Upgrades for the Canik TP9 SFx

hi welcome back to long-term reviews today I'm going to be talking about the canik tp9 SFX and more specifically about some upgrades that I have made to this pistol a little while ago I made a review video on the canik tp9 sfx and in that video the gun is mostly in its original factory configuration when I did that video I had added a brass back strap and magwell from Taylor freelance so it also added the Talon grips but the rest of the gun was as it came to me from the factory that is no longer the case I have upgraded a number of internals in the gun and I just wanted to walk through exactly what those upgrades are a little bit talk a little bit about the results of those upgrades how the gun performs now and just review the changes that I've made so let's go ahead and look at it it's worth mentioning upfront that just because I changed apart doesn't necessarily mean that everybody should change that part I'm not an expert in you know gunsmithing or anything like that and it's also worth mentioning that I have upgraded the pistol here for competition use so I wouldn't really advocate making any of these upgrades to a gun that you're planning to use for for carry or for self-defense just because some of the the changes that I've made do you alter the the safety systems of the gun and alter some of the springs involved in the safety systems and I really wouldn't recommend doing that to a gun that's going to be actually carried or used for anything besides competition so just getting that out of the way upfront the main things that I have changed on this particular gun are the sites the trigger system and then also the recoil system as well so we're going to talk about those three kind of systems separately so the first upgrade that I made was the sights now in the last video I mentioned that my particular specimen of the canik tp9 SFX was having some point of impact point of aim issues and now I know that as soon as you say that the guns not shooting where you aim the comeback is well maybe you're bad at aiming right I had other people shoot it and it was shooting consistently a little high and and that was repeatable between different users so I wanted to upgrade the sights and I figured that if I was going to change the sights I might as well really go ahead and upgrade them so what I opted for were the Dawson precision sights and let's see if we can get a look here at those so I went ahead and got fiber-optic green in the back and a red fiber-optic up front now if you're looking at this these sights might look a little strange because this front sight is quite tall it's not really a true suppressor height sight or at least that wasn't my intention Dawson precision sells some fixed sights for the kenick but I figured that if I was going to upgrade the sights I might as well go ahead and just really upgrade them and get some adjustable sights so it turns out that on the tp9 SFX the rear sight is cut for a Glock rear sight so I bought a Glock rear sight from Dawson precision that's adjustable and installed that and then shot it with the factory front sight and I called the company and this was kind of the process that they recommended to figure out exactly what height front side it was that I was going to need after having taken some some data at the range and I was way way off of zero because the front sight height was was incorrect the factory front site since this roof site is so much taller I took that data went to Dawson Precision's website plugged in the numbers in there front side height calculator and they spit out a frontside height that that this gun would require and the front sight is the M&P Smith & Wesson cut so I just bought a Smith & Wesson frontside off of their website from my particular gun this worked out to be a 0.375 inch tall front sight with the adjustable rear sight and the adjustable rear sight has quite a bit of adjustment I think if I depress this here you can see like that's that's quite a bit of adjustment and it's about at the middle of its adjustment it'll adjust up about that same amount so a front sight that's sort of in the ballpark will get you there with the with the adjustable rear sight I have really liked these sights I've run them in a competition since I put them on since I installed them and I was able to to pretty consistently get hits on man-sized targets out to 50 yards and I just was not able to do that before not so much because the sights initially were bad but just because they they weren't decided exactly right on the particular gun that I had the last thing to talk about with the sights is that as I was trying to install them myself I did wrap the slide in masking tape to try to prevent marring it and then when I peeled the masking tape off got this this lovely battle-worn finish look a little less than thrilled about how that's turned out and I probably could contact Kanak about that and say hey my my finish came off but I just don't want to go through the hassle right now of getting the whole thing Reese Sarah coded so I haven't worried with it and it doesn't it doesn't impede the guns function which is mostly what I'm concerned about with this particular gun so that's the the changes that I made to the sighting system on then to the trigger now right off the bat if you looked at upgrading the trigger on your canik tp9 sfx you've probably heard of freedom Smith triggers and that is what I have put on this gun it's a freedom Smith trigger so I'll go ahead and just show exactly how that functions here and we are empty I'm just confirming that for for myself as much as for anyone else so with this freedom Smith trigger it significantly reduces the over travel just by the way the trigger is cut up where it interfaces with the frame so I'll go ahead and demonstrate that so that that is the over travel right there I'm at the wall at this point so out at the wall pull a little bit further and we break okay and to reset this sir reset so we're still holding it in that was the reset and then it comes back just a shade from that okay so whole cycle again we're all the way out back to the wall break reset and then we're back on the wall again it just crisps up the trigger very nicely yeah it just it takes a lot of that excess travel out of the trigger so big fan of the freedom Smith trigger this particular model is the vanguard now you know I could have gone with a different model this one was one that they had in stock I liked the color the profile seemed kind of kind of good I did really like the flat face to the trigger there's a little bit of a lip here at the very bottom that is it's nice but it's a it's a flat face overall and I do like that quite a bit I also liked how that there's these sort of a relief chamfer here on the edge that lets you really get your finger around to the trigger safety and make sure that you depress that every time so I'm a fan of this particular profile there's other really great profiles on their website too don't know that this is necessarily the best but they had it in a color that I liked when I wanted to buy one so I I bought it alright the trigger isn't really the only thing that I've upgraded here though I've upgraded some of the internals as well and so I'm going to take the the gun apart and we'll talk through what internals I upgraded also so just go ahead and take it down or set the slide aside for our moment and look here at our fire control unit so right off the bat in addition to swapping out the trigger I did swap out this trigger return spring right here it's the little fella that's stretching when I pull the trigger back for the trigger return spring I used a spring Co Kanak trigger return spring I just bought that straight from Spring Co and I think that lightened the trigger up some that does have an effect on the trigger pull that's really all the changes that I made to the the frame portion of the trigger the other big change that I made though that's worth mentioning is within the slide and so inside of the slide there is this little fella right here it's a little safety plunger and if you press that in the action bar right here that the trigger is connected to see if I can get that yeah these little notches here as you pull the trigger back they push that safety plunger up and when that safety plunger is doing is preventing the firing pin from coming forwards without the trigger being depressed without this safety plunger being depressed the spring behind this plunger in the stock canik tp9 sfx is stout really most of the sprigs and this again are very stout so since this plunger gets depressed as you pull the trigger back here your to push against whatever spring is behind this plunger I went ahead and replaced the spring behind this plunger and used a ghost reduced power firing pin safety plunger spring it's a spring that's intended for a Glock it works just fine but I did go ahead and swap that spring out that makes this plunger move much more easily which means that you don't have to use as much force pulling a trigger back to move that plunger up again let me go ahead and stress that this is not a modification I would make on a gun that I plan to carry because you're getting into the territory here of modifying features that are intended to be safety features and if there's anything that goes wrong you stand to incur some some liability issues from that but I'm only using this gun in a competitive environment and so so it's the thing that I feel comfortable doing in that setting wouldn't do it if I were planning to carry this gun everyday or even daily at all right it's really only loaded when it's at the range so that's all the upgrades to the the fire control unit to the trigger and the fire control over all those upgrades the trigger return spring and the plunger safety spring those swapping those out did drop my trigger pulled down to about three to three and a quarter pounds so it's significantly lighter than how it comes from the factory the freedom of Smith trigger might may reduce the the pull weight some although I don't I don't think that it does I think that that pull weight reduction is largely the trigger return spring and the reduce power plunger safety spring so swapping those two out got me down to a three to three and a quarter pound trigger pull that's perfectly nice for me it's perfectly crisp I don't have to think about working the trigger it just works when I want it to I've really liked that particular feature okay last thing to talk about the last system that I've graded on this gun is the recoil system now the recoil system is completely inside of the slide and there's two parts that you have to upgrade if you're going to upgrade the recoil system so the first thing that you're going to want to upgrade is the recoil spring assembly in the stock configuration that is a captive spring on a guide rod what I have done is swapped that out for a tungsten guide rod to add a little bit of non reciprocating mass because slide moves but the guide rod does not and then I also have added a an aftermarket spring as well it is not captive I'll take that apart in just a second because of the way that this gun functions the recoil spring here actually provides the force to [ __ ] the striker spring so as these slide recoils back and then as it recoils back on the forward stroke when this recoil spring is pushing the slide back into battery forwards this striker catches on your fire control unit and is pulled back towards the rear of the gun cocking the gun what this means is that if your recoil spring is not powerful enough to actually [ __ ] your striker spring your guns not going to go into batter you're going to start to have problems okay so anytime you start to reduce the power of your recoil spring you're probably going to need to reduce the power of your striker spring as well now like most of the springs on this gun striker spring that it comes with from the factory is stout now that's good it prevents you from having light strikes or missed strikes if you've got primers that are a little cantankerous and they're they're not you know wanting to to work having a stronger striker spring can be good I'm planning to run ammo that I have bought just to compete with and I don't really anticipate that being a problem so I did go ahead and reduce the power of the striker spring as well so the striker spring that I used is the ghost 6.5 pound Glock striker spring and swapping that out is this really as simple as popping this back plate off and then just pulling the the spring out there's videos on how to do that I'm not gonna go into that here but it's not a complicated process to swap out that spring but I use that the ghost six and a half pound Glock striker spring for the recoil assembly itself I've got a tungsten guide rod and this adds quite a little bit of additional heft I'll post here I don't remember what the exact weight of it is I'll post that show up here in the video on-screen but it is the W 74 tungsten guide rod and that's basically what this company does they make tungsten guide rods for mechanics so I bought this straight from them I've really liked it it adds a little bit more mass out towards the front of the gun kind of balances out the brass back strap and mag well that I've got on it but it also does help a little bit with preventing some muzzle flip by having more weight out towards the the muzzle which increases the the moment of inertia of the pistol using all these $10 College words so the spring that I've got here is the wolf 14 pound commander spring and that's wolf with two F's if you buy this spring just make sure that you're getting the commander length spring if they sell different lengths of Springs or different sizes of Springs but you want the the commander size like for the the Colt commander the the 1911 but it's a 14 pound commander size spring when you install this I've read and it does seem to be true to me as well that putting the end of the spring that's got the coils kind of pushed together towards the flared end of the guide rod it gives you the best results and overall this thing just slides right into here and then you can just install it all back on to what now I have heard and read that a 13-pound recoil spring will work as well and I actually have one of those I just don't have it installed on the gun because I was planning to run it in a competition pretty soon after I got all these parts in and put it together and I knew the recoil spring it came with was stiffer than fourteen pounds for sure and I didn't have time to really test it out and make sure the 13-pound would work reliably I've read that it has or that it does work reliably I just hadn't verified that myself but I plan to and so just take that for what it's worth I know that the 14 pounder does function reliably with ammunition that I'm using which is a federal sin tech hundred and fifty grain ammo out of this out of this pistol with all of these upgrades the gun does perform very well I'm really thrilled with its performance and those upgrades have made a significant impact to the guns performance the recoil is incredibly manageable there is less muzzle flip than how it came from the factory between the weight upgrades that I've made and just reducing the power of the recoil spring assembly so I do like that I can basically just line it up on a target and pull the trigger twice and know that both of those shots are pretty well going to be hits I've really enjoyed using the the Dawson precision sights they're very crisp they they show up well against targets the fiber optics are pretty long compared to some other sights which does give them a little bit better light gathering in my opinion but I do I have really liked those sights and the freedom Smith trigger and the spring upgrades that I've made have just done wonders for what is already a phenomenal trigger system in the canik tp9 sfx but it does make this trigger very crisp reasonably light very comfortable to use and almost like just an extension of your your finger at least for me an extension of my finger where I just think that it's time for the gun to go off in it goes so overall I'm thrilled with the upgrades I would do them all again in a heartbeat on this gun and that's that's pretty much it if you have questions or comments or if you're have tried different upgrades and you like any of those better feel free to leave a comment in the comment section below go ahead and like the video subscribe to the channel if you'd like content like this but that is my review of the upgrades that I've made on the canik tp9 sfx thanks for watching

Channel: undefined

Views: 37,525

Rating: 4.8705034 out of 5

Keywords: Canik, USPSA, 3gun, CanikTP9SFX, Canik TP9SFX, Tp9sfx, Taylor Freelance, Dawson Precision, Sprinco, Ghost, W74, Tungsten, Brass, Spring, trigger, tp9sfx trigger

Id: yHBD8Dr-I7g

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020