Hammerli AP20 Spare parts?

[Gwhite]

The team I help coach is looking into buying a number of these for our starting shooters. I did a search, and didn't find any know issues or things that appear to break easily.

I'm wondering what parts I might want to get while I'm at it. Has anyone had any issues that having a few spares on hand could resolve?

Thanks!

[Kallysan]

I have an AP20 that I've put about 15k pellets through (i bought it used from overseas so I don't know how many were put through it before I got it). I've had a couple of issues with it but nothing that required parts to fix. The screws holding the barrel into the frame were loose when I received the pistol, the bolt gets rough/sticky feeling unless you oil it about every 750 pellets, and the hammer screw backed out causing the gun to not be able to be cocked (at about 3k pellets, haven't had that issues since). You can get parts for them from Walther USA if you need them. I upgraded to the Walnut grip because the plastic one is not the greatest, it gets real slick real fast. I also upgraded to the LP400 tank because the standard tank doesn't have a manometer (gets annoying). When you mount the tank horizontally the weight bar provision switches to the vertical, for me the pistol became to light at the muzzle which caused a lot of muzzle jump. I fixed this buy adding stick on wheel weights to the side of the compensator, tamed the muzzle jump. For the price difference I would recommend buying the AP20 Pro. You get $200 grip, $40 hinge, and a $200 tank for less than $100 additional cost. I guarantee anyone other than a Novice is not going to like the ambi grip for long.

[Gwhite]

For a college team situation, the flexibility of the AP20 grip design is important. These are intended to get the students started, and not having to keep track of dozens of different grips makes the logistics a lot easier. We start the year with ~ 30 students, with pairs sharing a pistol. We'll get everyone's hand size and (hopefully) assign pistols so that nobody has to adjust their grip when swapping shooters.

After several weeks of training, we down select to around 15, so each student then has their own pistol. Once the newbies can break 500 in a match, we upgrade them to Hammerli 480K's converted to use the AP40 cylinders. We have a wide selection of good grips for those, and students are issued those one or two at a time, and we have time to work with them and set them up with a good fit.