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.