Comparing the Vertical Front Grip
& Standard Lower Handguard
on the Romanian AK47

Many
of the parts kits on the
market these days offer
the wooden lower vertical grip on the front handguard. If you ask 10
people you'll get 10 opinions on these vertical grips. I personally
started out hating them on the looks alone, but after shooting, and
then owning one then more than one I now am a fan of the design. And
the looks? Well they grow on you like an ugly puppy
But aside from
looks what
are the advantages and disadvantages of the two designs? We'll take
a closer look here.

To
make the test as fair as possible we used similar rifles. Both are
built on US receivers with Romanian parts kits. Both rifles used a
30 round magazine

Both
have the same wire folding stock, same slant muzzle break.

We
shot 30 round magazines loaded with 20 rounds of Wolf ammo. We took
all the shots from an offhand standing position. We wanted to use the
least steady shooting position to gauge the efficiency of the front
grips.

Here
are the results. We shot many targets but this is a good representative
of the results on each of them. The top is the attempt with the front
vertical grip and the bottom target is the attempt without the bottom
grip.
Although I like the
feel of the from grip
and it seems more steady, the results are clearly in favor of the
rifle with no front grip. We plan to test these results by switching
the grips between the two rifles and shooting again to see if we get
consistent results.
In
the meantime if you'd like to buy a wooden vertical front grip for
your AK47 we have a few for sale call 1-866-999-2913 and we'll get
one out to you. Call for details.

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