It's Back!!!

Wow! Long day after working the two jobs. I teach part time in IT for a local community college two nights a week in addition to the day job.

Anyway, I owe Brigid over at her blog the story of my Kel-Tek P3-AT.

I purchased it new and proceeded to do the "at least 200 rounds before you carry it" thing. I put many more rounds through it and noticed that the recoil spring guide was deforming where it met the lower half of the pistol. OK no big deal I thought, I will just get another guide. That worked for a month. More of the same and now that the guide no longer seated flush, it started to deform the hole in the slide up front. E-mail to Kel-Tek simply said return it. I did in mid January and it wintered in Coca FL. and showed up last week.

What did they do? According  to the work order:

Replace slide
Polished feed ramp
I love this one: "Replaced internal parts"
Replaced recoil rod
Replaced trigger bar and trigger assembly
Test fired

My thoughts? They spent much more time on this slide, it was not as roughly milled as the original. The feed ramp was beautiful. Trigger seems much smoother. The barrel was also polished.

I have only put 50 rounds through it after repairs, but I cannot say that Kel-Tek has let me down yet.

I have researched the Interwebs and there are people saying that QA/QC at Kel-Tek could be better and that they do stand by the product. I think maybe Kel-Tec is playing the odds. Average person throws down 275 bucks, fires 50 or 100 rounds to qualify for concealed carry and never fires it again. Kel-Tek wins in that scenario.

So, I can have this for about 525 bucks (plus 50 bucks shipping back):

 Yes it does have a laser on it. The sight picture is lets say marginal at best.

Or for a 100 bucks or so less, I can get one of these:

Colt Detective Special used (duh). To paraphrase Tam: "I can put my buggerhook on the boom switch and I know this will go bang" . Not so much the Kel-Tek right now.