Remington RP9

The RP9 is Big Green’s very late entry into the polymer-frame striker-fired market.  A market very crowded with excellent firearms and little room to differentiate on features.  Remington has had a successful and well regarded line of 1911’s for years, but their last attempt to expand their pistol market, the ill-fated rollout of the R51, still stains the company’s reputation.

First offered with an MSRP of $499 and clearly intended as a duty gun riding in a police holster, the RP9 immediately strikes you as huge.  Looking at the gun in its box I expected it was even bigger than my Beretta 92, but the RP9 actually comes in more than a half inch less in length than the Beretta, though just a bit taller, and with the plastic frame the RP9 is almost 7 ounces lighter.

When the pistol first came out the company was talking about the imminent RP45 that would follow with a 15+1 capacity.  The RP9 is oversize for a 9mm and I suspect Remington intended to use all the same parts and machining for the .45 swapping in only the larger barrel and magazines with different feed ramps.  From a manufacturing cost perspective, and possibly from a department armorer cost perspective, it makes sense to build everything to one size.  Consumers don’t always care for the one size approach.  Many who adore the Glock 17 have little regard for the larger Glock 21 because of the increase in grip size.  If Glock made all their full size guns on the 21 platform I expect they would not have the following they currently enjoy.

Speaking of grip, here Remington made some engineering magic happen.   The grip is very comfortable and the ergonomics of the cutouts lead your hand to the trigger.  The grip allows a high hold up near the slide in the rear and provides a massive beavertail to protect your hand.  It is impossible to see how slide bite could happen with this gun.   The package arrived with three backstraps of different sizes allowing a bit of customization to adjust the grip to different sized hands.

The Remington RP9 is a full-sized handgun.  It would ride well in a duty belt or a nightstand safe. The gun is not designed to be a concealed carry gun in an inside the waistband holster or fit on your ankle.  I include this obvious bit because it is important to evaluate each gun in the role it is intended.

Height:                 5.56”

Length:                 7.91”

Width:                  1.27”

Barrel:                   4.5”

Capacity:              18+1

Price

Only the AR marketplace is more crowded than the polymer-frame striker-fired market.  Remington is late to the marketplace forcing them up against handguns with long established pedigrees and reputations.  Add to that Remington’s less than perfect pistol reputation with the R51 and it gives the RP9 a formidable challenge finding a following. Worse, early reviews were not favorable.  The ambidextrous slide release was unreliable and feed problems were evident. Videos of first editions are rife with stoppages, double feeds, and stove-pipes.

The RP9 was first floated with an MSRP of $569 placing it in direct competition with the Glock 17, S&W M&P, and H&K VP9.  By the time the pistol actually hit the market the MSRP had been revised down to $499 and at the time of this article the MSRP had been further reduced to $418.  Realistically, they began selling closer to $389 and are currently carried on many online gun dealers for $269.  Remington recently offered a $100 rebate program and the RP9 reviewed here was purchased for $269, less the $100 rebate making the true price $169!

THE GOOD

The ergonomics of the grip are excellent.  The metal bodied magazines hold 18 rounds of 9mm and the grip features a high undercut getting your hand close to the barrel and closer to the trigger than expected.  The grip has some texture molded in with the company’s trademarked ‘R’.  The texturing could be more aggressive for a more assured grip with wet hands, but for each individual calling for more texture there is someone claiming texture hurts their hands.

Machining and especially the finish on this pistol were top of the line.  Turning over the slide revealed the cleanest looking internal machining I have ever seen and the perfect black finish is continued inside the slide giving the internals the same slick easy to clean finish as the outside of the slide.  The inside of the slide really impressed me.

The sights are large, almost over-sized, with generous white dots.  They made bringing the gun on target easy and quick. Early reviewers complained the rear sight was ramped and did not prove a shelf for one-handed reloading drills.  That must have changed as our example stuck straight up from the slide and worked just fine as a lever against a belt or shoe.  When trying to shoot fast the importance of large sights that let some light in cannot be oversold.

If you have read my reviews before you have heard me harp on trigger consistency.  I can learn a 12-pound trigger and I can learn a 4-pound trigger but it is hard to master a gun that gives you a different trigger pull each time.  In the past two years we have seen massive improvement in the triggers of new striker fired handguns.  I suspect it started with the H&K VP9 hitting the market with a trigger far ahead of anything else, but wherever it came from we are all benefiting from gun makers suddenly mastering the striker fired trigger systems and Remington does not disappoint.

The Remington trigger gave an excellent break averaging 5.725 pounds with a spread of only 10.5 ounces over ten trigger pulls.  In other words, over ten trigger pulls the RP9 had a standard deviation of only 3.23 ounces.  Numbers don’t mean much in a vacuum so we have to put them into context, and you know I love charts:

The Canik TP9SA still has the best trigger we have tested since we started this system, but the RP9 is now solidly in second place among striker fired pistols.  The max spread for the Remington was only 1.3 ounces more than the Canik and the standard deviation about a third of an ounce more.

The best part of the RP9 is that good ergonomics, excellent sights and a surprisingly good trigger combine to make this gun a very good shooter. Here is a picture of the first 100 rounds I fired from my RP9 at 10-yards for break-in:

That’s 100 rounds messing around at 10-yards just for the break-in period.  No pistol rest, various shooting speeds and various presentations and 100 rounds into the center ring and most of them into one large ragged group.  Like or hate this pistol, it is a solid shooter.

THE BAD

Despite turning in an impressive shooting performance all is not chocolate and roses with the RP9.  Once upon a time every pistol was expected to need a break-in period of 500 rounds before it was considered reliable.  The striker fired plastic revolution has made many people forget the break-in period and many write about taking guns out of the box after a long period of sitting in warehouses and on shelves and torture testing the gun with no oil.  The surprising thing is how many guns survive such testing with no failures.

The RP9 is not such a gun.  I field stripped, cleaned and oiled the RP9 before heading to the range.  (By the way Remington, would it kill you to run a patch down the barrel before you ship it?  The barrel seemed to arrive pre-fouled) Despite my care and attention on round 17 I received this nasty surprise:

That bullet nosedived under the feed ramp gouging the head of the bullet.  As you can imagine it created a hard-stop and the magazine had to be stripped to get things moving again.  While I subscribe to the break-in period this failure had me worried.  The Internet is filled with poor reviews of the RP9 for failures to feed and eject.  I was just getting comfortable again when the gun failed to eject a spent casing and tried to reload the empty shell.

Happily, that was the end of the failures for this particular gun.  Two failures with full metal jackets in the first 60 rounds.  We switched to hollow points after five boxes of practice ammo and gave it another 150 rounds of service grade ammunition without a failure.

The other failure we experienced was the ambidextrous slide release.  It simply doesn’t work on the right side of the pistol.  The slide release works perfectly on the left side for right-handers, but there seems no way to make it function on the right side.  Both slide releases seem to be identical and are formed from a single piece of metal.  The slide stop is on the left side and the piece seems to flex just enough that pushing the slide release from the right side of the gun does not put enough force on the left side to release the slide.

An ambidextrous slide release was a nice thought, but if it doesn’t work it is worse than if it wasn’t there at all.  A control that doesn’t function is just something to get in the way or to snag on something.  Remington should make the slide release work or get rid of it on future models.

Last, though I just got done raving about the excellent trigger, all the effort Remington had went into the trigger pull and they forgot to add a reset. The trigger has to be almost back to its starting point to reset and the tactile indication is too weak to notice. Trigger slapping has recently come into vogue and is even being taught by some instructors now. I would prefer to have the option of resetting the trigger rather than the reset barely existing.

CONCLUSION

I can’t make up my own mind about the RP9.  The pistol comes across as though it were designed by committee; while the design doesn’t give anyone something to hate, it also doesn’t provide anything to love.  Remington took the time to bevel the front of the slide to prevent it from looking completely like a brick but the sheer mass makes you think of a brick anyway.  The ergonomics, sights, and trigger combine to a make a well above average shooter but there will be no concealed carry market for a gun this big and early reliability rumors are likely to continue to haunt the RP9, especially if some of the controls don’t work.

The price point is excellent, even without the rebate the gun sells under $300 from multiple online vendors.  The problem is the Canik tested several months ago was also a better gun, shot as well as the RP9 with a slightly better trigger, had the same magazine capacity, but was smaller in nearly every dimension.  The only advantage I can see for the RP9 over the Canik is that Big Green is based in the US so parts and service will likely be easier to come by.

If you are new to firearms and are looking for a home defense handgun that you never intend to carry concealed the RP9 could be worth a look if you are on a budget.  It’s a large easily handled gun that shoots great.  I will definitely include the RP9 the next time I take out a new shooter, but if you are an experienced shooter with a slightly higher budget there are a lot of good choices out there.  Ultimately it is difficult to see where the RP9 will be able to carve a niche for itself in the overcrowded market for striker-fired plastic framed handguns.