Kahr PM9 Mini Range Report

[marklbucla]

I bought a Kahr PM9 off of Bud's Gunshop a couple of weeks ago and finally took it out to the range today. It's much lighter than its all metal counterpart, the MK9.

Shot about 100 rounds through it at steel plates 15 yards away. No failures of any kind and it handled very nicely. I was surprised that the recoil didn't feel as stiff as from the MK9, considering how light it is. The trigger was a little heavy, but I'm hoping that it'll lighten and smoothen out over time.

The only problem was that it was hard to get the slide to close after a fresh reload. Pulling back on the slide didn't disengage the slide release and pushing down on the release was rather difficult.

All in all, I'm looking forward to getting a Desantis Nemesis in the mail from Midway in the next few days and pocket carrying this little beauty. I don't think I'm able to hide a LS9 very well in this summer heat, so I'll hopefully be able to find the fix in my new PM9.

 

[sfmittels]

Good choice, especially for summer. Best of luck with it.

I got a new PM9 a few weeks ago, but I bought mine from Cylinder & Slide gunsmiths, where they did a lot of polishing, a trigger job, added rapid-acquisition night sights, and a few other reliability and accuracy goodies. It was 100% reliable right out of the box.

But several times it would do the same thing you described: the slide would hang up when chambering the first round from a full magazine. I'm left-handed, so I never use the slide stop anyway. I slingshot the slide to chamber the first round. The few times the slide balked at chambering the first round, I just smacked the back of the slide with the heel of my weak hand (keeping my finger off the trigger, of course), and everything went fine after that. After my initial 200 round break-in, the problem pretty much went away. I'm not worried about it, because it always has a round chambered when I'm carrying. And if you ever need to actually use it for self-defense, you're not likely to be doing any reloading.

 

[mlandman]

I have one, 800 or more rounds through it. I think the feeding round 1 is a magazine issue. The way their mags hold the angle of the rounds is the worst of any of my brands (H&K, S*W and Kahr). When I watch chambering the first round, it is not sitting at the bullet up slant needed to smoothly hit the ramp. I think the shock of the slid hitting the slide stop during ejection kicks the next round up to the correct angle.