what can you tell me about hte P64?

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The Polish P-64 "CZAK" is one of the nicest little blow-back pistols made. It looks and functions a whole lot like the Walther PPK but can be found for a much lower price and is at least as well made. Very accurate and dependable. The ammo, of course, is the 9X18 Makarov round, which is a tad more powerful than a .380 ACP (9X17 Browning). My carry ammo is the Hornady Critical Defense 95 grain JHP.

Oh - and it's not DAO. It's single or double.
 
P64

They are great accurate little guns, they are DA/SA, I've never seen one that was DAO. The double action trigger pull is terrible, up at about 15 pounds but the single action pull is very nice, mine breaks at about 4 pounds.
 
The two I fired were DA/SA, not DAO. The DA trigger pull was extraordinarily heavy (some have apparently measured it at >20 lbs.). I've read that you can buy a spring kit to help with this. The SA trigger pull was quite light. If you get a lighter mainspring to help with the DA, you'll probably want to find a stronger trigger-return spring to keep the SA from dropping to 3 lbs. or less. Maybe that's included in the spring kits -- I don't know. The recoil was also a bit unpleasant compared to a Makarov for me, mainly because the small grip of the P64 and the finger-rest protrusion on the magazine do not match up well at all with my large hands, as I can't fit all three fingers on the grip and finger extension. In any case, it's a solidly-built little pistol. I'll probably pick one up eventually. I just wish they came with mags with a flat-faced finger extension.
 
Great guns. Probably the best trigger in SA that exists on a surplus gun. Very accurate.

Thing is, if you break any parts they are next to impossible to find. I had one with a broken extractor and never could find another one.
 
The one I had was sweet little pistol finished to very high standard. Quite surprisingly both double and single pulls were pretty good (there was no 20lb+ DA trigger pull). The only reason I don't miss the gun is because when I handed it over it brought price of second hand R9 with four magazines to $649+tax. That pistol is in very good condition.
 
A little slide bite happens on my slender hands.

But the heavy DA pull plus the finger smack during recoil make it much less fun compared to most handguns I've tried.

Otherwise I really like the handgun, and three middle-aged friends (DeSoto County) have MS CCW permits.
They carry the P-64 with them all the time, and it is their Only carry gun.
 
Great guns. Probably the best trigger in SA that exists on a surplus gun. Very accurate.

Thing is, if you break any parts they are next to impossible to find. I had one with a broken extractor and never could find another one.
There's a guy in Poland who advertises on GunBroker and has spare parts out the wazoo.
 
They hurt to shoot. Slide bite galore.
Disagree. The PPK and PPK/S will try to amputate your thumb, but you shouldn't have trouble with the P-64, unless you're gripping way too high. Unlike Walthers, the rear portion of the slide is beveled on the edges.
 
Polish P64:
Fixed barrel, blowback, DA/SA firearm in 9x18 Makarov with a slide mounted decocker/safety combo: up to fire, down to decock/safe. It has a European style heel/butt mag release. The gun locks back on the last round, but there is no external slide lock/release lever. Pulling back on the slide releases the slide lock.

This gun has a DA trigger pull in the neighborhood of about 25 lb, plus or minus 5 pounds.


Safety issues to be aware of:

1. This gun is not dropsafe when the safety is off.* It can fire when in DA mode, if it is dropped on the back of the hammer with the safety off.

*It has a rebounding hammer and a non-inertial firing pin. IOW, the firing pin is longer than the channel in which it resides. Therefore, the hammer can not be lowered all the way, or the firing pin would be resting on the primer. Instead, the hammer rebounds and is held captive on a "half cock" notch, which can and does fail if the gun is dropped on a hard surface and lands on the hammer. Basically, this gun has an inertial hammer, rather than an inertial firing pin. The manual safety blocks the firing pin and the hammer, and it should be considered the only reliable way to make the gun safe with a chambered round.

2. SA trigger: due to the sear/hammer interface, the SA trigger is capable of very good accuracy, but it suffers a little in the safety department. The geometry (at least on mine) is not "positive" at all. Rather than a glass rod snapping, the trigger pull feels like pulling a cinder block over the edge of a cliff. This is great for making tight groups. But there is no positive engagement. If you pull the SA trigger to the edge of breaking and let go, the sear will NOT reset. At this point, jarring the gun could potentially make it fire. (If you find yourself in this situation, pulling back on the hammer will allow the sear to reset.)

Other quirks and trivia:

Finish: Most are blue-blued. More rarely, you may get one that is plum-blued to an eggplant-ish color. It's sort of a milk chocolate brown with just a tinge of purple.

Loaded chamber indicator: This gun has a really cool loaded chamber indicator. It's a pin that extends through the back of the slide where it can be seen and felt. The indicator extends through the breechface, and a chambered round presses it flush against the breechface, making the indicator extend past the back of the slide.

Grip frame: The gun's frame doesn't have a backstrap. The only thing covering the mainspring is the plastic grip panels.

Cosmoline: The guns are stored in cosmo, and after you buy one, you will probably have to detail strip the gun and clean, thoroughly. Cosmo built up around the trigger bar, particularly, can cause the gun to fail-to-fire when you pull the trigger.

Spare parts: very limited availability of spare parts.

Hammer spur: there are at least two different hammer spurs. I believe the rounded spur is the older one. The newer one being the triangle shaped spur.

The year of manufacture is stamped on the slide. My gun is as old as I am.

The position of the SA trigger pull is surprisingly nice. I have sold some guns, before, because the
SA trigger didn't break until you pulled the trigger nearly all the way back against the grip frame, making the trigger reach way too short. The P64 SA trigger positioning is pretty decent. It is way forward, pretty close to where the DA trigger starts.

The SA trigger and the fine sights make the gun freakishly accurate to shoot, off-hand. I have never fired a gun with a similar sight radius anywhere near as accurately as this gun. I'm talking orders of magnitude. In fact, this gun shoots about as accurately as the average full size pistol, in my hands, and I usually have big problems with a short sight radius on a pistol.

Mine feeds hollowpoints just fine, unlike my Hungarian 9x18. In fact, my P64 has been 100% reliable and very accurate. (Well, except for the time the trigger didn't engage after flipping off the safety... before I cleaned out the cosmo).

Safety: The manual safety works by doing several things.
1. it blocks the hammer
2. it traps the firing pin. When rotated to safe, part of the safety inserts into a notch in the back of the firing pin, locking it in place.
3. it pressed down on the disconnector, which pushes down on the trigger bar. This prevents the trigger bar from interacting with the sear. So when on safe, the trigger pulls freely but doesn't "touch" anything important, same way it's done in many modern firearms.
4. At the end of the safety's travel, the disconnector also pushes on the sear, tripping it and releasing the hammer; at this point the hammer and firing pin are both blocked.
 
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Good thorough post, Gloob.

I have two of these, one really nice one that I got from AIMSurplus, and one that someone had tried to paint the slide that also was missing it's tiny safety detent ball so the spring was riding directly on the safety and got bent/twisted while taking pliers to operate.

I made the mistake of putting myself onto a wait list at a vendor I'd never bought from and won't again as I think they sent me someone's mucked up pistol just to make a sale.

I was able make a working detent piece from bronze and clean the little piece of s*** to look about half as good as the other and will have to get into the DA trigger for both of them - it's the worst C&R trigger I've ever used, bar none. But I do agree that the SA trigger is decent.

I think the P64 would be a really nice pistol in a lighter caliber, mabe .32 auto.
 
With a name that ends in "ski" I had to have one. Really a well made gun. It would easily be a $500 dollar gun if made in the US.

I've seen better DA triggers on Craftsman staplers. The SA is frighteningly light. Like a cocked Smith revolver.... But lighter.

I'm glad I have one. Not in a hurry to get another.
 
The DA trigger pull is easy to improve with a lighter main spring from Wolff. (And a heavier recoil spring will, of course, soften the recoil.)
 
Like a cocked Smith revolver.... But lighter.
I admit to having only one example of each, but IME, I disagree.

My Smith has the scariest trigger I have ever used. (It's a -1, FTR). It breaks at under 2 lbs, and the scarier part is that it occurs with no detectable movement of the trigger, whatsoever. In fact, if you press light enough, the only detectable movement is FORWARD. It's as if the trigger operates solely by pressure, which is obviously not true. It was so odd to me, that I was compelled to purposely drop the gun to see if it would hold. It did.

The P64 isn't that light, but the geometry lends itself to accuracy. On most guns, there's a bit of takeup. And after you take out the slack, all the goodness happens in a small area. Then after it breaks, the trigger flies backwards in "free fall" until it hits something hard. A competition gun might have an adjustable trigger stop to prevent this.

But a P64 is different. The SA trigger pull is long, and it's not a matter of takeup or slack. You just have to move the trigger a palpable distance to get the sear to release, due to the amount of sear interface and the trigger leverage. But it doesn't stack. And it doesn't fly free after the break. There's plenty of overtravel, but it's almost the same pressure/resistance as the rest of the trigger pull (trigger return spring, basically, but now minus the bit of friction between hammer/sear). So the gun doesn't torque after the trigger break, and the bullet leaves the barrel well before you will reach the end of the overtravel. At a certain point in the trigger pull, the gun just fires. It feels kinda cheap, really. Kinda gimmicky, because it achieves this with neutral sear/hammer geometry, which has its own issues (very, very weak sear reset). But it's effective, in terms of accuracy.
 
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Magazines are the biggest problem. There are no good aftermarket or new factory OEM ones. Replacement springs can be made from Makarov ones.

There, again, check GunBroker

Links please. I have accounts with several disrtributors and the ones I see advertised often are used ones that have had the plastic baseplates modified. Such modifications make me leary of them.

I only have two magazines at the moment. One works well the other magazine spring is weak and needs replacement. One of my winter projects is to modify Makarov springs to see how that works. As I recall I think the Mak spring needs a couple of coils clipped off. However if you have a source for new springs that would be a great help.
 
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I've seen better DA triggers on Craftsman staplers. ...

I'm glad I have one. Not in a hurry to get another.

These two sentences from your post are very well put - I like your 'phraseology'. They express my feelings better than I could.

I respectfully disagree on the P64 / S&W SA trigger pull comparison, but then my handguns and yours may well feel very different in operation.
 
Blowback HURTS older hands.
Pretty little pistols, they are for sure. But I much prefer a 9mm, which has considerably more punch, and less recoil (snap).
 
Considering how hard it is getting to find a real firearm made of all steel plus the fact that they sell for around $200 in very good condition they should be a lot more popular than they are. The ammo goes against that though.
 
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