Pawn Shop Pieces – Excel Arms X9R

If you search for the Excel Arms X9R on the Google machine, you won’t find much. A few old for-sale listings at most. On YouTube, all you’ll find is a promo video from the customer. When you look into Excel Arms as a whole, what you tend to see is information on 5.7x28mm guns they produced, a promised AutoMag pistol revival, and a TEC-22 clone, but not much else.

I can’t find a single review for the X9R on YouTube or Google. I stumbled into this oddball hanging on the wall of a dusty gun shop with a $250 price tag. Its odd looks captured me, and I’m a PCC fan. I snatched it up and brought it home without knowing much. After extensive searching, I still don’t know much about this gun.

The Excel Arms X9R – What We Know

Here’s what I know for sure. The X9R is a semi-auto, 9mm, straight blowback carbine that uses Glock magazines. The gun was produced up until at least 2018, but it might have been produced longer than that; there isn’t much information. It’s worth noting that the X9R missed the big PCC push of 2014/2015.

If you weren’t into guns in that era, you might not know that the dual release of the CZ Scorpion and MPX revived the PCC concept, and now everyone makes one. This was an interesting era, and prior to the PCC revival, carbines that accepted Glock magazines were pretty rare. The X9R offered Glock compatibility before it was the standard. If you’re curious about the origin of the “Does it Take Glock mags?” meme, it dates back to this era.

The X9R had that going for it, but not much else. The price was between $800 and $650 for these rifles, according to old listings, and that’s absurd. The guns are CNC machined and look and feel nice, but they are straightforward overall. We get an AR-style stock and pistol grip, but that seems to be the end of AR compatibility.

Live Inventory Price Checker

	CZ-USA Scorpion EVO 3 S1 9mm Pistol	Rainier Arms	$ 1059.95
	CZ-USA Scorpion 3+ Micro 9mm Pistol	Rainier Arms	$ 999.00
	CZ Scorpion 9mm Magazine - 20rd	Rainier Arms	$ 33.99
	Cz Scorpion Evo Pistol Grip - Cz Scorpion Evo Pistol Grip Black	Brownells.com	$ 21.95 $ 13.99

Inside and Out

The handguard features Picatinny rails across the top and bottom and slots on the side, but those aren’t M-LOK slots. They appear to be similar in idea and allow you to mount rails, but the footprint is unknown to me, and it must have been proprietary. The barrel isn’t threaded, which is a shame because this could be a solid suppressor host.

The controls consist of a crossbolt safety that’s pretty large and a charging handle to match. The magazine release is placed ergonomically, so it’s easy to reach. It’s similar to the magazine release you see on AR-9s. There is no bolt release, and the gun does not have a last-round bolt hold-open device. This was a problem of the era with Glock-mag fed carbines.

The charging handle is right side only, and there isn’t even a whiff of ambidextrous design with the X9R. It’s got all the trappings of a straight blowback gun with a heavy recoil spring and heavy bolt, which leads to a weighty little rifle.

The bolt is stainless, which makes all that carbon buildup from a straight blowback easy to clean off. The massive charging handle provides a secure grip, helping you overcome the hefty recoil spring.

The gun comes with three Allen keys. Why? Because that’s what you need to field-strip this thing. Yep, tools are required to even clean the weapon. This is silly, and they could have figured out a more straightforward tool-free method of disassembly.

To The Range With the X9R

From top to bottom, the gun’s an oddity. It’s easy to understand why it didn’t sell all that well, and why this appears to be the first review it’s received across the entire internet. How does it perform at the range? I loaded up some steel and brass cased ammo, grabbed a handful of Glock magazines, and went to find out.

Blowback guns tend to have a violent recoil impulse in line with a 5.56 AR-15. That’s not the case here. It’s not overly smooth, but it’s surprisingly soft. Likely a testament to good balancing of the bolt weight and recoil spring. It’s not jumpy, and it’s not throwing much into your shoulder. It’s better than most cheap blowback 9mms, like the KelTec SUB 2000, but it doesn’t touch a radial or roller delayed design.

Recoil aside, the accuracy also impressed me. It stacked rounds at 25 yards into a two-inch circle. At 50 yards, I can reach out and hit an 8-inch gong without any real challenge. The X9R features an insanely light trigger. It has no noticeable takeup and a crisp break. The light trigger also makes it tempting to go fast.

Shooting Fast

If you’ll indulge that temptation, the gun will go fast, sometimes faster than you’d expect. Bump firing the gun is super easy, and you don’t need a fancy stock to get it rocking and rolling. It’s a great way to turn money into noise.

Much like the MP5, when the gun goes empty, you’ll hear a click due to a lack of the last round bolt hold open. This slows reloads down, and so does the tight recoil spring. You have to jam the magazine in and then fight with the charging handle. Reloads are slow, so don’t go too fast if you can’t spare the reload time.

The gun does create a rather obnoxious noise. The receiver extension is empty, so when the gun fires, you can hear the spring move, and it seems to echo inside the tube. This results in a fairly annoying noise you are left dealing with. It’s not a problem, but it does annoy me.

There were no reliability concerns. I didn’t shoot this gun extensively, but in the 300ish rounds I sent downrange, I only had one failure to fire, which seems to be a dud round more than a gun failure.

Foretelling Failure

It’s easy to see why the X9R didn’t sell so well, or seemed to have sold well. The gun had an expensive price point mixed with some odd features. It wasn’t fancy or innovative, it required tools to field strip, and didn’t do anything exceptionally well. The X9R is fine at a $250 price point, but at $650 to $800, you’d be laughed out the door. While it’s fine at the range, it lacks purpose.

There are better options for home defense and competition, even in the PCC realm. Excel Arms is no more, but I will admit to some curiosity about the 5.7 version of this rifle. It might be a little bit more fun. For now, the X9R will likely get lost in the gun safe.

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About Travis Pike

Travis Pike is a former Marine Machine Gunner, a lifelong firearms enthusiast, and now a regular guy who likes to shoot, write, and find ways to combine the two. He holds an NRA certification as a Basic Pistol Instructor and is the world’s Okayest firearm’s instructor.