This is an off the cuff guide while I have a customer’s gun apart to try and solve the Achilles heel of this pistol: the absolutely unbearable gritty trigger pull. Being the first CCP I’ve handled, I don’t know if this is a common problem or not but judging by the shoddy quality of stamped parts, rough finished internals and roll pins all over the gun I can take a good guess that this pistol isn’t unique in having a gravel road for a trigger. While the mechanism itself is rather clever, it suffers from a myriad of problems under the hood. None the less, let’s take a crack at it!
Walther’s single stack 9, with the plastic tool provided to field strip it.
Disassembly
1: Field strip using a punch or provided tool. Yep, this pistol requires a tool to so much as field strip it. Poke the striker retainer in the back of the slide to push the stainless latch up, press the retainer as a whole into the slide about an inch and lift the slide up in the rear. This is exactly as awkward as it sounds, and you’ll probably have to retract the slide slightly to get it to release the rear of the slide to lift up.
Sort of like old Walthers, only with more tools and three hands required.
2. Remove the striker retainer and spring. Use a flathead screwdriver to push the retainer in, rotate it 90 degrees clockwise and it will come right out. The stainless latch is your reference point here, since rotating it any other direction will block removal via the incredibly small roll pin pictured below. Removing the striker requires punching out that pin, so we’re not going to mess with that here. Not sure why these couple of images have a green tint, the new camera is playing tricks on me.
Push and rotate to clear the microscopic roll pin stop.
Removing the striker itself requires punching out this tiny pin.
3. Remove the safety and sear assembly. Rotate the safety about halfway to the on position (up) and pull it straight out, wiggling as necessary. Drive out the sizable frame roll pin, and the sear assembly will lift up and out. Take this opportunity to eyeball the trigger bar and the strange circular sear drum, that’s our next destination.
Straightforward safety removal process, half on and wiggle out.
A good view of how the trigger bar engages the sear cog.
4. Push out the sear pin. This pin should be knocked out RIGHT TO LEFT as the holes tighten up on the right side. Fair warning, small bits incoming here as both the sear and the striker block deactivator are spring loaded. Inside the sear housing the sear itself is the center piece with the short, heavy spring while the striker block deactivating lever is on the right side and has a long, weak spring.
Out right to left on this one, it tightens up one direction.
Sear, short spring. Striker block lever, long spring.
5. Remove the ejector and sear drum. Drive out the short roll pin retaining the ejector, again RIGHT TO LEFT just because it’s easier, and that will free up the drum. Either keep a finger over the top to catch the spring and plunger, or put the housing upside down when pushing the drum out. Another trick is to use a 1/8″ or so sized punch that will both push the drum out and catch the plunger.
The ejector retains the drum via a slot, and limits the rotation as well.
6. Optional steps. Drive out the two roll pins if you really want to take apart the housing further. The hook is what the striker retaining latch engages on, and the hook itself retains the detent spring and ball for the safety barely visible above as a silver speck in the larger center hole. Further disassembly of the slide is problematic, as the striker block plunger is retained by a blind roll pin, but you can remove the extractor in the same way as a Ruger 10/22 or similar: pull the plunger back with a pick or small flat screwdriver.
Further disassembly of the frame isn’t really recommended, but you can drive the two sizable roll pins in the frame out to remove the actual serialized metal frame and barrel assembly, along with the other guts. I opted not to do this for this guide, however, and you likely won’t have reason to mess with the two likely stubborn roll pins.
Reassembly Tips
A few tips for reassembly, particularly the sear housing which can be a pain:
1. Press the drum spring and plunger in with a 1/16″ punch, which is small enough that the cut in the drum can overlap the plunger a little and keep it from running away.
2. The sear pin goes in left to right, both because it gets tight on the far (right) side and because it’s easier to wrestle the sear in first! Line that mess up and get the sear pin through it, then you have a much easier and lighter spring on the striker block lever to finish it up.
3. Insert the safety facing straight up, as there is an angle on the stem that will push the detent out of the way for you. Then push it in and rotate it down/forward into the off position to pop it right in without any fuss.
4. When putting the slide back on, hold the gun muzzle straight up so you can eyeball the guide rod (gas seal) into alignment with the hole in the frame. Drop the slide on so it lines up only with the end of the frame, don’t retract it at all, then press in the striker retainer with a tool and finish dropping the slide into position. It sounds awkward but is much easier than taking it apart!
Final Thoughts
Let’s talk about the trigger a bit here, but first see if you can spot the problem with the surface finish of the sear drum:
Click for full size.
If your answer was that the surface finish looks like a stucco wall, you would be 100% correct! The surface is wavy, uneven and this image was after a considerable amount of polishing using 600 grit wet/dry, followed by felt bob buffing. There is simply no way to clean up this part without going ham on it, then re-cutting the flats that engage the sear and striker block lever.
The trigger is downright awful because it’s a compounded problem: poor surface finish on parts and poor mechanical advantage. To top it off, you have to fight no fewer than SIX springs while pulling the trigger: the trigger return spring, sear spring, drum return spring, striker block lever spring, striker block plunger spring and to a small degree the striker spring due to the very positive angles on the sear and striker.
The CCP is a disservice to the excellent quality of the PPQ and P99 pistols. Rather than being the little brother of excellent service pistols known for their reliability and stellar out of the box triggers, the CCP is more of the big brother of the PK380 and PPS which have much less glorious reputations. Had they paired the interesting gas delayed “soft recoil” concept to a trigger akin to the P99’s single action or the PPQ it would’ve been one hell of a single stack 9mm to compete with the M&P Shield or Glock 42. Instead after over an hour of gunsmithing, the trigger went from gravel road to freshly oiled chips.
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