Have you ever noticed your Glock’s barrel tilting while firing? The answer is likely no. The slide covers the barrel, and the cycle happens fast, so it’s hard to notice if you’re not looking for it. It’s easier to see while disassembling or cleaning your Glock pistol. When using a 16″ barrel in your pistol, as the APEX bullpup conversion kit does, the angle becomes easy to see. Almost every modern handgun features this tilting mechanism. This mechanism, known as “Browning action” is the reason for the tilt. Glock pistols also use this action.
You may be asking yourself, what is the cause of the tilting? How does it affect the accuracy of the firearm? What is the purpose of tilting the barrel? Glock pistols, as well as many other firearms, use a “locked breech” design in their action and barrel. John Browning perfected this design in his last design, the Browning Hi-Power. This design elegantly leveraged the laws of physics (no pun intended).
How A Semi-Auto Repeater Pistol with a browning tilting barrel Works
First, you must understand how a semi-auto repeater pistol cycles a new round into the chamber. Then we can understand the Browning tilting barrel mechnisms’ cause, purpose and effect on accuracy. The best example of this mechanism is a Glock. Glocks are recoil operated pistols. Short recoil pistols to be specific. The pressure of the fired projectile pushes the slide of the gun backwards. The pressure also sends the projectile out of the barrel. This is a great example of Newton’s third law of motion, there is an equal and opposite reaction to every action.
With higher powered rounds this cannot happen at exactly the same time. These higher powered rounds are commonly in Glock pistols. Upon firing, your entire pistol, the barrel, slide, and frame are recoiling together. This is the “locked breech”, and it remains locked together during time of fire and shortly after. The recoil spring and mass of your slide and other components aid in keeping your breech closed. After a certain amount of slide travel, the barrel unlocks and begins to tilt downwards. At this point, your barrel stops recoiling along with the rest of the firearm. Only the slide continues to move to the rear. This assumes you are holding the firearm with a firm grip. The distance before the breech unlocks allows enough time for the casing’s pressure to lower. Levels become suitable for extraction as the slide continues to travel backward.
How the Browning tilting barrel action assists ejection and chambering
The tilting also assists with reliable chambering and case ejection. There is a feed ramp on the bottom of the chamber end of the barrel, but, it is far away from the magazine. If you look at the pictures above, the Beretta 92 on the left is a “fixed barrel action”. The rounds in the magazine are in-line with the barrel, so it can have a smaller feed ramp. A more accurate example of a fixed barrel firearm would be the Hi-Point, as it is directly fixed to the frame of the gun without locking blocks. We will use the Beretta 92 for example sake here. The right picture is a locked-breech browning action Glock barrel, with a more prominent feed ramp.
The barrel tilts down and moves backward after each bullet has exited the barrel (once the breech has unlocked). This movement brings the feed ramp closer to the magazineand into alignment with the next round. As the slide moves back, the recoil spring is now under pressure. This pressure returns the slide forward which strips a new round off the magazine. This round travels forward and up the feed ramp, into the barrel. As the slide continues its journey forward, it pushes the barrel forward and up into its firing position. At the end of the slide travel, the barrel and slide are once again locked.
As far as ejection goes, the shell extractor is located behind your magazine. By bringing the barrel closer to the extractor it has less time floating unsupported by the ejector claw before it hits the extractor. This allows exactly the right amount of free space for it to tumble out of the pistol.
Why The Barrel Tilts
So why the tilting you may ask? Why can’t this all occur without the barrel moving? Well, it can, as seen in many non-locked breech firearms. The difference being, these firearms are of smaller caliber and direct-blowback. The barrel remains horizontal when the action cycles. Rounds in these magazines are pre-aligned with the chamber. An example of a higher caliber fixed-barrel pistol is the Beretta 92 mentioned above. The Beretta 92 is a non-locked breech, and a higher caliber. Manufacturing this firearm as a compact platform is not possible. The tilting mechanism allows for a more compact design.
How Does This Affect My Accuracy?
Well, the simple answer is: it doesn’t. Your firearm isn’t shooting with the barrel in the tilted position. It isn’t unlocking or tilting until the projectile has exited the barrel. As explained above, it’s only firing with a locked breech, at which point the barrel is horizontal. When chambering a new round, your barrel “may” not lock into the exact same position. Yet, the difference is likely less than a thousandth of an inch. This difference is very unlikely to affect accuracy. Generally, human accuracy is less than that of mechanical accuracy anyhow. The META Tactical APEX series 16 inch barrels are precision machined to a high-tolerance standard. Each barrel is quality checked many times to ensure you won’t have any accuracy issues in your firearm.
How is my barrel held in place?
The barrel is tightly held in place at the muzzle end by the hole at the end of your slide. There is also a jigsaw puzzle type fit on the chamber end, pictured below. If you look at the top of your pistol, you will see some cuts in the slide and mating grooves in the barrel which interface together. The barrel precisely slots into the slide, “keyed together”. Finally, your barrel is also held in place with your takedown lever/pin and locking block as an anchor point.
In Conclusion
At the end of the day, you can rest easy knowing that your firearm is no-less accurate due to a Browning tilting barrel. The reality is, the barrel isn’t tilting “down”, but rather it is tilting “up” as the firearm goes into battery, to align it with the sights. The tilting barrel design was a big step in the improvement of firearm technology. Found in most handguns today, this design is reliable, strong, accurate, and simple. It may have seemed odd to you at first, but now that you know how it works, you can embrace the tilting action and educate anyone else who notices the barrel tilting in their handgun or APEX series conversion kit!
