Well - it's been a crazy couple of weeks since ROOK Tactical went live to say the least. First of all I want to thank each and every person who has visited the site, checked out our offerings, and in some cases bought items from us. We are a small locally owned Texas business so any support is greatly appreciated! We got some great feedback immediately, made some tweaks, and plan to continue tweaking the site until it's up to ours and your high standards. We would love it if you could also follow our Instagram and Facebook if you're into that sort of thing as we will definitely have drops there in the future also.
By now the majority of our first customers have received their goodies, and I hope you are all busy building that dream gun you have always wanted. It seems MOST parts are getting harder and harder to find as the Pandemic wears on, the current administration is making scary statements about gun ownership, and retailers struggle to keep all things in stock. We will have a few more sales in the near future to try and move the majority of the GLOCK inventory we have, but for now I'd like to talk about the Front Rail/Locking Blocks that ROOK Tactical has engineered and manufactured.
I myself own a few 80% Polymer Firearms that I am an enormous fan of. The idea itself is ingenious and it shows in their popularity. However after having a few difficult builds, and seeing a lot of issues with locking blocks both in fit and quality on various websites/blogs I decided that as an Engineer maybe I could design and manufacture an upgrade.
Original locking blocks even those made by GLOCK are made using Metal Injection Molding. Here is a decent run-down of that process:
While metal injection molding is great for small parts that you need to make a lot of quickly and at a low cost - more molds = more parts at a cheaper price. MIM like any manufacturing process has it's own idiosyncrasies. GLOCK uses it but they have had many many years to perfect it. GLOCK locking blocks are also ONLY responsible for interacting with the Barrel Lug whereas the locking blocks on a 80% Polymer firearm must perform two jobs. The first one being the barrel/lug interaction that essentially tilts the barrel to allow the next bullet to load into the chamber the second being that of retaining the slide to the frame. It therefore must take the loads and stresses associated with both of those simultaneous violent actions during a shot being fired. There is also the wear factor as even with gun lube the blocks will begin to wear after a while and the grain structure of MIM once exposed can begin to wear down and become more abrasive quickly as the metal particles are released into the surfaces. This is why GLOCK sells replacement locking blocks.
So for this application ROOK decided to use something I have a lot of familiarity with as an Engineer. Forged Billets. Each of our blocks are machined from a forged billet block of Heat Treated Stainless Steel. We use the same steel in our ROOK Tactical Pin Upgrade Sets.
This results in better grain structure, more strength, a higher achievable surface finish, tighter tolerances, and of course everything is parallel and straight as machined. This means better first time fit - or at least that's the hope. But this quality unfortunately of course comes at a price.
So far we have tested the the prototype G17 blocks pretty extensively, and they seem to fit in the majority of frames we have tried them in without much if any fettling or forcing. They show virtually no wear after 1000 rounds and we are very happy with their performance and may only make one small tweak before production, BUT we are now willing to sell some of the prototypes.
So without further ado -the ROOK Tactical G17 Rails for Polymer Pistols of the 80% variety will go on sale Sunday the 31st of January at 5pm. We currently have an inventory of 10 from the prototype batch. After that any sales will be on a pre-order basis for the next batch, and the lead time will be 6-8 weeks. We are working to get it down to four weeks but please just assume a minimum 6 week lead time minimum with receiving, quality, and shipping. To avoid confusion there will be two links one for the prototypes in stock and one for the pre-order. Once the first link shows out of stock you will have to go to the pre-order link to purchase. Also to keep people dropping things in their cart and then holding, the available rails will only deduct from stock once purchase has been completed.
The 19 Blocks have been tried for fitment in a few frames so far, but we don't have any rounds on them. Our friend MGB is working on that, and I am trying to get to the range this weekend. ROOK and Weather permitting. But we do expect them to perform pretty flawlessly as they were manufactured using the same process and material as the G17 Rails.
We hope everybody understands that we are a small company and the capital outlay required for mass production means that there are no reserve spots. If you want a rail and don't manage to get one of the 10 for the prototype sale then payment will be required up front. Think of it like a Kickstarter project if you will. We will be trying to hold stock in the future and of course lower the prices but this is where we are at as a business right now.
I also promise to try to make the blogs shorter in the future and as always thanks for Gettin'ROOK'd!
TLDR; G17 Large Frame Rails will go up for sale Sunday the 31st of January at 5pm. Once the 10 prototype blocks we have in inventory are sold you will be purchasing your spot on a pre-order list with a 6-8 week lead time. If you are not prepared to wait then please don't purchase.
