This is /k/ related, but I couldn't find a handgun general thread and wasn't sure my questions merited making a thread for them.
I got a Keltec P17 yesterday. It was sort of an impulse purchase. I had the transfer done at a store with an indoor range, so I swabbed out the bore, just in case there was any kind of preservative or whatever in it, put a couple drops of oil on the slide rails, and tried it out. Slide movement felt a little bit rough and it made a sound like a tiny high-pitched zipper when I cycled the slide, which worried me, but it did go into battery.
Slowly and painfully I put 350 rounds through it. I was almost convinced it was a lemon when I left. I was getting constant failures to feed, extraction, and ejection problems, plus failures to go into battery. I thought CCI "Clean-22" would be the perfect stuff to break it in with. I had thought they'd fixed the problems with it. Stupid me. The only reason I didn't tell the store to return it as defective was that when I tried Mini-Mags, it mostly ran. It shot really low when I got it out of the box, but the sights are adjustable and I was able to get it zeroed dead nuts on at ten yards, at least with Mini-Mag solids, which encouraged me a little.
I got it home and cleaned it very, very, very thoroughly. I and put some SOTARacha lube on the slide rails, barrel hood, recoil spring, and so in, and this morning I went to the range with it and a few boxes of Aguila, Armscor, and a partial box of Federal Automatch. I put 250 rounds through it. It ran like a raped ape with the cheapest, dirtiest ammo I could find, short of Remington Thunderbolts, and I am halfway tempted to get a carton of those the next time I'm at Bass Pro Shops to see if it chokes on them. It is accurate enough that at the end I was hammering out head shots on a silhouette target at ten yards as fast as I could find the front sight and press the trigger, with 100% hits except for the ones that made oval holes. I didn't even have any duds or stovepipes, which is unusual when I shoot more than a handful of Automatch at once. It did start keyholing toward the end. The rifling looks a little shallow to my eye and there are chatter marks on the tops of the lands. When I pull a bore snake through it there's noticeably less resistance then with my Ruger Mk. III. I just cleaned it again and put more lube on it. I may go to the range with it again tomorrow.
Things I like:
trigger is surprisingly smooth for something with most of the fire control components being sheet metal stampings
front sight is fiberoptic
rear sight is adjustable for both windage and elevation
points very naturally
seems to be reliable when it's clean and properly lubed
16+1
frame-mounted safety is in just the right place and works just the right way
Things I don't like so much:
trigger is spooky light with no perceptible wall before it breaks, published specs say it's supposed to be a four pound trigger, if this one's even two pounds I'll eat my hat
trigger has crazy overtravel, reset is very far forward and is a tiny, barely perceptible click that I can miss when I'm not concentrating hard on feeling it
not a fan of the pivoting paddle magazine release
slide stop is half an inch too high on the frame
extractor tension seems marginal
as with many Kel-Tec products, the frame is a plastic clamshell held together with screws, and the halves don't match perfectly, with a noticeable sharp edge all the way around
magazines needed to be loaded fully and shot until empty a few times before the feed lips smoothed up and allowed the top cartridge in a full mag to go into the chamber reliably
it points naturally, but it feels cheap and plasticky, so lightweight as to feel insubstantial, like a kid's toy, the Internet reviewer who said he thought it was made out of recycled beer cans and a broken supersoaker wasn't far off at all
All in all I'm positively impressed with it and glad I made the purchase. It's a hell of a lot more reliable than the Taurus TX22 I got based on the hype when they were released, which is now on its fourth trip back to Taurus, this time with a cracked slide. I'm so happy with it that I bought an optics plate for it. When it arrives I'm going to stick the smallest, lightest RMSc green dot on it that I can find on Amazon and shoot it until it breaks. I've ordered four more mags, too. Would it be dumb to get a cheap airsoft-grade light and put it on the rail, just to make it extra tactical?