Walther Q5 "Arabesque": Art in the Form of a Match Pistol

Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons. I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today in Scottsdale at the Bear Arms to see something that isn't my normal specialty. This is a basically current production superbly recorded Walther q5. So we normally think of engraved guns, it's kind of like old or you know someone took a fancy gun from the past, well, at that time, you know if you were buying a Tiffany engraved Colt that was engraved like new at the factory. and the same is true today, but I think a lot of people maybe don't consider it, so what we have here is like I said, a Walther q5 that has like a hundred and thirty hours of hand engraving work on it and it's really a One Quite a beautiful gun, as well as being an excellent competition gun, so let's take a closer look.

It comes in a very nice leather case. Walther stamped on the top, open it up and you know it's an interesting commentary on old style, you know, classic. engraved weapons you look at this fancy case like well, what are all these things for? Well, those little slots for the disassembly screwdriver and this one is for a shell box. Well, in this case we have a slot on the side for the mandatory trigger lock, which No need to bother to engrave or embellish what we have here are three, two spare magazines and the

pistol

and oh my goodness , this is fantastic, so the base gun itself is a Walther Q five.

This is a Steel Framed Pistol, it is developed from its base on the ppq series which was based on Walther's P 99 series and this is just the most modern version with all the updates from the competition, so It has adjustable sights, it looks really fantastic. They call it minimal dynamic per

form

ance trigger reset, in fact one of the key features of the P 99 and its descendants like it is that they use a firing pin system in which the firing pin is fully cocked and pulling the trigger only releases it when there is a lot of pressure. Striker-fired

pistol

s like this use the first part of the trigger post to finish cocking the striker, so you're tensioning the spring before the trigger is released and that gives you a stiffer, less good trigger pull, where the Walther The design here doesn't have things fully cocked and the internal safety prevents it from firing, dropped or anything and then the trigger just has to release the firing pin to advance, so the engraving on this was done by a company called Bottega in cz.

Oni Giovanelli, which was founded in 1955 just above the Trumpy Ax valley, which is located in the guard area of ​​Italy, this is basically the only valley where there is a large profusion of Italian firearms companies and companies related to production of firearms, such as engravers, so the company was

form

ed in the year 55 and the engraver who actually made this particular weapon was a gentleman named Darío Cortina who started working for the company when he was 14 years old and worked there for 41 years, so I've been doing this. Quite a while ago it seems that he more or less began sweeping the floors and learned the art of engraving.

Apparently the gold in the light elements were his, not so much they don't sound like suggestions but more because of his insistence on the company that the engraving company was associated with. We met with Walther and apparently they get along very well and they had this project which, by the way, is called

arabesque

and Dario Cortina did the engraving and basically came to the conclusion that this would look a lot better if we had some little gold details. and he told Walther we're going to put gold details on this because it'll look better and your choice is to say "okay" or "okay" because I'm not going to give you a choice other than the gun itself, all the magazines have a steel base. plates that have been embellished, engraved and with gold details, you get a couple of those too.

I admit it's a little jarring for me to get this as a super magazine fan with this super fancy baseplate and then just a cheap, standard molded plastic magazine loading tool. You can see that the case is designed specifically for that charger. I guess the last thing here would be the wooden surround grip assembly, which is nicely checkered and a very nice piece of wooden material to boot. I think it's really going very well. Well, with this type of large floral style engraving, I have to admit that one of the fundamental questions that arises with these types of things is who buys them and what for?

Walther has this as a weapon that is fully functional and that they are proud of. in the fact that it has a really good trigger and it has all the competition style improvements that they put into the q5 series, like this is a fully functional gun and I suspect that the people who built it would maybe be a little disappointed if It was never actually used, what's the point of doing all that work and making this such a good gun if no one is going to shoot it? And on the other hand, I suspect that the vast majority of people who buy something like this do. so, without any intention of shooting it, for them it's a piece of mechanical art that they will put on a shelf and appreciate, but won't actually use, and I think in some ways it's a little sad, it's a shame that the value that entails This is the dollar value associated with it due to the experience, quality, and quantity of work required to create it.

It's a shame that the consequence of that is that it's too valuable for anyone to want to risk damaging it or for you to know about. wear, no, it's an interesting conundrum with just ornate guns, but you know, custom ornate high end mechanical art of anything like this, in any case, it's a beautiful gun, at some point someone is going to buy it and take it to house and I hope they give it a very nice home and if it were mine, I could afford to buy a gun like that and then shoot it because I think that's what everyone involved in the project would prefer anyway.

I hope you enjoyed the video. It's an interesting opportunity to take a look at some of the engraving work currently being done on new production pistols like this one from Walther. Thanks for watching.