Custom Gun Grips: How to Improve Your Shooting Experience

Adding specialized gun grips to your custom gun can improve your shooting experience and performance. Whether you’re adding grip sleeves to your carry pistol or a foregrip to an AR-15, the intent is the same. Better handling for better shooting. Before you start bolting all kinds of contraptions onto your gun or spending your hard-earned money, it’s important to understand how grip affects your shooting, custom grip benefits, and how to choose the right gun grips for your shooting needs.

Where Shooter Meets Gun

The gun grips are the point at which you connect to your firearm. They provide the leverage to aim, squeeze the trigger, and control recoil. They offer a firm gripping surface that sits surely in your hand. Grips also need to be comfortable enough that you can maintain your hand position through extended aiming or manage the recoil generated by the small explosion inside the chamber without injuring yourself or losing your handhold. They may not always get a lot of attention, but when a grip fails or doesn’t do its job well, your shooting suffers.

• Grips: This is the area of the pistol, rifle, carbine, or shotgun your dominant hand holds onto while shooting. Whether it’s a revolver, pistol, or long gun, you need a control surface to work with.
• Stocks: On many long guns, the grip is incorporated into the stock, while others, like AR-15s, may have separate stocks and grips. The stock provides additional support when braced by the pocket created where your upper torso and shoulder join.
• Foregrips: Most common on long guns, although there are foregrips that will attach to a pistol’s accessory rail, this grip lets your offhand help stabilize the gun for better accuracy.
• Grip Sleeves: An easy grip upgrade for pistols with molded frames that don’t use grip plates, these polymer or rubber accessories slip over the grip to improve the size or tactile feel for the shooter.
• Skins: Another alternative for molded frames is texturized stickers or “skins” that are engineered to wrap around the gun’s frame and functional controls to improve handling.

Gun Grips: Often Missed Opportunities

Too often, shooters simply accept bad gun grips as “just one of those things”, whether they’re the stock OEM slabs or custom upgrades that look the part but just don’t feel right. You don’t have to. Back in the day, most gun stores had the grip display–which looked like a spinning showcase had come down with revolver warts–to showcase a dozen or so wood variations and a few Pachmayr options. You have an almost limitless set of gun grip solutions for modern handguns, including established favorites like fresh plates or grip sleeves, as well as modern 3D-printed grips, frames, foregrips, and more–all in a variety of colors, patterns, materials, textures, and configurations.

There’s no reason to settle for bad grips anymore.

The Benefits of Upgrading to Custom Grips

While not every set of gun grips offers every benefit, there are a few common upsides shooters are looking for when they pick out their new furniture. You should start by considering what you hope new grips will do for your shooting or where your current setup may be letting you down.

Better Handling

One of the top reasons to add custom gun grips or foregrips is that they can make handling your gun easier. From designs that offer better purchase when your hands are wet, slick, or slippery to thinner grip sizes for small hands and grip sleeves that add a little more bulk for big ol’ bear paws, you can make sure you have the handhold you need. This doesn’t just affect accuracy and precision. A loss of control during live fire on the range or in real life can be dangerous and come with deadly consequences.

Increased Comfort

Aside from the handling, when a grip fits your hand just right, it feels better. This makes it more comfortable to hold in a ready position or aimed. Your hand finds the proper shooting grip more readily on the draw from a holster, improving your speed-on-target and efficiency. This might be due to molding that conforms better to your hand, a lighter weight, or surface texturing that offers fewer sharp points that dig into your skin.

Improved Accuracy

Because custom gun grips give you better handling, you also have more control for better aiming and precision, the follow-up shot placement after you manage recoil and come back on target. The right grip plates or sleeves make it easier for you to mitigate recoil and ride through the muzzle flip to return to your aiming point. Foregrips and custom stocks do the same for rifles and carbines, making even rapid-fire tactical engagements more manageable.

They Look Cool

We may be all about function-first around here, but there’s nothing wrong with functional gun upgrades looking cool as all get out. In fact, it’s a bonus. Gun grips are available to suit every taste, coordinate with every color, and emphasize every curve or angle on your custom gun. Why not take advantage of cool points while improving your shooting?

Choosing Your Custom Gun Grips

When it comes to choosing your custom gun grips, it helps to take stock of your shooting needs and preferences. There are plenty of options on the market, so every gun owner can find the perfect solution for their firearms.

1. Intent – As with most gun upgrades, your first priority is to make a focused improvement that will give you the benefits you need to shoot better. Whether that’s handling, control, or comfort, your gun grips need to support your goals.
2. Materials – Make sure the materials used are going to give you long-term use without failing, cracking, peeling, or otherwise failing. That perfectly stippled set of grips won’t help your handling if they’re soft enough to be worn down through normal use in a few months.
3. Design – Likewise, the design of your gun grips should be a perfect fit for your gun and engineered to hold its position so you have a secure grip for steady aim.
4. Quality – Choose grips from a manufacturer that has a rigorous quality program. This ensures the design has been tested, materials checked, and the final product signed off on.
5. Cost – Finally, consider the price of the gun grip options you’ve narrowed your choices down to. While we’re all about saving money, when it comes to shooting better, the cost-benefit analysis gets a little more important. The last thing you want to do is save a few bucks just to end up with grips you don’t like or can’t count on.

Order Gun Grips, Grip Sleeves, Foregrips, and Stocks Online

Get the grip surfaces you need for better shooting. We offer custom gun grips, stocks, sleeves, and fore grips that give you the quality and design features you want with friendlier pricing for your bank account. Order your gun grips online from JSD Supply.