A Tale of Two Crossovers: Glock 19X and 45 in the Gen 6 Era By: GI Suburban Dad

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SPDSVBENV, nasties, and welcome to another edition of NICE RACK! In this installment, GI Suburban Dad takes a look at a couple of Crossover Glocks — specifically, the Glock 19X and the Glock 45. GISD is going to talk about what you can do with those Gen 5s now that Gen 6 (and transitory V Series) is out… though, to be fair, the G19X and G45 are more like Gen 4 ½. Anyway, but he may be more Colonel Flagg than Jason Bourne, but he knows his stuff. Give it a read. ~ Richard Kilgore

Grunts: SPDSVBENV

I get it, the latest and greatest Glock is out. Right now, that’s Gen 6 (and I guess the “V Series,” but no one includes it). I freely admit they’re a really nice evolution of the line. But what about our older ones? If you’re like many of us, you have some old Gen 3s, 4s, and 5s hanging around the safe. What about those?

Much like the eclectic assortment of pens in your junk drawer, you don’t even know where many of them came from. Maybe not even when they showed up in your house.

I’ve tried playing CSI with the two featured here. I know when the 19X and 45 were released, and the fact that I bought them before I had transitioned (to red dots) tells me it was some time between 2018 and 2021. What I know for sure is that I hadn’t shot them in years, and when it came time to pick a gun for a class or range trip, they weren’t ever even close to being considered.

I love a good gun build project, so I set out to rehabilitate these two old Tupperware classics into something I’d actually prefer to run. What I ended up with are two test beds for similar but different approaches to just how far you can take an older Gen Glock. Overall, this cost way more than I expected, but it also turned out way cooler and more fun than I could have hoped.

For those of you who are impatient, I’ll spoil the rest of the article for you: If you do not already own one of these pistols, don’t just run out and buy one for an identical DIY. You’ll wind up spending roughly $1,850 (not including the flashlight and optic, which you’d have to buy for any gun) to build a flat-shooting pistol with a great trigger that takes Glock mags. They already make that gun; it’s called a Platypus. It costs more or less the same as one of my project guns, and the hard work is already done for you.

But if you do happen to have one of these old warhorses gathering dust….

Crossover Taxonomy

The 19X and G45 are technically “Crossover” platforms—marrying the G17-length frame with the G19-length slide. While the 19X is often called a “Gen 4.5” due to its maritime spring cups and Gen 4-style magwell lip, the G45 is a “True Gen 5,” incorporating the flared magwell and front serrations that became the standard before the April 2026 Gen 6 rollout.

The Glock 19X and the 45 are basically the same gun. The 19X, of course, was born out of the US Army’s Modular Handgun System (MHS) competition. It was to be a textbook case of the government’s ability to overthink and overspend on a decision as benign as choosing the least-used, least-lethal weapon on the battlefield.

It even led to (then) Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to say, “We’re not figuring out the next lunar landing. This is a pistol. Two years to test? At $17 million? You give me $17 million on a credit card, and I’ll call Cabela’s tonight, and I’ll outfit every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine with a pistol for $17 million. And I’ll get a discount on a bulk buy.”

Quick Specs: Both pistols utilize the “Crossover” design—a full-sized G17 frame with a compact G19 slide. The G19X is the “Coyote” military variant with a Gen 4-style magwell lip, while the G45 is the black, “True Gen 5” Law Enforcement evolution with a flared magwell and front serrations.

After all the time and expense of rigorous evaluations, Sig undercut Glock on price. The government said “Cheapest is always best”, the P320 was selected, and as we all know, nothing bad ever came of that in any way, shape or form.

I try not to write about things you can find elsewhere, but I share this anecdote because that’s how I learned about the 19X. And seeing it in that weird two-tone brown, I knew I had to have one.

If the G19X was a Generation 4.5, then the G45 was a true Gen 5 with some lessons learned, like maybe we don’t make the front of the grip hang down so far that previous-generation magazines are incompatible. Instead, we put in a God-awful front cutout, which they say is to help strip out the magazine.

That’s an action that might happen once in a lifetime, versus how that grip will hurt your hand every time you shoot.

Thankfully, Glock quietly did away with that “feature”, but Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Bottom line, I ended up with two nearly identical guns with no provision to mount an optic, and while they were perhaps the best Glocks made to date, they quickly felt dated.

<Digression!> Everyone back then freaked out over how innovative a Glock 19-length slide was on a 17 grip, completely ignoring the several-year-old HK VP9 that had these exact dimensions. Why? Because HK chose to put a 15-round magazine in a 17-round-length grip, no one noticed. <end rant.

I’m going through a Port and Comp phase in my life.

I broke the seal on having a slide milled for direct mount optics by having some work done on my beloved SAO CZ 75B. After that, I was ready for more.

Actually, at first I thought I might stop there. Then the question popped into my head, “Just how far could I take these things if I maxed them out?”

Since I also plan to pass these two guns down to my two boys when they are of age, I was tempted to make them clones of each other. Instead, I realized it would be a lot more fun to fill the same attachment slots a la video game speak, but with different parts. So you’ll see below where one is ported, the other is comped. One has a weighted grip plug filling the back of the grip; the other has a magazine well, and so on.

There were some identical items used, because I found them just so outstanding that I wanted nothing else. Let me hit those quickly first.

I actually won a free stippling job from Cody over at Curran Tactical one night during our range competition. (Oh, no, not by winning the match; it was in a raffle.) So, I dropped off my 45, thinking it might make an interesting side note to this build. What I got back was pure artistry. The grips feel as good as they look, and they look amazing. His work ruined me for stock grips, so right away I knew the 19X was going over to him. These things are some seriously grippy bois now.

The next repeat is the Kynshot hydraulic guide rod. I am at a loss to describe the difference this makes other than to say it makes a noticeable difference. The best thing I have come up with by way of analogy is driving a car around with only springs and then adding shocks. It seems pricey at first, in the $100-120 range, but once you shoot it, you’ll want them in everything. Recoil magazine last year put it really well in saying it’s almost like a good but not great compensator has been added.

Other than that, both have Streamlight TLR-1s because I like them as lights and because they allow for holster compatibility. Both also have direct-mount optic slide cuts (though done by different vendors), and both have plain, all-black, taller iron sights installed, which is what I prefer. Call me a simple man but having another dot (especially fiber optic) for a front sight competing with my optic dot for my attention is a recipe for disaster for me. Now for the stuff that’s different.

As I mentioned I started by getting an optic attached. I hate tiny little screws going into the slide of my gun, although pro tip: If you cross thread them you don’t need Loktite. I had an Acro looking for a home so that’s what I went with.

Wager Machine Works did my milling, and I couldn’t be happier with the precision fit. This setup, despite allowing for a very low red dot mount, still required some taller irons and a Cerakote job to treat the newly exposed metal, all of which Wager also did. The Acro is a bombproof optic, and I’m good with the window size, but at the price point, I would like to see a thinner border around the glass. Maybe that’s what makes it so tough.

I also got around to replacing the “super terrible why on God’s green Earth did they put this on a $650 optic?” plastic battery cover that immediately starts to strip out and break if you use anything other than the Aimpoint tool perfectly aligned to remove it. There are several good options, including some cool prints, but I went with a plain black Tango Down version. They even named it “Severe Duty” so you know it’s super tactical. Not to be confused with the “Severe Doodie” incident of 2008, I don’t want to get into. Long story short, I’m banned from public transportation in Pittsburgh and talk about ruining a stranger’s quinceañera!

Anyway, after I got this back, I started hearing great things about the Radian Ramjet and Afterburner, so I decided to dress this Barbie Blaster up some more. As the famous orator Borat once said, “Wa wa wee wa”! The change is immediately felt and it is dramatic. I shot the 45 with this comp next to the still stock 19X and they might as well have been entirely different guns. Many others have commented on this product, so I’ll leave my praise at that. Related I mentioned above that the matching TLR-1s allow for holster compatibility. I should note that this is also because my holsters accommodate 17-length slides, which the Ramjet essentially makes the 45 now. If you were determined to reuse 19-length holsters, you’d need to go the porting route below.

Next, I learned about the existence of the C&H Precision brass weighted grip plug, which I found on the interwebs and immediately threw up in my mouth a little bit over the price. The guy telling me about it was a big fan, and he’s a shooter I admire, so I took the plunge. Turns out they are pretty great. So great that I had to look up the tungsten options, which caused me to throw up outside my mouth but in fairness, I had been eating gas station sushi that had been in my car for 2 days, so it might have been unrelated to the price of tungsten. The weight goes exactly where you want it in the gun to counteract recoil, and overall, it makes the gun feel like a gun. Which probably makes no sense, but when you feel it for yourself, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Lastly, my only misstep. I wanted to keep a high level of reliability, so I went overly conservative on the trigger replacement. I put in the Apex Duty trigger, and as you’ll see in my shooting notes, it was the only “upgrade” that wasn’t really one.

The 19X lost the MHS as noted above, but I still thought it looked cool, and really, how many newly released guns come with a lanyard attachment? I had completed my 45 build and recovered financially enough that I felt my marriage could handle a second build. I knew what I was keeping the same, but I also knew what I wanted to change for comparison.

Porting was the biggest thing, and some Guntubers had me interested in Monsoon Tactical’s “Lucky 7’s” setup. The gun went to Ohio and while I was clicking drop-downs on their site selecting my optics cut I saw they could do front serrations, something the gun desperately needed and not something every machine shop will do. Monsoon also has a very thoughtful cueing system where they won’t ask you to mail them your gun until 2 weeks before they are actually ready to work on it. Something I wish other machine shops offered when I was without my beloved Staccato P for 9+ weeks waiting for it to get ported.

I was fresh out of spare optics (or ones I was willing to cannibalize from other guns) so I went with the tried-and-true Holosun 509T. Similar to the Acro, it attaches more like a rifle sight on a Picatinny rail. Did I mention how much I hate attaching optics to pistols using little screws threaded into the slide or a plate? Best of all, Amazon sells them and lets you buy stuff with your credit card points, so score another one for my marriage longevity.

Next, as much as I liked the weighted grip plug, and as much as I am normally wary of magazine wells (they often cause a lot of magazines without extensions not to seat fully under stress), I decided to give the SLR Rifle Works magazine well a shot, and I’m glad I did. It looks great, adds some weight to where I want it located, it also does more to facilitate magazines going into place than I would have previously given mag wells credit for.

Lastly, I’ll expand below, but Cody from Curran Tactical schooled me on a trigger company I had never heard of, Tactical Pontoon, and after feeling one on his gun, I was sold.

The 19X, next question. Okay, so you might want to know “why”. It comes down to two things.

1. Lucky 7’s porting is definitely flatter shooting than the Radian Ramjet comp, and that is saying a lot, because the Ramjet is dramatically improved over stock. I didn’t want to believe my own feelings on this, so I had others shoot it with no prior coaching, and all of them said the porting was flatter/softer shooting.
2. The Pontoon Tactical trigger is lightyears better than the Apex duty. For the additional cost of 2 boxes of ammo, you get a lifetime of better performance. This is really noticeable when I ran them side by side on “The Test” (Ten shots, ten yards, 10 seconds). The 19X made it feel easy while the 45 made it hard to go faster without unsettling the gun.

The Apex is getting replaced first chance I get, I might even treat myself to Tactical Pontoon’s “Heisenberg” model, which I literally never thought a Glock trigger could feel like.

I won’t go so far as to say it’s “1911 good” because the geometry makes that impossible, but it definitely felt as good as a very good single-stage AR trigger in my limited testing. The Apex honestly feels no better than the stock trigger (which I ran side by side).

I would think that, for $130, even an unrefined heathen like me could tell some difference in hand.

Ammo To Go provided me with my preferred 124-grain weight range ammunition, for which I am grateful. I keep sounding the alarm, ammo shortages are coming. Please, friends, buy now.

My final thoughts are a lot like my opening thoughts. These guns are a ton of fun to shoot, and I want to take them to the range with me all the time now. If you already have the gun and you like projects, you should absolutely do it.

I would not, however, go out and buy the guns and spend this much money to get performance (possibly even better performance) that’s otherwise available off the shelf in another platform.

Through this process, I came to love my Glocks all over again. Just as some people claim they grew up shooting 1911s, I got my start shooting Glocks. I honestly think a lot of folks have burnt themselves out on 2011 (myself included). Now they’re going to enjoy coming back to what they (we) know, and know works.

If that description fits you, I hope this article gave you some ideas for getting the most out of them.

In the meantime, I’m shooting the heck out of these and re-thinking the timeline for when I’m going to hand them over to my boys!

Below you’ll find a list of the Glock accessories I utilized for this comparison.

• Glock 45 All-In, $2,750
• Glock 19X All-In, $2,500

• Wager Machine direct mill for optic, Cerakote OD Green
• Aimpoint Acro
• Dawson optic height sites, all black
• Streamlight TLR-1 [Gun.Deals, Palmetto State Armory, Optics Planet]
• Apex duty trigger
• Kynshot hydraulic buffer [Gun.Deals, Primary Arms, Optics Planet]
• Radiant ram jet and afterburner [Gun.Deals, Palmetto State Armory, Primary Arms]
• Curran custom stippling [Curran Custom Shop]
• C&H Precision brass weighted grip plug

• Monsoon Tactical front slide serrations, direct mill for optic, “lucky seven” porting, Cerakote
• Holosun 509T FDE [Gun.Deals, Palmetto State Armory, Primary Arms]
• Curran custom stippling
• SLR rifle works magazine well
• Streamlight TLR-1 FDE [Gun.Deals, Palmetto State Armory, Midway USA]
• Ameriglo blacked out suppressor height iron sights
• Kynshot hydraulic buffer [Gun.Deals, Primary Arms, Optics Planet]
• Pontoon tactical critical mass trigger

Now you’ve seen what I did – what would you do with yours?

Olivo -A Tale of Two Glocks

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