American Airguns Blog
The Random Ramblings Of An Airgun Addict

I am not much of a pistol shooter. I like pistols but I typically like shooting rifles better. I have four air pistols, but rarely shoot them. When I have time to shoot, I usually grab a rifle. About three years ago I bought a CP99 Sport made by Umarex. I had been thinking of trying one of their air pistols and got a really good deal on the Sport version of the CP99. I had the thing maybe a month when a buddy of mine from church came over one weekend and broke it.

He isn’t a shooter and I don’t know what he did to break it but he managed to brake a trigger linkage lever. Hoping that it might be something simple, I took the pistol apart to see if I could fix it. Well, it took me a couple hours one night be I got it apart and managed to figure out that that a small protrusion on the trigger linkage lever had broken off. The level is a pot metal piece so it doesn’t surprise me that it broke. I set all the pieced of the disassembled pistol on my workbench and called for a replacement part.

I don’t remember now who I called to replace it, it may have been Walther, but whoever it was sent me two replacement parts free of charge. I figured that this was probably a known problem in the design or manufacturing so they had to make up for it by replacing the parts free. I got the new parts in about two weeks after I tore the pistol apart. When I got the new parts I put them with the other parts on my workbench and thought to myself that I would get to it in a couple of days. That was 2003.

Fast forward to March 2006. My son and I went to a GSSF Glock match at Ft. Benning Georgia for our Spring Break trip. We had a great time shooting the match, which was similar to IPSC or IDPA type matches. They had three stages to shoot and you could only shoot a Glock. We didn’t have one but one of my club members, Harold Rushton, generously shared his Glock 19 with us so we could shoot the match. I ended up like 96 or 97 out of 140 shooters and my son was in the 155-119 range.

On the way home from the match I got to thinking about that CP99 that had been cluttering up my workbench for so long. At some points over the past three years I had thought of just throwing it out since I didn’t know if I could even remember how to put the thing back together again. On the drive home my son and I talked about the Glock match and possibly shooting more action pistol matches in the future. I decided that I was going to try to get it back together and so we could use it to practice our pistol shooting at home. The CP99 doesn’t recoil like its powder based brother but the hold, trigger control and target movement needed for IDPA shooting could be replicated in the back yard.

Well, a couple of days ago I gathered up all the pieces off my workbench and put them into a small Rubbermaid container so I could work on putting it back together in the living room. I went on-line to the Walther website and printed a parts diagram for the CP99 and got started. I had left the major sub-assemblies together when I took it apart which made it easier to assemble. The biggest challenge was to figure out where the three springs and one screw were supposed to go. I figured out pretty quickly from the parts diagram that the largest spring and screw made the slide move forward when the slide release was pressed. The smaller spring was used with the magazine release lever. But I couldn’t see where the medium sized spring went.

The other problem was figuring how to get the top assembly into the gun. There is a lever that extends back from the trigger to the rear of the gun where the hammer resides. The safety on the side of the pistol pokes into the gun so that the assembly wouldn’t drop down into the pistol with the lever installed. I finally figured out that the safety pin could be push out from inside the grip and the action could be set inside the gun.

With the top assembly installed in the gun, I tapped the rear and forward pins in place to hold it there and then tried to figure out how to put the trigger pin back in. I had take the gun apart again to figure out how to get the parts to line up properly to allow the pin to be installed. I reassembled the pistol and thought that I was done. I still had the medium spring setting on the table but I wondered now if I even needed it and if it might be to something else. I pulled the trigger and the hammer hit the firing pin with a soft clack. However the trigger didn’t go back to the forward position. AH HAA! I discovered where the medium spring must go. It had to be associated in some way with the trigger return mechanism. Sure enough, I took the pistol apart for third time and found where the spring went.

I reassembled the gun and now it appeared to work fine. The trigger returned after every shot and the hammer was hitting the firing pin. Now all I had to do is put in a CO2 cartridge and a clip of ammo and go shoot. Well, it never works the way we expect it. I removed the old CO2 cartridge that had been installed in the gun for that past three years and loaded a new cartridge. PSSSSSSSSSSS, the old seal was compressed and wasn’t sealing. The first cartridge dumped it’s gas into the air and froze over. I removed it and looked at the seal. It had a ring of silver crud around the seal and it looked smashed down. I cleaned the seal as best I could and decided to leave it set overnight without a cartridge installed to see if the seal would expand. Sure enough, I installed a new CO2 cartridge the next morning and the seal held. I fired off a couple rounds to make sure it worked and I actually hit what I was aiming at.

I am glad that I finally got the CP99 back up and running, even if it was three years later. I will probably order a new CO2 seal just to be sure that the old seal won’t give me any trouble. I was pretty proud of myself that I was able to get the thing back together after three years and it actually works. Now I am ready to start improving my action pistol shooting skills. Hmmm, now I might have to make me some fun targets to shoot!