Not a pleasant experience - Fortis Manufacturing SHIFT Vertical Grip

This grip is lightweight, comfortable, and versatile. It allows for several different grip styles and feels pretty good when used with any of them.

In most cases that would be the essence of the review, but unfortunately I had a very poor experience with this grip. There's no hole in the bottom, so the rear screw is entirely inaccessible to anything other than the mini wrench included in the packaging.

I applied a very modest amount of torque when installing, but the screw must have cross-threaded or something. This spells trouble since there is no way to access it with a conventional bit or driver. Trying to remove the screw with the included wrench stripped it out immediately, and I tried every trick in the book to no avail.

About an hour after installing this grip I was using a hacksaw to chop it in half, since this is literally the only way to access the rear screw.

I didn't expect Fortis support to do much for me, but I contacted them anyways to find out. I was told that I could have shipped my entire handguard to them to have them remove it for me, but at this point there wasn't anything they could do. Shipping the handguard would have been pretty impractical, and probably not much cheaper than the grip itself.

Of course there was some degree of user error that led to my botched install, but even if they'd bothered to provide a torque rating with their grip, I'm not sure how one would accurately apply it. The inaccessibility of the screw means that if anything gets stuck it's game over without some specialty tools.

I didn't get a forward grip out of this purchase, I just lost a hundred bucks and an afternoon. At least I managed to drill out the screw and get the thing off without any damage to my handguard. This experience inspired me to also remove the other Fortis products that had previously been on my rifle.