The most important thing to keep in mind when considering KelTec’s new PR57 pistol is that the cartridge for which it is chambered, 5.7x28mm, originally started life as a one-trick pony, and that trick did not involve handguns intended for concealed carry. It was not designed for expanding bullets, handguns or even semi-automatic fire, really. Its literal raison d’être was to be fired out of a small submachine gun—a PDW (personal-defense weapon) called the FN P90—with a roughly 10-inch barrel. This would have given the truck drivers, cannon cockers and helicopter mechanics of NATO armies a firearm easier to hit with than a pistol that also had a chance of punching through the body armor of Soviet paratroopers who it was assumed would blanket the rear areas of the Western alliance in the case of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cartridge’s raison no longer d’être-ed, though, and Fabrique Nationale had to expand the utility of the round or wind up writing off the program as sunk costs.
Step one was to come up with a handgun companion for the P90, called the Five-seveN, so FN could market 5.7x28mm commercially. Second was to come up with versions of the cartridge that could be approved for commercial sale in the U.S., where Federal law banned the import of the original AP (armor-piercing) loads.
Fast-forward 20-some-odd years, and there are a variety of pistols chambered for 5.7x28mm on the commercial market here in the States, and now there are even a handful of loads in the chambering that are intended for defensive use out of a handgun from the jump.
Thing is, up to now it’s been hard to carry a 5.7 pistol concealed. It’s a very high-pressure load; SAAMI specifies a maximum average pressure of 48,500 psi. The FN, Ruger and Palmetto State Armory pistols chambered in the cartridge use a delayed-blowback operating system (factory 5.7×28 ammo receives a special coating on the brass to add a little stiction to the extraction cycle, enhancing this). Meanwhile, the Smith & Wesson M&P5.7 uses a novel gas-operating mechanism wherein the barrel doubles as the gas piston. But, these are all fairly large handguns.
Further, it can be challenging for shooters with smaller hands to use these pistols, as the cartridge is small in diameter, but quite long, necessitating a grip that is unusually large in the fore-and-aft dimension.
Now comes KelTec’s PR57, from that company known for thinking outside of the box—often way outside of the box—for engineering solutions. KelTec reached back into company lore to solve the vexing grip-size problem.
See, before there was a KelTec, founder and design chief George Kellgren had another gun company, called Grendel. (GRENdel. KELtec. Get it?) and its first offering back in 1988 was an inexpensive .380 ACP pistol called the Grendel P10. The P10 was a compact 10-shooter, hence the name, and was notable for the absence of a detachable magazine. This kept costs down by reducing the parts count and kept the size of the grip manageable by allowing the grip itself to serve as the magazine body. Rounds could be loaded into the magazine one at a time with the slide locked back, or 10 at once using an AR-15/M16 stripper clip and a included adapter.
KelTec used this play again with its new pistol. With no separate magazine body to accommodate, the 20-round PR57 has easily the smallest grip of any 5.7 pistol on the market. The lack of a magazine release, magazine-release spring, mag body and floorplate no doubt contributes mightily to its market-leading low price.
The slide is almost cylindrical, with two sets of grasping grooves ahead of and behind the ejection port. Wrapping entirely around the slide, they look more like ribs or the fins on a 1950s sci-fi prop ray gun. There are seven grooves up front and 11 in the back. Not quite seamlessly, the rearward set is partially milled in the slide and partially molded into the polymer plate that covers the lockwork and is secured with a pair of horizontal roll pins.
That rear polymer shroud also has the non-adjustable two-dot, rear-sight notch molded into it. The front-sight blade, also sporting a dot, is attached with a threaded tenon reminiscent of a Glock front sight. (Because the rear sight is integral with the polymer shroud, it is therefore not adjustable. This will come up later.)
The array of round holes visible at the muzzle helps identify the barrel’s rotary lockup system (the barrel’s lugs can best be viewed in the opening spread on page 33) • Fixed and incorporating two white dots, the rear sight is adequate for shots at self-defense distances • The front sight is a post and, like the rear, is enhanced with white paint. The sample was installed a little crookedly, but that was an easy fix • The curved, DAO trigger dispenses with the familiar bladed safety. It was comfortable, consistent and broke at only 4 pounds with no stacking • A single-slot accessory rail is integrated into the dustcover • An included mount for a powered electro-optic sight affixes to the slide with two screws. Once installed, it’s a simple matter to mount any MRDS having an RMSc footprint. Unfortunately, the iron sights won’t co-witness • Viewed from overhead, it is easy to appreciate just how slender the PR57 actually is. The new pistol is less than an inch wide • Once regarded as a niche chambering, the 5.7×28 mm has begun to take off, and KelTec has substantially lowered the barrier to ownership of a gun so chambered.
The only other features of note atop the slide are a half-moon cutout at the rear of the ejection port to serve as a loaded-chamber indicator, a pair of threaded holes for mounting the included optics-mounting plate and the external extractor, which is a short pivoting claw.
Moving down to the polymer frame is where it really sinks in how slim and compact the PR57 is. My personal favorite in this genre, the FN Five-seveN Mk.3, is in the horse-pistol-size category, roughly the size of a Beretta 92 or Glock G20. The KelTec is wafer-thin by comparison. The widest parts of the PR57 are only a few hundredths more than .9 inch, and that’s skinny.
Up front, the frame’s dustcover has an accessory rail with a single crosswise slot, intended to accommodate lights of the Streamlight TLR-1/SureFire X300 size. The trigger guard has a slightly squared-off profile in front with a suggestion of a hook at the bottom front corner, and the slender grip is angled with a pronounced arch to the backstrap. In profile, the pistol’s silhouette resembles nothing so much as the original Remington Model 51 from the 1920s.
Controls on the frame are limited to the slide release—a non-ambidextrous one consisting of a ridged sheet-metal tab positioned conventionally to be operated by the thumb of a right-handed shooter—and the trigger itself. That trigger is a pivoting type with middling-long travel, steady weight with zero stacking over the course of the pull and breaks without any kind of wall or hesitation at a consistent 4 pounds.
Disassembly is almost ridiculously simple. Just ensure the pistol is clear and then push forward on the trigger, then run the slide assembly forward off the frame. The dual, small-diameter, recoil-spring assemblies and the barrel lift out through the bottom of the slide. To reassemble, just nestle the barrel and recoil springs back into the slide, run it back onto the frame until it locks in the rearward position, push forward on the trigger again and then release the slide with the slide-release lever.
Once the clip is aligned with the pistol’s internal magazine, the cartridges are pressed into the magazine with thumb pressure • Functioning as grasping grooves are round bands integrated into the slide. They work well and the fixed rear sight anchors your hand in position when manipulating the slide • The external extractor reliably removed spent cases • Well-spaced, textured squares provide surprisingly good purchase with no discomfort.
While the pistol was apart, you will have noticed the three locking lugs up by the muzzle end of the barrel. These mate into mortises on the inside of the slide, making the KelTec the sole short-recoil-operated 5.7x28mm handgun on the market right now. As the barrel and slide move rearward under recoil, the barrel rotates, unlocking the lugs from the slide and allowing it to continue rearward.
So how well does this whole thing work as a pistol?
At the range, if you lock the slide to the rear and you can, like the aforementioned earlier Grendel P10, thumb rounds into the fixed magazine one at a time until it is filled, or you can utilize the two included 10-round stripper clips to load it. Once the internal magazine is loaded, drop the slide using either the slide release or the slingshot method and you are ready to go. There is no manual safety, and the trigger is, as mentioned, light and manageable.
Muzzle blast from the high-pressure 5.7x28mm load from a 4-inch barrel is fierce, but recoil is negligible and muzzle flip almost nonexistent. It’s like firing the world’s loudest .22 LR. There’s surprisingly little muzzle velocity loss relative to the typical 5-inch-barreled 5.7 handgun; well within the normal velocity spread of the rounds.
Over the course of 600 rounds, the PR57 was utterly reliable with multiple loads, including FN SS197, Speer Gold Dot and American Eagle FMJ. The sole exception was the new FN “DFNS” 30-grain JHP SS200 load. A number of both failure-to-feed and failure-to-eject malfunctions were suffered with that load, possibly due to its extremely low recoil in this recoil-operated handgun. (A shame, as the DFNS is my first choice of rounds in the delayed-blowback-action FN Five-seveN, where it’s been both reliable and accurate.)
With the advent of good, expanding, self-defense loads, the PR57 would be particularly excellent for a recoil-shy or physically infirm shooter, with its soft-shooting nature, large magazine capacity and easy-to-manage trigger, but there are a couple of caveats:
The first is that this is an extremely light trigger for a pistol with no manual safety. Were I to carry it, it would only be strong side, behind the hip. The second is that the sights are non-adjustable. The test pistol printed a couple inches left at 15 yards and it wasn’t until I closely examined the front sight that I noticed it had been installed slightly crooked. Easy enough to fix, but my trusty old Shooting Chrony Beta took a bullet to the skyscreens before the problem was diagnosed. This can be ameliorated by installing a red dot, but then you lose the use of the irons altogether.
Lastly, once the pistol is loaded, there is no way to unload it other than by emptying it downrange or else carefully manually hand-cycling the contents of the magazine through the chamber.
This is a truly novel pistol, a unicorn of a 5.7: It’s smaller, lighter, less expensive and thinner than any of its competitors—but it has some serious complications baked into the design as a result. I plan to do a fuller, extended 2,000-round test of the sample gun, because it’s interesting enough to warrant it. It could be the breakthrough handgun to mainstream the 5.7x28mm round—or it might not. I’m interested to see how it turns out.
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