Go from mushy to much better with Timney’s Alpha Competition Replacement Trigger for the Ruger RXM.
Twenty years ago, I would have never thought there would be so many drop-in trigger options to choose from. If you’re a relatively new shooter, you’ve probably never thought about it because, for about the past decade, drop-in, do-it-yourself trigger fixes for guns have been commonplace.
But it hasn’t always been that way, and Timney Triggers is a big reason why you have so many aftermarket trigger options, to include some for handguns like the Ruger RXM.
Timney has been around since 1946. For a long, long time they existed on customers who were sporterizing military Mauser rifles. This was a very common practice right after World War II. Many veterans brought Mauser rifles home with them, so Timney made their name by offering aftermarket triggers for those Mausers and for Enfield and Springfield rifles. They also offered triggers for the Remington 700, Winchester Model 70 and Ruger 77.
Around the turn of the century, John Vehr, who took over the company from his parents, did two very important things: He hired a talented engineer by the name of Calvin Motley, and he hired a marketing guy from West Virginia named Chris Ellis.
Motley designed a Timney trigger for the AR-15 and, a few years later, a trigger for the Remington 870 shotgun. These triggers, combined with Vehr’s vision, Motley’s engineering savvy, and Ellis’ knack for getting the word out to customers, created a perfect storm. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Timney now offers more than 100 triggers that shooters can install themselves including handgun triggers for Glock and S&W, and now the Ruger RXM.
In case you are unfamiliar with the Ruger RXM, it’s a Glock clone built on a Magpul polymer frame. But unlike the Glock, the RXM has a removable, serial numbered, stainless-steel fire control insert (FCI), and you can switch this FCI between different frames.
As I stated in my February 2025 edition of this column discussing the Ruger RXM, “I carried Glock pistols for almost the entire 13 years I worked in law enforcement. I trusted them and shot them well but was never in love with them. Mostly because that damned indentation behind the trigger guard was murder on the first knuckle joint of my middle finger. The Magpul EHG grip frame on the Ruger RXM is less notch and more taper and solves this problem. It fits my hand much better. In fact, compared to a Glock, the EHG grip is a better fit to my hand in every way.”
Of course, being the Glock-like clone that the RXM is, it shares the Glock-like mushy trigger. The trigger on my RXM broke at a somewhat distasteful 5 pounds with about a full centimeter of travel between when the passive safety was disengaged and when the sear was released. Talking with Ellis at Timney, he said their RXM trigger would have a lighter pull weight and that the trigger travel would be slightly reduced. Being the trigger snob I am, I ordered one and Ellis was right. I’ll get to the details in a minute. First, I want to share with you some notes on installation.
I’m not going to go in depth on the installation of the trigger, because it comes with instructions. Timney has a detailed video online, and if you are somewhat familiar with taking a Glock apart, you’ll pick up on the internals of the RXM pretty quickly. I will say that the process took me about 30 minutes and that includes the time it took me to take the photos.
However, there was a problem with the installation: The pistol worked, but after the sear release, the trigger continued to travel and pushed past the disconnect. I thought I might have done something wrong, so I called one of the technicians at Timney. When I began describing the problem he knew exactly what I was talking about before I finished.
According to the technician, the disconnect on less than about 1 percent of the RMX pistols from Ruger will not have enough tension, and it lets the trigger bar push past. He said all I needed to do to correct the problem was to disassemble the pistol and just tweak the disconnect bar out a very slight amount. I did as I was told, put the RMX back together—this time it only took me about 10 minutes to do everything—and the pistol worked perfectly.
The new Timney Alpha Competition Replacement Trigger for the Ruger RXM reduced the pull weight from right at 5 pounds to just a smidgen more than 2.5 pounds. But it also reduced the distance from the point where the passive safety is disengaged to the point where the sear is released by about 2 to 3 millimeters, with the overall travel from safety release to sear release ending up at less than a centimeter.
Though I’m not a Glock fan boy, of all the Glock-like clones on the market I like the Ruger RXM best, and even more so now with its new trigger. If you like yours or are considering one, the Timney drop-in trigger will only make it better.
Just keep in mind that there’s about a 1 percent chance that the disconnector on your RXM will need to be fine-tuned a very slight bit. You won’t need a gunsmith to install this trigger or tweak the disconnector, if necessary.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
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