The Unofficial P64 Resource Forum

In the past, there are some threads about parts on the P-64 breaking. One part is the Safety breaking. This seems to be one of the parts that does break and difficult to find sometime. As recently posted, the safety is a cast part, machined and heat treated. This part is inherently OK, but what appear to be happening, is dry firing and the shock of the Hammer seems to cause stress cracks in the safety with a complete failure resulting.

This is not uncommon even with other pistols. The venerable P.38 can suffer the same problem with a lot of dry firing. My opinion is dry firing the P-64 may not be a good idea since spare parts are not commonly available. Use a "Snap Cap" and dry fire away.

Again, my opinion on the Safety breaking is the heat treating of the part. Being cast is no problem, but when they are machined, there are a lot of 90 deg corners and when heat treated, there are stress points set up in the sharp corners and constant "hammering" of the part from dry firing will cause cracks in the corners. If the corners were radiused, the problem probably would not exist.

We probably fire these pistols more in 1 year than any of the Polish military expected them to be fired in 10 years. So, they will appear to break more often (just my opinion on this fact). I am sure the pistol was fully tested and put thru torture tests and if worked fine. We don't have a lot of parts breakage on the pistol so it is good, but there are a few parts that can be potential for breakage, so we need to know which parts and correct our handling of this area. As I stated, I think the dry firing without "Snap Caps" may be the major contributing factor to the breakage. Most pistols would be OK dry firing, but there will be a few that will break. Even the US Beretta 9mm has its own problems, so this is not isolated to the P-64.

Do my thoughts make sense?

you answered my question.

Excellent post by our venerable moderator.

I have often wondered, also, if perhaps there was a particular run of safeties during one given era of manufacture where the temperature got too high during the heat treatment, and that not necessarily all, or even a majority of safeties were affected. From what public information that I have read on the P-64 and peoples' experience with it, this is a fairly rare event.

Edit added: Sorry. I first wrote "hammers" when I meant "safeties"! (This note for those of you who read it before I corrected my error.)

In Polish army and police procedure is to dry fire pistol into bullet trap when unloading so this failures I believe are to be sporadic(otherwise this problem would be far better recognized) and attributed to new faulty parts rather than flaw in design or materials used. Problem is you don't have replacement parts and when sporadic breakage is not a problem for a service pistol it sure is a problem for you...

"herrmannek" is correct, we just don't have the spare parts to replace a piece if it were to break. A couple of my favorite pistols are the Walther P.38 and PP, I personally don't drop the hammer on these pistols on a consistant basis because the safety possibly can break! Again, "herrannek" is correct, incinsistant manufacture or heat treating can cause sporatic problems with parts breakage. I contribute much of this to the heat treating, as heat treating is a science of its own. When a part goes to heat treating, the material info is given to them and if this is off, the heat treater has no control except to have the part meet hardness requirements. If the part is hardened to the proper hardness, it can still be too deep and this will cause a part to break from "shock". Firearms building is tough business to make sure everything is correct.

My opinion is still that the P-64 is one of the best small pistols ever built! With a small amount of "polishing", I would rate it right up with the Walther PP in quality, and I like German firearms.

I think the fact that the factory mainspring is so strong also contributes to the breakage, in addition to the other issues.

abwer

You make perfect sense. As to the Beretta, it's biggest problem is that it is not a 1911A1 chambered for .45 ACP. We should have kept the .45 and let NATO come into compliance with the US.

abwer

You make perfect sense. As to the Beretta, it's biggest problem is that it is not a 1911A1 chambered for .45 ACP. We should have kept the .45 and let NATO come into compliance with the US.

In my view, this is correct.

bZinggg.

I agree , on the 1911 100%
one of the best combat pistols ever made ( even though I can't think of a better combat pistol )

NORM