AR-15 Recoil Pad

Anew customer brought me his wife’s brand-new 450 Bushmaster. This is essentially your everyday AR-15 on steroids. He had purchased his own, largely for hunting Florida’s abundant feral hogs, but his petite young bride had decided she wanted to join him on these potentially exciting hunts and wanted a 450 Bushmaster of her own. However, he thought the recoil was stout enough (about that of a 20 gauge shotgun) to warrant a recoil pad.

In the August 2020 issue of Shooting Times an article noted, "Shooting the 450 Bushmaster is an adventure. It’s accurate, all right, but you know when you’ve touched it off! It kicks. For recoil figures, handloads ranged from 9.5 to 14.6 foot-pounds, bellowing huge, bright orange balls Above and A recoil pad helped. from the muzzle. But everything shot with it is apt to stay shot." Not surprisingly, after shooting his at the range, the recoil quickly became a problem for her.

My customer was initially interested in an "exotic" compensator for her rifle but I suggested anew recoil pad instead. Now neither of us had ever seen an AR or derivative with a recoil pad, but since I had been doing a lot of recoil pad work all summer, the subject was fresh on my mind. I told him a recoil pad would be a lot cheaper than buying and installing compensator, exotic or otherwise, given the required barrel threading.

The added length to the rifle, due to the additional inch or so from the recoil pad would not be an issue because the rifle had an adjustable Magpul stock. He thought about it and said, "What the heck, if I doesn’t reduce the felt recoil enough, we can still add the compensator later. A happy wife is a happy life!" I first removed the factory 1/4" thick polymer/rubber plate from the butt of the lady’s AR and used it to trace a pencil and paper pattern to use in grinding the new pad to fit.

Next, I went online to the Brownells website to search for choices of various size recoil pads that would work. This time I struck out as most examples were marked "Back Ordered" and those that were in stock showed no dimensions other than thickness, if at all. Next, I went to the Kick-EEZ website (Kick Eez- Products.com, and

found an abundance of pads, sizes, and colors. Even more important, the site listed dimensions of their pads. Preferring black to match the Magpul collapsible buttstock, I found a pad just slightly larger than my pattern. For the few readers out there that haven’t enjoyed the fun of being covered in rubber dust generated by belt grinding away-oversized recoil pad down to size, just take my word for it; you want a pad as closely sized to your pattern as possible.

The price was a little more than I was used to at Brownells or other distributors, but knowing that the size was close—and that it wasn’t back ordered—made the slightly higher cost worth every penny. Moreover, the pad was 1.125" Free Gunsmith Book Just finished downloading and started reading the e Book, Gunsmith Tools, Cutters & Gauges: A Primer, offered by Fred Zeglin in your January 2021 issue. It is an easy read and informative for the average mechanically-inclined person like me. Thanks very much to Mr.

Zeglin for offering this great resource free for American Gunsmith subscribers! You’re welcome. All subscribers can follow the link below and use the coupon code: sven20 4dRentals.com/product/ebookprimer Visit his website at FredZeglin.com.