travels 3/4 of an inch feeling like a brick sliding on a cinder block will be harder to control than a 4-pound trigger that breaks after 3/8 of an inch of smooth travel.

“Smoothness of a trigger motion is also very important," Erhardt said. "When driving a car, it’s a lot easier to control the vehicle on a smooth road than it is on a bumpy one.”

Upgrading a trigger has become a simple operation for many of today’s service pistols like Glocks, Smith & Wesson M&Ps, Sigs and many others with the use of drop-in trigger assembly components. Depending on the results your customer wants, you can do as little as replace the trigger itself. Or you can replace other key components like trigger bars, connectors and safety plungers.

As a case study, let’s look at a couple of Glock upgrades. The first scenario was the most basic part replacement — swapping the trigger itself on a new Glock 43X. For the second, we dug a bit deeper and swapped out the trigger, trigger bar, connector and safety plunger.

The Glock 43X has a decent trigger out of the box. This one had a pull weight of 5 ½ pounds, a rough take-up stage that moved about 1/4 inch, followed up by another 1/4 inch of pressure until the break. Some gradual stacking bridged the two stages of take-up. The trigger reset after 5/16ths of an inch of forward travel.

I swapped the trigger face only with a new Apex Tactical Action Enhancement aluminum trigger, leaving everything else factory stock. The new trigger offers a flatter face and a straight rather than curved profile. Since the geometry is different, the performance changed too.

After installation, the take-up roughness was gone, and the travel went from 1/4 to 1/8 inch. The break stage was also 1/8 inch. As expected, since we didn’t change other parts, the weight was the same at 5 ½ pounds. Reset occurred at 1/4 inch of forward travel. In this case, we dramatically improved the quality of the trigger press by shortening the cycle and smoothing things out without impacting the “safety” factors related to pull weight. It’s a worthy upgrade for carry and service guns.

In the second trial, we did a more comprehensive upgrade using a Glock 19 Gen IV pistol. The before performance offered a 5 ¾-pound pull weight with 3/8 of an inch of gritty take-up followed by another 1/4 inch of travel before the break. As with the Glock 43X, the reset occurred after a hair over 1/4 inch of forward travel.

Even though we replaced all of the trigger components in this case, the only tools required were a Glock punch pin and a bench vise. I ordered and used an Apex Tactical Armorer’s block. This holds the pistol stable, provides relief cuts for pin removal and houses a big magnet to catch stray parts. It’s well worth the money if you’ll be doing trigger work on a regular basis.

The Apex folks provide excellent “how-to” videos so we won’t go through the entire process here. Suffice to say that the job can be completed in 10 to 15 minutes with practice. All parts are designed to be “drop-in” and you won’t need any files or hones. With just a bit of attention to detail anyone can do this with confidence.

The after results were dramatic in this case. The pull weight was reduced to 4 ¼ pounds and the new system operates with stunning smoothness throughout. Take-up travel was reduced, and the break is more crisp. Reset occurs with just about 1/8 inch of forward travel. Plus that colored aluminum (red in this case) looks really snazzy.

Neither of these upgrades did anything to change the mechanical accuracy of the pistols. If you put them in Ransom Rests before and after, you wouldn’t observe a difference in on-target performance. However, in human hands, both pistols are noticeably easier to shoot accurately. Since the user doesn’t have to fight the trigger as much, it’s easier to fire a shot without torqueing the sights off target during the trigger press.

Mechanical Improvements

Mechanical accuracy arguably boils down to one thing. As Randy Lee from Apex Tactical explains, “When the barrel locks up in consistent relation to the sights, that’s where you get maximum accuracy.” That’s it. When barrel and slide are fitted perfectly, the sights attached to the slide line up with the barrel precisely the same way with every shot.

The idea of the semi-drop-in barrel is to tighten the fit between barrel and slide so there’s a consistent lockup. With mass-produced handguns, every part has a bit of dimension variance. That’s necessary to ensure that each part will fit with every other part even though they’re produced in separate batches.

Practically, if Smith & Wesson makes 1 billion barrels one day and a billion slides the next, any sample from the barrel pile has to fit with any one from the slide pile. This is great for production and to keep costs low. With modern production techniques, the tolerance variances are small, so the results are still pretty good. Most factory pistols lock up consistently enough to shoot groups of 4 inches or less with relative ease.

Lee explains the importance of consistent barrel lockup.

“With polymer guns specifically, the barrel has to be locked up with the same amount of lockup force for an extended period of time," he said. "The barrel has to lock up with the locking block, and there’s pre-tension on the front of the barrel. The bottom of the barrel rests on the bottom of the slide opening while the top makes contact ¼ or ½ inch farther back, essentially holding the barrel in place. This relationship between slide and barrel needs to remain stable for a short bit of movement.”

Barrel Upgrades

As an experiment in improvement potential, I did some user-installable upgrade work to a Smith & Wesson M&P 2.0 full-size pistol. I wanted to explore upgrade solutions that didn’t require expensive custom work by a specialty gunsmith.

Since the 2.0 series of the M&P came along with significant improvements to the original M&P trigger, I didn’t bother with a trigger upgrade. It’s a solid trigger out of the box and appropriate for carry and home defense use. What I did do was install a semi-drop-in barrel from Apex Tactical. The fitting process required nothing more than some blue Dykem layout fluid or a sharpie, some emery cloth, a narrow pillar hand file, a vise and a diamond hone.

With the semi-drop-in barrel, you hand fit a new barrel to the specific slide you already have so that you can eliminate front-to-back and side-to-side shake. It’s a fine line because if things are too tight, the handgun won’t go into battery reliably and may experience feeding problems. If things are too loose, you might end up with too much movement and accuracy worse than before you started.

Following the clear process outline in the instructional video, I first did a bit of diamond honing on the exterior of the barrel itself. Apex adds a bit of extra material at the 10 and 2 o’clock positions so you can achieve a perfect slide-to-barrel fit up front. Once the barrel inserts into the slide without undue force, then you do a bit of filing on the barrel hood extension. This piece mates with a notch in the slide and controls the degree of play between a locked-up barrel and slide.

By filing the hood extension, you can fit the barrel and slide so that they lock up but have no shake between them. There’s also a fitting pad on the base of the barrel lug that controls vertical play. You may need to remove a bit of metal from this area too. In my case, the vertical fit was correct out of the box and I didn’t need to make any adjustments. I did have to remove a bit of metal from the barrel hood extension.

The “after” results of the barrel upgrade were stunning. While results varied by ammo type, most average five-shot group diameters from 25 yards shrunk by half. Now I was able to print groups in the 1.5-inch range using both premium self-defense and practice ammo. Sig Sauer’s 124-grain V-Crown averaged 0.89 inches. Sig’s 115-grain FMJ practice ammo printed an average group size of 1.52 inches. American Eagle bulk 124-grain FMJ ammo averaged 1.45-inch groups. You get the idea.

Helping your customers achieve big performance improvements doesn’t require thousands of dollars in custom gunsmithing work. With a couple hundred dollars in parts, and some installation service offerings on your part, you can take their service pistols into a whole new league.