With HK ceasing manufaturring of this series is there any hope someone will buy the manufacturing rights and machinery to restart production? Heck if a new model is of equal quality offered in Stainles And Carbon steel, Night sights, Commonality of holsters and other parts and accessories and is offered around $900.00. I would buy it if it had Lorcin or Hi-point on it at that point.
Anyone think we are that Lucky? I mean Stoeger bought the Cheetah from Beretta and Magnum Research bought the P99 manufacturing rights from Walther… I can only hope.
HK never sold enough of these to make money on them when they were in vogue, I doubt there is enough interest in the platform to justify the expense; frankly, no one would turn a profit selling a few hundred a year.
Yes, but they were always very costly. I believe H&K sold over 100,000 P7s.
HK supplies police and military contracts. The P7 doesn’t fill this niche’ anymore, so they stopped making it. If someone started manufacturing them they could make money. Especially if they could introduce a slightly melted version with a lightweight frame.
Actually, HK has been out of the P7 business for several years already, and I would be very surprised to see anyone else take this on, given the complexity of the platform, the costs associated with manufacturing it, and the fact that so many ex-Polizei guns have now saturated the market at a very low (in relative terms) price point.
From a manufacturing standpoint, there really is no efficient, cost-effective way to build these guns. They require extremely high grade steels, are quite complex in terms of design, feature a barrel that very few companies can even produce, and are machined to tolerances that we tend to associate with custom firearms. I’m not persuaded that a third-party firm could approach the level of refinement needed to effectively make a P7, and if they did, it would surely have to be priced out of the market. All of the surplus guns that have landed on our shores over the past few years seem to have led many to forget that a typical P7 sold for $1,200 (and up) back when they were still in active production.
Finally, there is the question of which P7 variant you produce. I’ve owned all of the major caliber versions, and found that I strongly prefer the pre-M series guns (or what we tend to call the PSP). The M7 project was stillborn, and the M10 with its built-up slide was unwieldy at best. The M13 was popular, if expensive, but traded away compactness and trim lines for greater capacity. The M8 does very little that the PSP will not, costs significantly more, and is still only an 8/9 shot pistol.
I guess what I’m saying is that the best that one could probably hope for would be a reissued PSP-pattern gun, and you can already buy an original HK in like-new condition for less than what it would cost to build one. In purely economic terms, that doesn’t seem to leave much of a niche market to go after, and no one is likely to take this on purely as a labor of love. Anything is possible, of course, but would be highly surprised if we ever saw a third party attempt to get into the P7 business; especially in view of the fact that they are still so widely available.
Good point, though isn’t Hellenic basically an HK-licensee? I know they get tooling and technical support from Oberndorf, but have never been quite sure what the extent of that arrangement really was/is.
i personally wouldn’t want a P7 clone. I highly doubt any little startup company could build it right.
plus like everyone has been saying, it would cost MORE for a reissue than a new or lightly used real HK P7.
would be cool if HK started making them again, but i doubt it. They’d rather sell us 900 dollar glocks :o
I would have to wonder, is the demand there for this? I mean as a company looking at it from a strict profitability standpoint. Are there enough consumers out there who would purchase a new P7 to justify paying the most likely rediculous liscensing fees the Oberndorf elves will want?
I have to say that I doubt it. If it were profitable, HK would have never dropped it.
I was thinking the same thing. I have no idea what the licensing arrangements will be like but since the market is full of cost-effective options, how competitive will the P7 be? There are those who like the gun. I am one of them. But I don’t see how feasible it will be to manufacture and more importantly, support the guns.
An offshore manufacturer could probably make the gun cheaper, but quality, and distribution would be challenges. If a company like Norinco made a P7 copy, I’m sure it would be affordable but they would have a hell of time exporting it to the USA and I’m not certain I want a P7 that says Norinco on it. Not trolling here, just a personal preference.
There is the option of altering manufacturing methods to reduce the price. I suppose if a firm like Ruger could apply investment casting technology to it, you could end up with a less expensive gun. But still, will enough people buy?
I’m reminded of the plight of Detonics. Like the P7, it was pretty revolutionary at the time and it worked well. But getting support could be difficult and with the arrival of other options, it went the way of the dinosaur. An aficionado tried resurrecting the company and the guns, and despite a lot of support from the mainstream gun press, it didn’t take off as well as they thought it would.
I guess a surplus PSP or P7 really is the best option right now.
I think the three main issues with the P7, technically, are its weight, the mag release, and heat build-up
-Make the frame out of polymer.
-Make it so that when the slide is locked back on an empty mag, if you cycle the squeeze cock it drops the mag. Insert mag and another squeeze drops the slide.
-Use polymer to add an air gap and low thermal conductivity to the trigger area.
If you are going to do the first, I’d think you could engineer the second and third in at the same time.
As for making them, how many surplus P7s remain unsold. Buy them in bulk and use them for parts. Maybe even take the current frame mill it down to retain the key hard points and serial number and fill the rest in with polymer. I’m thinking you could keep the price under $1000, and it isn’t a new gun, just a mod of the old one.
A plastic P7 doesn’t strike me as all-that-feasible, and one of the great disadvantages of polymer is that you would invariably end up with a very chunky/blocky P7; nevertheless, I have a great deal of respect for this kind of thinking as it is the true engine of innovation.
-Make it so that when the slide is locked back on an empty mag, if you cycle the squeeze cock it drops the mag. Insert mag and another squeeze drops the slide.
Don’t mean to be contrary, but given the inner workings of this gun, I get the impression that it could be done pretty straightforwardly. You would simply have to design an interface between the cocking lever/arm and the slide release that trips on an empty mag, and cams back to the open position when the gun is cocked. Granted, it might take some doing, since I believe the slide lock/release is located on the opposite side, but I would think that there are there are enough linkages in the action of a P7 to figure something out. Whether it would be a good idea in an operational/safety sense may be another discussion, but in purely technical terms, I’m not sure which aspect of this leads to the conclusion that it might be impossible. Impractical might be a more useful term here.
Don’t mean to be contrary, but given the inner workings of this gun, I get the impression that it could be done pretty straightforwardly. You would simply have to design an interface between the cocking lever/arm and the slide release that trips on an empty mag, and cams back to the open position when the gun is cocked. Granted, it might take some doing, since I believe the slide lock/release is located on the opposite side, but I would think that there are there are enough linkages in the action of a P7 to figure something out. Whether it would be a good idea in an operational/safety sense may be another discussion, but in purely technical terms, I’m not sure which aspect of this leads to the conclusion that it might be impossible. Impractical might be a more useful term here.
AC
Fair enough. Now that I think about it more you could seriously rube goldberg a solution, but at the end of the day you’d have something of very questionable reliability, and it’d make malfunction clearance a bitch.
