Recentlyish, I acquired two black dagger frames during one bundle or another. The grip is awesome and I love all the little improvements I observed on the frame, like the metal plate and the superior mag release button.
Since I own a stock Gen 3 Glock 19, I says to myself, yea why not? And I proceed to attach the Glock upper to the dagger lowers. Unfortunately, when manually racking the slide, I noticed the trigger didn’t reset consistently. Lubricant seemed to help, but it almost consistently reset every other rack.
Awhile later, and much more recently, I picked up a dagger upper at the dagger state armory, and figured it should work better. Unfortunately, even with a completely stock dagger upper, the triggers on both lowers do not reset consistently after each and every rack of the slide.
What do you think? Tinker with the trigger or potentially RMA it and wait safely and patiently?
I had the same problem, resolved it by replacing the Dagger trigger bar with a Glock OEM gen3 trigger bar. This was my plan anyway, but it seemed like the PSA trigger bars shark fin was really pushing up and/or out on the G19 slide.
I don’t care for the “bump” on the shark fin that the Dagger trigger bar has, like the Gen4 Glock. My understanding was that this was introduced in an effort to avoid missing the FPBS when the magazine release was reversed, but it just adds another friction point for the trigger pull if you’re not trying to run the magazine release wrong-handed. The magazine release doesn’t seem reversible on the Dagger frame, so not sure why they went with the bump in this case…
Mag release doesn’t affect that at all. Even on the two Daggers I have, the trigger bar will cock off to one side as it’s pulled. The nub limits how far it can move, to make it travel more smoothly over the center of the safety plunger. It’s still not a perfect setup even on OEM Glocks. But it’s better than it used to be.
If depressing the mag release on the normal side doesn’t move the trigger bar at all, I don’t see how reversing it would suddenly make that move. I could test it on my gen 5, but I don’t see the point.
I may be wrong about the why but that was something I had read about why the nub showed up in gen4 and still is not backported to current production gen3 Glocks.
Regardless, getting back to the Dagger, it would be interesting to know why there is this drag on the slide/trigger reset issue with a Glock upper with the Dagger trigger bar. Maybe just a little bit of fitting would resolve it rather than replacing?
The Gen5’s don’t have them but they could probably use them. Trigger bar still slides off to one side when pulled. At least on those the plunger is the same shape longways so it doesn’t matter as much.
I have heard part of the Gen 3 stuff not being updated is because it’s standard issue for some PD’s and things like that. If they made an upgrade then they’d supposedly need to retrofit everyone’s gun, or at least send the parts out. But I can’t confirm that.
Though I don’t really see the issue in them replacing things with some newer parts. Like the newer ejectors and extractors. The current ones work fine, just the newer ones work better. I put a Gen5 ejector in one of my Dagger’s.
I’m having a similar issue with a slide and frame I bought separately. When I put the new slide on the new frame the trigger just won’t engage at all. But when I swap the slide from my other dagger, the trigger on the new frame works fine and when I use my old frame with the new slide it also works fine. Everything is stock.
Check the inside of the slide, right side of it. There should be a track there, same side as the plunger and all. Make sure there’s not a groove worn into it. Properly heat treated slide won’t do that. I had issues with a Rockslide USA one doing that.
Combo of a groove being worn into that track/cam, plus a possibly out of spec connector can cause failures to reset, failures to even fire/heavy, heavy trigger pull, among other issues.
Check guides online for Glock connector protrusion. You can bend them back in or out as needed to fix some issues, if they will stay in place. That also comes down to the metallurgy. My OG Dagger had a bad one too and I had to use a Glock OEM spare since it wasn’t staying bent properly.
I just picked up a couple of Dagger frames. Finished 0ne with a complete Dagger slide that I bought on sale a few months ago, and another got a P80 slide that I finished.
BOTH of them have the trigger reset issue. The Dagger slide I bought from PSA is bone-stock. The P80 slide has a P80 branded parts kit.
I tried lubing, cycling repeatedly, and nothing fixes it. I finally dremeled off the “nub” because nothing else worked – now, they work 100% of the time.
Something isn’t right with this design. I’m glad I got it to work but it really does not instill confidence to have a bone-stock PSA finished lower and a PSA finished upper together and the trigger won’t reset half the time (or more).
And now that I’ve modified it, does that invalidate any warranty claim I might have?
The nub shouldn’t have caused any issues at all. It’s a factory Glock Gen 4 thing after all. If you have reset issues first thing I’d be checking is the trigger housing itself, specifically the connector.
Is it broken in? My new Daggers had lots of friction and some quirks to them but after break in they are super smooth. You can clean, lube, and just play with the gun a bunch to break it in as well. Rack and dryfire a ton.
Also check the protrusion on the connector. I had one Dagger with an out of spec connector and that can cause reset issues.
Also keep in mind that the Dagger is it’s own thing and I don’t think OEM Glock stuff is guaranteed compatible with it. Seen threads in the past about the slide rails having height differences and causing issues for some. If the slide sits lower with an OEM Glock frame slide, I can see that causing excessive friction with the trigger bar fin.
Sidenote, looking into it, the trigger bar nub on smaller caliber Glocks was actually for mag release related problems. For lefty mag releases, which the Dagger doesn’t have though. The mag gets pulled to the right, close to the trigger bar with the mag catch reversed, and can ultimately impact the trigger bar/safety plunger contact and cause light strikes. But it doesn’t affect pull form every account that I could find.
