Campaigning the PX4 in USPSA
I am working the PX4's issues hard to get a nice pistol for USPSA shooting. While I have never had a failure to feed, and can ride the slide home all I want and NEVER cause a jam, I am using a .40 S&W, and IIRC, the gun was originally designed and sized for .40 and may therefore have a few issues in 9mm not attendant with the .40 version.
The decocker is really killing my draw speed as it is stiff and hard to thumb up. This and the gritty trigger both have the same solution, douse liberally with an aerosol charged oil like TriFlow to wash small bits of steel and dirt out of the trigger and firing pin assembly. Particularly helpful is sticking the small "straw" down inside the firing pin block release pin while pushing it down with a dental pick. In general the pressure of the oil will force small debris out of the action. TriFlow works great, and works better if heated in warm water first and shaken well. Occasionally use the same straw and carburetor cleaner to remove all of the oil and debris and get the metal bone dry before applying a new coat of oil. I am also experimenting with Bone's ABEC-5 skateboard bearing oil called Speed Cream. Speed Cream wets extremely well, is clear, and bonds to the metal very strongly. It comes in an eyedropper container and sells for about $10 an ounce. To get the decocker to have a more civil tone I sit watching TV and click the decocker on and off hundreds or even thousands of times. Eventually, as with my 96, the thing gets pretty loose and stops jamming my thumb when I have to do it under time pressure in competition.
This is a very accurate pistol, and as I get mine broken in a bit, I am convinced it will outshoot my 96. It would be so much nicer with a longer slide or at least a longer barrel, but it is what it is for now. I love the rotating barrel lock and have described it in some detail on the Wikipedia page. The cam tooth is bearing a lot of load based on the amount of wear I have experience, so I am now using Kryton Teflon grease on it and like what I am seeing. Kryton 205 grease is $125 an ounce and comes in a syringe, but a little bit goes a very long way. It will not burn, will withstand temps in excess of 650 degrees, and for the barrel extension, at least with Practical shooting, that is a good thing. I also use it on the slide rail and barrel end/slide interface and sear. Very, very little is needed. I am pretty tired, having shot 6 USPSA stages today, but with the exception of 2 Charlies at 20 yards starting with a DA shot, the entire rest of the course I shot 2-Alpha. I hope someday to be as good as this gun. It is winning me over and outshooting Glocks, Sigs, 1911s, and every other gun at the range. Of course, in the end the operator is the key, and I am still more focused on accuracy than speed this early into Practical shooting, but this gun works.
The frame is actually kind of rubbery where the gun meets the man, and that is a good thing I think. In particular, when pressing really hard to get the grip tape to stick I can feel the grip flex. This is no doubt part of the secret of the PX4's light recoil. The very long recoil spring is too, and has been almost completely overlooked by the gun rag experts because it goes through the transfer block all the way to the back of the feed ramp and it is easy to miss its true lenght as a result. The bad thing is the grips are awful and the snakeskin pattern on the backstrap is directional so as to NOT support the weak had grip. ***??? Earth to Beretta, you want to have another look at that already? I have skate tape on the grips now and aside from the beating my hands took after shooting for 2 hours last night and 6 hours today, I think I am getting the grip dialed in now. Have I mentioned this gun is stupidly, amazingly, accurate? Like **** did he just do THAT accurate? I'd love to have it in 9mm about now as I am shooting Production class and get zilch in points for the extra recoil of a major caliber. Anyone want to trade theirs for a CZ75?
Issues:
The 10-rnd mags are crap, bad crap, and worse crap. First, the springs are very weak, and in spite of this they are very hard to load. A good part of this is the very aggressive stagger of the double stack, in part it is because the tooth in the autoloader plastic thinggy isn't flexible enough to get the rounds to choose a left or right path, so the rounds don't want to stagger right going down into the mag. Loading with a thumb has no such problems, but my thumb is almost raw today after all the loading. Second, the springs don't get the job done when you dump a mag in the dirt on a reload and the grit gets in the mag. Oil makes things much worse. I am working with Rain-X, an old snowboard binding trick, and it seems to be working. Rain-X needs to be applied over and over to build up enough thickness, but dries into the metal or "dry" so does not attract and hold dust. I still have to lube the outside of the mag just a bit to get a good release from the mag holder, but so far I am liking the Rain-X solution.
Now the really bad crap. The crease that runs from the bottom of the mag about half way up the side to limit the round count to 10 is about 2-3mm too high up and this causes the one and only serious problem I have encountered. When there is one in the pipe, which when time is critical and you don't want to waste a second or two releasing the slide on an empty pipe means always, the mag is very, very hard to get seated and locked into place because the stacked rounds are not sitting on the spring - they are sitting on that stupid too-high crease. Zero give. If you strip the rounds out of the mag you will find a ball-bearing shaped dent in the last round. I had 3 occasions today where the mag did not lock into place and I had to rack the slide to feed a round. I THINK I have this figured out correctly, but I am still studying this issue carefully because if there is something going on in the internals of the gun that is causing this problem then I am going to be bending, wearing or breaking something pretty damned quick because the solution is a thunderous blow to drive the mag into place. This only happens with one in the pipe AND a full mag.
This brings me to a slightly less serious, at least in its consequence, problem with mag changes. If you drive the mag home that hard, the Slide will often release all by itself. This can be quite disconcerting. However, given that driving the mag home like a freight train addressed the more serious problem above, I have decided this is actually helpful for me in competition as I can develop the habit of always driving the mag home hard enough to drop the slide and save myself a second or two - at least until the RO complains. There is nothing complicated going on here. The mass of the slide release button is sufficient that when ramming a mag home that hard, the button lags the frame’s pop upwards, which is effectively depressing the slide release. While of personal benefit to me, I think this is a potentially serious problem that Beretta should address. It happens quite frequently (1 in 5 times maybe?) if driving hard enough to seat the mag with one in the pipe RELIABALLY. If you know what is required I think you could get a self-release nearly every time. Currently, this is my goal.
As for sights, well, block sights suck, they are awful in the real world too. Block sights require that you cover up what you intend to hit. That pretty much violates common sense and everything you have every been taught about not pulling the trigger on anything you are not willing to destroy. What would that be? You can’t see it cause you have to cover it up to use the sights properly. Put bluntly, requiring that a shooter cannot ID what he is about to shoot, by design, is piss poor design. The correct solution is something like the DoubleRing sight or Burris FastFire optics. Think about a target popping his head up from behind a wall. How can you watch for the target and keep your sights trained on him at the same time? Well, you can't. Stupid design. Glock’s “6-O’clock sight is a so-so work-around, but DoubleRings are better (not allowed in Production) and halo optics the correct solution to a whole bunch of problems with sighting.
For USPSA we almost always shoot in blazing sunlight where all the day-glow stuff is unnecessary, but I do like the Day-Glow, TruGlow, Sponge Bob Glow Pants, or whatever they call it. It seems to work OK. I would remind everyone that the name of the game is front-sight-focus. In fact, the monthly USPSA magazine's name is Front Sight. It is everything. Keep this in mind when choosing colors. You don't want your rear sights distracting your eye from the all-important front sight.
I hope some of this is helpful. Most of this essay is probably going to turn out to be insightful and on target. Some of it will likely turn out to be wrong. It's a WIP, but it is being worked very hard. Please share your tips and suggestions, it might just same me a lot of time and money.
