New Printable Coming Soon: The PPPX - Walther PPX (Patreon)

It has been a good minute since I posted an update here, and for good reason, though those reasons I will make available in the post immediately following this.

(Excerpt from the introduction of the assembly PDF for this model.)

The Walther PPX is a peculiar gun. It’s a budget-minded, hammer-fired offering from Walther. Both have had three short years of production. While its action and hammer-firing experience was well-received, it was quite panned for its high height-over-bore axis along with its clunky design.

This was one of the kits that I had bought with the intent to build a backlog, so this kit has been waiting for over two years, I would guess. Occasionally, I peruse gun action sites looking for part kits that look viable to reverse-engineer. This happened to be one of them.

My kit did not come with a magazine release retainer or spring, and no replacement parts were available. I decided to see if a Glock magazine would fit, and indeed it does, but initially at the cost of the last-round hold-open feature being removed. This was a worthy tradeoff for a working handgun. In addition, I did not get a slide-lock spring either, so I used a Glock 43 takedown spring to model and use in its place until we found a COTS replacement.

Fortunately, as an experiment, I was able to partially restore the last-round hold-open for Glock magazines, but at the cost of losing access to the last round in the magazine, and some additional modification to their magazine. For converting a parts kit that was never meant to use this magazine in the first place, I’ll take partial restoration of this feature as a victory. (The user can choose whether they want to make use of this or not.)

You can read in more detail about it here:
https://twitter.com/nguyenkvvn/status/1680157326244737025

And a discovery of the OEM mags being the same capacity here:
https://twitter.com/nguyenkvvn/status/1696733424176816569

You can also learn about how the trigger system works here:
https://twitter.com/nguyenkvvn/status/1687226315458433025

Assembly is very easy. The drop-in trigger and hammer housings are held in place by the takedown lever and a single pin, respectively. The only difficult part of assembly is the requirement of a 3mm x 18mm slave pin to retain the trigger reset lifter and spring. I was able to go from a fitment model to a firing test within 15 calendar days, due to the relatively straightforward design of the PPX’s internals too.

I would like to acknowledge and thank the_aveees, as I referenced the Glock Gen4/5 magazine and magazine release negative geometry from an unreleased project of ours. I would also like to acknowledge and thank UberPoor and GeraldKatz. UberPoor went out of his way to procure, then model, the OEM PPX magazine, magazine release, and the magazine release retainer to design a negative model of the magwell for this frame. GeraldKatz and UberPoor helped identify the dimensions and specifications for some selected springs in the kit, the ones I did not have, as well.

(End excerpt.)

Fortunately for you guys, not only are Walther PPX kits compatible (tested with 9mm), but the model supports the later-released Walther Creed kits (9mm) too. This is not public knowledge yet, but will be as we move towards open beta. There aren't any listings right now on the usual auction sites, and eBay and other vendors are rather overpriced. You should be able to score a PPX or Creed kit for under 100$ as of writing on GunBroker when one appears.

Public beta announcement will be made on October 1st, though if you have a kit, send me a ping and I will let you in early now that we have wrapped up private beta testing.

I moved fairly quick working on this too. It's crazy we went from this fitment model:

To a proof-of-concept within a few days:

To something more resembling a traditional handgun a little later after:

I'm particularly excited to get this towards release and begin to calculate roughly how many engineering hours I spent from design all the way through documentation. This project I felt that I was able to approach with my now-matured CAD skills, and was able to test myself on how quickly and effectively I could fit and model a design. The dev process definitely felt more fluid and streamlined on the PPPX. I found that the PPX was a good model to test my skills against since the design was generally simple, but included enough complex geometry to investigate. In addition, there was good fun to be had experimenting with the Glock magazine working in a Walther handgun.