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.