The Rimfire Report: Master Chief's Favorite .22? FarrowTech's FT-M Kit

If you have spent any amount of time on the range with a KelTec P17, you already know it looks like it fell out of a prop bin on a low-budget sci-fi set. The telltale signs of a KelTec’s typical clamshell polymer construction and boxy lines have earned it comparisons to everything from a Nerf gun to a prop from a video game nobody can quite put their finger on. FarrowTech decided to stop pretending the resemblance was a coincidence and leaned all the way in with the FT-M kit. This conversion kit dresses the P17 up as a reasonably faithful (but compact) stand-in for the M6D Magnum, a firearm frequently seen throughout the Halo series. Today we’ll check out this roughly $100 aftermarket conversion kit to see what it does to your P17 pistol.

More Rimfire Report @ TFB:

• The Rimfire Report: Celebrating 75 Years of CCI — A Trip to Lewiston 
• The Rimfire Report: Reviewing the FN 502 Tactical Rimfire Pistol 
• The Rimfire Report: Testing SK High Velocity 22LR Match Ammo 

What You Actually Get

The FT-M kit runs $95 at the moment, down from $105, and that price gets you both slide cover styles (one cut for an RMR-pattern optic, one with iron sights) along with two mag bases, all the hardware, and all the tools needed for installation. FarrowTech backs it with the same lifetime warranty they put on the rest of their lineup, which is a nice bit of confidence in a product category that is, at the end of the day, a 3D-printed part strapped to a $199 gun.

That "3D printed" part is worth dwelling on for a second, because FarrowTech is not hiding it or treating it as a shortcut. Most of the company’s catalog runs on additive manufacturing, and pairs those printed housings with machined metal hardware wherever load actually matters. That is a different proposition than the usual garage-printer novelty part. If you were hoping to just print your own housing instead of buying one, you are not skipping some manufacturing secret; you would be doing roughly what FarrowTech already does, just without their dialed-in files, their material selection, or printing skills, which is something I’m still trying to nail down myself.

Installation

This is the part of the review where I tell you installation is easy, because it is. You remove a set of factory screws from the P17 and replace them with the ones FarrowTech includes, which is also how the kit avoids being a permanent modification. Every screw you take out gets a 1:1 replacement, so if you ever want your P17 back in its original, unmodified format, you just reverse the process. No drilling, no cutting, no dealing with adhesives. That matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the FT-M is less of a permanent transition and more of a cosplay that you can do with your gun for a little while.

Mechanically, the P17 does not seem to notice the kit is there. Across roughly 500 rounds over the last week I’ve had the gun in this configuration, the P17 has given me the same mixed bag of reliability P17 owners have come to expect, which is to say whatever hiccups showed up tracked back to the usual rimfire ammo lottery rather than anything the kit introduced. The added bulk and weight do not change how the gun cycles or introduce any new failure points that I can observe. You are not losing reliability to gain a costume, which is really the best-case outcome for a kit like this. This could change once we add an optic, as the additional weight of both the bulky rear end and the optic could upset the tuning of the P17, but we’ll check that out in a follow-up article.

Where the kit does cost you something is precision. The FT-M's printed housing is bulky by design, since that bulk is what makes the P17 read as an M6D in the first place, and that bulk sits right around the sight line. Getting genuinely accurate hits with the stock iron sights is harder than shooting the bare P17. The holdover is pretty severe, but with practice, it is not unusable, and walking shots in for casual plinking is easy enough, but if you are after tight groups, the iron-sighted version of this kit is not the configuration for that. That is exactly why the eventual red dot matters here, and not just for looks. FarrowTech also sells a red dot mount that replaces the rear iron sight portion of the FT-M body, and putting an optic up top should claw back a lot of the precision the housing costs you with irons alone.

Some Criticisms

The two places the FT-M kit runs into real, physical limitations are the trigger guard and the bulky rear’s interference with the safe operation of the slide stop. FarrowTech built the housing to mimic the M6D's oversized guard, and if you have anything close to a full-sized adult hand, you are not getting a comfortable second full hand in there alongside your firing grip. It is not dangerous or unsafe; it is just tight, or you have to modify your grip by moving your index finger out of the big trigger guard to just under the new dust cover. If you want to actually replicate the clone look people are chasing with this kit, meaning the full profile with no trigger guard interference, the real answer is a trigger guard delete on the P17 itself. That is a bigger conversation than "bolt a kit on," and one I wouldn’t recommend.

Secondly, and again probably unavoidably, the operation of the slide stop/release becomes quite painful when sending the slide home while using your thumb to do it, as many of us would during a reload, or sending the slide home on an empty chamber. Doing this with the rear part of the housing attached inevitably pinches your thumb in between it and the forward part of the conversion kit, not ideal, but something you soon won't forget next time you run the gun and try to do a hasty reload. Other than that, throwing any old ammunition, a suppressor, and maybe even a light on this thing is a fun time with some like-minded friends at the range if you’re into that.

Scale, For Context

This next section is for all of you Halo nerds in the audience who are wondering. I think it is worth noting, before we go, just how small this whole package actually is compared to what a “real” M6D would look like if we were to make a 1:1 replica. The M6D Magnum in Halo lore comes in at roughly 10.51 inches long and 10.83 inches tall, dimensions that exist to accommodate a fictional 12.7x40mm round pushing what amounts to a .50 caliber projectile, and be handled by a 7-foot-tall cyborg in 2 tons of armor.

The KelTec P17 underneath the FT-M kit is 6.7 inches long and 5.3 inches tall, is shooting .22LR, and is, of course, handled by relatively normal-sized humans (Hop is approaching the height of a Spartan, but he’s not quite there yet). Of course, I don’t mean to imply that FarrowTech is trying to make a 1:1 scale replica. Instead, they are building something that reads as the M6D at a glance while staying a genuinely small, genuinely cheap rimfire pistol. The reactions we’ve gotten from others at the range are worth the price alone, as anyone who has ever played the original Halo will instantly recognize the lines of the M6D Magnum pistol, even if it's scaled down.

Final Thoughts (For Now)

The FT-M kit by itself gets the P17 most of the way to looking the part without touching reliability, and it does it without permanently altering the host gun. What it does not do, at least not yet, is complete the illusion or shoot as precisely as the bare gun does. If you’re willing to commit to the bit, a trigger guard delete, extended magazines, a paint or Cerakote job to match the M6D's is probably all you’d need to get it a bit closer to the real deal. Down the road, once there is an optic on top of this thing (likely an RMRcc or RMR), and the rest of the build is finished, we will circle back to see whether the FT-M holds up as more than just a neat shape bolted to a budget .22.

For now, the kit does what it claims to do. It is a reversible, well-made novelty piece that will not hurt how your P17 runs, and depending on how much you care about hand fit inside a cosplay-accurate trigger guard or shooting fast, precise groups through irons, it might be all the "Halo pistol" you need until someone scales things up and replicates the “real” M6D. Anyway, your thoughts and comments, as always, are welcome below. Thanks as always for stopping by to read The Rimfire Report, and we’ll see you again next week!