At Grip Plus, Sai Chiang Will Make You the Most Accurate Shotgun Grip on the Planet
When it comes to gun fit, we all know the standard check list: length of pull, cast, pitch, and drop at comb and heel.
But Mark Wade will tell you that something is sorely missing. Over the decades, after 15 custom stocks crafted by experts he describes as “well-known stock makers,” the competitive clays shooter will urge you to add one more measurement: gun grip. At 6 feet/3 inches and 280 pounds, Mark has what he calls “large hands, getting the right grip has always been a challenge,” he says.
For Mark, gun fit has become especially important as he ages. The Florida-based financial advisor has been shooting competitively since 1989 – winning the Grand American Trap tournament in 1992. He recently got bumped up into the ATA’s Veterans Category. But now it feels like Father Time is catching up with him. “At 68, I’m not as good a shooter as I used to be. I’ve had big layoffs in between. My primary game is American Trap, although I shoot all the disciplines. I just want to shoot better.”
And Mark will tell you, a stock’s grip is probably the most overlooked aspect of fitting a shotgun.
An ergonomically correct grip on a shotgun stock directly affects control, consistency, recoil management, and ultimately, breaking targets. While shooters typically focus on length of pull or comb height, they often forget that the grip is their primary interface for controlling the shotgun.
The perfect shotgun grip helps ensure consistent hand placement and mount. It enables repeatable head position, eye alignment, gun swing and follow-through to the target. The correct grip radius and depth will intuitively position the trigger finger to promote instinctive shooting. Your wrist will be more relaxed, recoil becomes more manageable and overall your stamina improves.
Sai Chiang in his shop examining a Grip Plus stock.
Frustrated, Mark looked beyond the industrial-age practice of relying on the orthodoxy 18th century try-gun, for example, and instead went full-on digital. He grabbed a flight to the high-tech mecca of San Francisco and met with Sai Chiang, Owner and Founder of Grip Plus shotgun stocks.
In the end, Mark says the completed stock has “the closest I’ve had to a great grip.”
Sai got into precision-engineered stock-making sort of sideways, through his California fabrication business. He spent 35 years in photo processing until it peaked in 2000 with the spread of digital photography. In 2005, he decided to start a company in the San Francisco Bay Area that manufactured interior graphics and architectural fabrications for point-of-sale and similar systems.
A Grip Plus stock gets the finishing touches in the company’s shop.
Meanwhile, Sai excelled at local and national competitions. During his first year learning Olympic Skeet, he qualified for the U.S. Olympic Skeet Team. When he scored a perfect 100 on the first day of competition and finished sixth overall, the U.S. Army Reserve Marksmanship Unit recruited Sai to compete and represent them in Olympic Skeet. He accepted and at the age of 28 enlisted in the Army Reserves to join the Army Reserve Marksman Unit. During that period he grew increasingly dissatisfied with commercially available shotgun stocks.
He returned to Hong Kong in an attempt to qualify for their Olympic skeet team, and made it. Closing in on his mid-fifties, though, Sai realized he would never become a world-class competitive clays shooter. But wanting to stay involved in that world, he acted on his long-held ambition to become a professional stock maker.
“Once I got into Olympic skeet I felt the stock didn’t fit me the way it should,” he said.
So he started “cutting up the stock” as he describes it, in effect making and modifying his own stock. In 2009, he traveled to Munich, Germany for a custom stock from Ergosign – known for their modular EvoComp stocks that feature customizable grip styles, weight reduction options and innovative recoil-reduction systems. He became their U.S. distributor. He started getting requests for bespoke stocks that Ergosign would not fill. He finally ended his arrangement with Ergosign, and decided to do it on his own in part by leveraging his fabrication background.
The Grip Plus shotgun stock.
“It became the most challenging learning curve of my life,” he said. “The grip is a preformed style design and it doesn’t have the easy measurements of other stock measurements. It’s free form.”
He then embarked on an extended pilgrimage to Italy to master stockmaking.
He ultimately decided to use technology to make repeatable, individualized, custom grips. He learned CNC machining. With improvement, he upgraded from a three-axis to five-axis CNC machine.
A three-axis CNC machine shapes stationary material by cutting along three perpendicular directions: X (left/right), Y (front/back), and Z (up/down). By comparison, the five-axis CNC machine uses three linear axes (X, Y, Z) for movement and two rotational axes (A, B, or C) to tilt and swivel the cutting tool for the creation of complex, contoured shapes.
A CNC machine in the Grip Plus shop creating a bespoke stock.
“Custom stock makers make it by hand,” Sai explained. “It’s time consuming and not as precise as it needs to be. They sometimes use a duplicator not a CNC machine. A duplicator is not even close in duplicating a stock. Then you start sanding, and you never get a completely accurate stock that way.”
When it comes to raw materials, Sai explains that he “starts with a large, blank of any grade that will fit your hand.” You then put on a surgical glove. Grip some automotive Bondo and you end up with an exact mold of your hand. Sai scans that grip into a digital format and converts it to machine code that’s used to CNC-mill that blank to fit your natural grip precisely.
Sai Chiang
Shooters like Mark then receive a totally bespoke grip. “It makes all the difference,” he said.
Mark has a titanium shoulder on his shooting side and the reduced recoil from the Grip Plus stock “kept me in the trap game. It’s the best-fitting stock I’ve ever owned.”
Irwin Greenstein is the Publisher of Shotgun Life. You can reach him at the Shotgun Life Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/shotgunlife#
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Irwin Greenstein is Publisher of Shotgun Life. Please send your comments to letters@shotgunlife.com.
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