I post about pistols from time to time and every once in a while do a review. My background is that I have been shooting USPSA since the early 2000s and hit G in 2006. Since then, one of the things that I do for a living is I am one of the owners of a retail firearms store with an attached shooting range. We sell and rent guns to the public. To me pistols are very subjective in that what feels good to me, may not feel good to someone else.
At some point in the last year, I did a kind of review on pistols and I don't really make an argument about any of the subjective stuff. I do however tend to comment on reliability. I think at this point, I am a pretty good source on it because 1) I have extensively shot most full frame production pistols in the US, more than a little bit. 2) We have a rental fleet with more than 500 firearms in it and we keep data on when they go out of service to include things like how often we have to clean them, how often and what kind of repairs we have to make and how often we have real failures.
About a year ago, I got to shoot a Walther PDP Pro with the Parker Mountain Machine comp and I really enjoyed it. So I bought two Walthers so that I could cannibalize them and made one for myself. This particular pistol now officially has over 50K rounds fired through it and I wanted to detail the problems that I had with it. When I first put the pistol together, I went to the range and in the first magazine I had two failures to feed shooting 115 grain Winchester white box range ammo. I immediately got aggravated and was looking at the pistol, the things I installed and saw the instructions for the comp. It clearly stated that the pistol functions with 124 grain or heavier ammunition and that 115 grain was not recommended. So I have now shot another 49,980 some odd rounds through it without a single failure. I have not had to replace a single part, there was not a single break or failure. Over the 50,000 rounds fired, I cleaned the pistol after the first 500 round range session because it was kind of covered with grease in some spots that smelled bad when it heated up. Since that cleaning, I have not cleaned the pistol once. (I have cleaned the end of the surefire multiple times and the optics multiple times).
I went back and checked our rental fleet where we have several PDPs including 5 and 4 inch frame pistols in both the normal and Pro versions. They do get cleaned every 5k rounds (got to keep the customers happy) but none of them have had a failure of any kind just like my personal pistols. I never thought that I would write this but Walther has moved into my personal S Tier of pistols in terms of reliability to join most Glocks and almost all of the hammer fired H&K pistols.
