I never replicated this issue on the range with live ammo except when attaching my Evo9 can to the PPQ Navy I have. There was a known issue with Navy models that Walther USA now has a "fix kit" for. Essentially, the slide would almost go into battery while riding the reset, but not quite. As soon as you released the trigger, the slide would move fully into battery. But unless you replicated it from slide lock with a dummy round while watching the slide very closely, you wouldn't see it.
I did a full analysis and ultimately determined that from the factory, the extractor hook on my example was too long. It over-engages the rim and pushes the sharp edge of the extractor into the brass at the groove. If you dropped the slide on one dummy cartridge several times, it would seriously chew the brass up in the groove. By applying all the tension of the extractor spring onto the sharp tip digging into the groove, it was retarding the slide travel just enough to prevent 100% lockup.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the extractor spring tension or barrel/slide/frame lockup, the extractor hook was just overkill. So I took as many different headstamp examples as I could find and measured them all at the groove. After determining a nominal min-max groove depth, I very carefully removed a few thousandths from the extractor hook length, then rounded the bottom a bit more and polished everything up. The tip of the hook still reaches the groove on the narrowest brass I could find, it just doesn't apply as much pressure to it. It stopped shredding the grooves on my dummy rounds.
Once I got the length/tension correct, this 100% eliminated the reset/lockup issue under recoil, even with the suppressor attached and using my powder puff match loads, which is a 147gr flat nose at 900fps. I did order the "fix" kit from Walther and as stated above their CS is excellent, but I haven't bothered to install it and it's in the original case with everything else they come with.
That's just an anecdotal example of one, but Walther Forums had a long thread on PPQ Navy reliability issues, and no one had figured out the actual issue I identified until I posted it. For a much more technical response, I looked up the original thread and where I started posting (memory is fuzzy because this was over 5 years ago. Start at Post # 266:
https://www.waltherforums.com/thread....36528/page-14
Last edited by glocktogo; 10-15-20 at 13:47.
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