Assembling the Guide Rod of a Springfield XD 9mm Handgun

Video Transcript

"Here's our slide, here's our barrel, our barrel's back in our slide, there's no movement in it, and here's our guide rod. We're going to be putting our guide rod back in to our slide mechanism. If you look right here, on the bottom of the barrel, you can see a round notch. Now, that round notch is going to seat with this back in of the guide rod. They're just going to sit in, it's just going to sit right into itself. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to set my slide down, I'm going to take the wider coils of the recoil spring are going to go to the forward part of the slide. I'm just going to insert that into the seating area. This is when I'm just going to kind of hold the guide rod and recoil spring with my left index finger and thumb. I'm just going to kind of hold that in place. Right now, it's not in place, see I can move it. What I'm going to have to do is push in with my right index finger, and just push that about 1/8 of an inch in and down so that the guide rod seats with the barrel. Push in, and there we go. No movement. I'm going to physically look down in here, I'm going to make sure that my guide rod is seated inside the barrel, and it is. As you can see here we have no play, no movement, it's real stiff, we can't lift the guide rod up. We'd have to physically grab the guide rod, at this point, to pull it back out. That's what we don't want to do right now because we're reassembling and we're not doing the take-down. Now that I know. You know that it's in you can hold it, actually, physically like this, the guide rod's not going to fall out. The next step is we're going to marry the slide with the frame."