After acquiring my Walther PDP 4" Compact for holster making purposes at RFV Tactical, I quickly started liking the gun. I made a few tweaks to the gun to fit my large gorilla hands better like shortening the slide release levers and recontouring the beavertail and modifying the large backstrap. I also cut three coils off of the factory recoil spring to make it shoot a little softer, as the PDP is notoriously over-sprung. With those modifications, it worked surprisingly well for me and earned it's place as my absolute favorite striker fired pistol.
I then acquired a Full-size 4.5" PDP and did a lot of custom stuff to it including having the slide and barrel ported by Impact CNC Machine, changing out the recoil spring assembly with ZR Tactical components, and I also installed a Walther Performance Trigger.
I've shot the Full-size 4.5" at several action pistol matches and did really well with it. I really wanted to build another completely custom Full-size PDP with a compensator, so I acquired a factory gray polymer 4.5" lower and a 4" upper so that I could add a Parker Mountain Machine barrel and compensator to give it a 5" slide length (I really wanted a 5" lower, but I couldn't ever find one). Once I got the 4" upper and compensator put together, I decided to use it on my first Full-size 4.5" lower, and put the ported slide and barrel on the new gray frame along with a ZR Tactical long-stroke recoil spring assembly and a Holosun 507Comp optic. The performance of the compensator is noticeably better than the ported barrel, so I really wanted to pair it with my custom stippled and Cerakoted frame and the Trijicon SRO optic.
While the performance of the two full-size guns is awesome, there was just something about them that didn't feel as good as the Compact. I determined that the modified large backstrap of the Compact just felt so much better in my hand and gave my support hand more room to grip the gun. Unfortunately, the large backstraps for the Full-size frames do not have the same shape and feel as the Compact's large backstrap, so I sacrificed an unused backstrap and melted pieces of it onto the two Full-size large backstraps to build them up and then contoured them to be almost identical to the modified large backstrap of the Compact. This was a time-consuming and tedious task, but it was definitely worth it! Now all three guns feel the same in my hand, and I am really happy with the way they turned out.
These PDPs are very similar in performance to all of my double stack 1911s, which is not easy to achieve with a polymer frame striker fired gun. While they are noticeably snappier than a lot of my other custom guns, they return back to zero so quickly and consistently that it honestly amazes me every time I shoot them. 😁
