Being a little rough or sloppy on the trigger with a light polymer gun can pull your sights off the target. However, plenty of people carry 1911s, and you know what you get when you chamber a 39-ounce pistol in 9mm? A very, very soft-shooting pistol.Ī lot of high-intensity competition experience behind various handgun platforms has shown me that heavier guns obviously recoil less, but they also tend to remain steadier as you are pulling the trigger. It’s not even a compact gun (whatever that is), being roughly the size of the original PPQ, which is considered a full-size duty gun. Trigger pull on my Q4 SF was 5.25 pounds, with a smooth take-up and a relatively crisp break. The PPQ has consistently had one of the best trigger pulls of any striker-fired gun on the market, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever tested a PPQ trigger that actually had a pull weight as high as the advertised weight. The Q4 SF sports Walther’s Quick Defense trigger, its standard trigger system, with an advertised pull weight of 5.6 pounds. It’s identical to the Q4 SF except for the rear sight. If you like the adjustable, plate-mounted rear sight setup like that found on the Q5 Match SF, Walther is also selling the Q4 SF OR (Optics Ready) pistol for $100 more. The rear sight is drift-adjustable in the dovetail for windage. If you take it from direct sunlight into a dark room, or hit the sights with the beam from a flashlight for just three seconds, the dots glow brighter than tritium night sights for at least three minutes.
If you take this gun from a lit room into a dark one, the sights glow dimly. The dots are photoluminescent paint, which gives you most of the performance of tritium-powered night sights for a fraction of the cost. The steel sights have three large dots on them that are white with a faint green tinge. The top of the slide is flattened and serrated between the sights. You’ll spot “Q4 SF” on the left side of the slide. Unlike the polymer piece on the original PPQ, the recoil spring guide rod in the Q4 SF is steel. The magazines have high-visibility, red polymer followers, and the index holes on the rear are numbered. The Q4 SF uses standard PPQ magazines, and two 15-round magazines are supplied with each pistol. The magazine well on the frame is generously beveled. The button is big and reversible for you lefties. Like other members of the PPQ M2 family, the Q4 SF features the American-style button mag release. The G10 grips add a little bit of girth, but the pistol feels good in the hand. The frontstrap of the frame is nicely checkered, as is the front of the trigger guard. The pistol is 5.4 inches tall and is a bit thick side to side at 1.3 inches, thanks to the G10 grips that protrude a hair farther than the slide release levers. The grip frame on this pistol is the same height as that on the larger Q5 Match SF, just shortened front and back. While it is definitely thicker in the hand than the PPQ, it feels just as good. Combine the substantively more aggressive gripping surface with a heavier pistol that recoils less, and you’ve got a gun that just doesn’t move in your hand when shooting. The texturing on the grips covers everything but the frontstrap and is also more aggressive than the factory surface on the polymer-framed guns. The grips wrap around the rear and meet in the back. And unlike the PPQ, the Q4 SF comes with G10 laminate grips held in place by screws. The frame is machined from billet steel and sports a slightly larger beavertail than found on the ancestral PPQ. With its steel frame, unloaded weight of this pistol with an empty magazine in place is 39.7 ounces, which means you’ll need a good holster and a good belt to carry it. It is a striker-fired pistol with a four-inch barrel and a 15+1 capacity. The Q4 SF is a smaller version of the Q5 Match SF, and while it isn’t simply a steel-framed version of the PPQ, the resemblance is strong.
WALTHER P1 KAL 9MM SERIES
When it was introduced, Walther hinted it was just the first in a new series of steel-framed guns, and just over a year later, the company has delivered on that hint with the more compact and concealed carry-suitable Q4 Steel Frame. It weighs 41.6 ounces, some versions have a big mag well, and it’s nearly nine inches long. The Q5 Match SF got a lot of attention, but it was a big, heavy gun, not at all suited for concealed carry. Competition pistols generally have superior sights, trigger pulls and easy-to-use features, so why wouldn’t they attract the attention of the gun-buying population at large? The success of the Walther Q5 Match Steel Frame should have been a clue to everyone that far more people than just competition shooters are interested in competition guns.