The Day Warrior Glock 19 Clone Review

I have had very limited access to firearms for a bug chunk of my adult life. Twenty-two years living in Japan will put a big wrench into any firearm training and definitely no ownership. I could not even access firearm manufacturing websites while enjoying free internet at many mainstream coffee shops because the content would be blocked. I sometimes think I was the reason it was blocked.

While I enjoy training and time at the range I also enjoy putting guns together. I am yet to explore my basic 2nd amendment rights and build a firearm from the ground up. The ARs and handguns I have put together are usually in kit form or a series of serialized parts transferred from my local FFL.

I have put together a number of AR-15s together based on parts from companies like Aero Precision. I have also put together a number of Glock 43x and Glock 19 clones. Some have used all 3rd party parts. Many of my projects have been slide replacements sitting on top of standard Glock frames.

I recently purchased the PSA Dagger from Palmetto State Armory. I loved the lower frame of this firearm. Very comfortable to shoot and while I only had a few hundred round through it I thought it could be a good foundation for my The Day Warrior build.

The parts list for The Day Warrior Version 1.0 were very straight forwards and I purchased everything from two companies.

• PSA Dagger Lower Compact Polymer Frame without Trigger Group
• APEX Tactical Action Enhancement Kit for Glock – Gen 3/4
• Zaffiri Precision Complete Upper – RTS – G19 Gen 3 – Slide, Barrel, Parts and Sites

v1.0 was a nice little build. It had the ergonomics of the dagger but I was able to add a threaded barrel and option for adding an optic at a later date. I really like the looks of the Zaffiri Precision slide combined with the Dagger frame.

How did it perform? Unfortunately I had a lot of reliability issues with this combination of parts. Mostly failures to feed at a rate greater that twenty failures for two hundred and fifty rounds tested. This is a little less than 20% failure rate but definitely not dependable enough to consider as an EDC.

The Day Warrior Build v1.0 Test Results can be downloaded below. Raw testing video is here.

I talked to Zaffiri Precision support and most of the products are tested around standard Glock OEM parts. While the PSA Dagger frame is a Glock clone and did work, the reliability was lacking. I decided to switch to a Glock 19 Gen 3 frame.

While maybe not as ergonomic as the PSA dagger frame the Glock 19 frame does look pretty darn good. Reliability also jumped up significantly. Out of three hundred rounds fired over a two day period I had only two failures. I had another test sessions of seventy six rounds with four failure but these four failure all occurred on the last magazine or two and may have been a cleaning or lubrication issues with a new build. I will have to put some more round though to verify but I am definitely happy with the increase in performance after switching to the Glock 19 frame.

The best part about building my own custom Glock 19 is that I was able to add my company logo to the back plate. Okay a little goofy maybe but pretty cool that this is actually carriers the logo of my company. The next steps will be to get the frame customized. I have a few ideas there. I would also like to give the gun a good cleaning and lubrication to see if v2.0 continues to perform better than v1.0.

The Day Warrior Build v2.0 Test Results can be downloaded here. Raw testing video is here.

Please stay tuned for my updates and testing.