When you want to tailor a firearm to meet your needs, custom gun accessories give you reliable upgrades to improve your shooting lifestyle. Custom firearm parts are increasingly popular with those who are building their own homemade firearms or modifying commercially purchased guns. Gun customization can alter a gun’s outward appearance, improve its function, or make it easier for a shooter to use. That’s why so many people visit Pennsylvania’s Largest Gun Show to find unique parts and accessories for better prices than they’ll get anywhere else.
Why Choose Custom Gun Parts and Accessories
Custom gun parts are components that are integral to the function of the firearm and are meant to replace your gun’s OEM parts. Custom gun accessories, meanwhile, add additional utility and improve performance without altering your gun’s integral components, or they are separate but used with your gun. Every gun owner has their own reason for choosing to upgrade their weapon, but the most common are:
Accuracy – Improving your sight picture for faster target acquisition, more accurate shot placement, and tight, precise groupings.
Performance – Fine-tuning your gun’s operation by tweaking the trigger pull, recoil management, reliability, or usability, among other characteristics.
Comfort – Giving your gun a better feel while carrying or shooting it.
Capabilities – Adding features or mechanisms to ensure your gun is ready for action in tactical, competition, or defensive situations.
Appearance – Changing your gun’s appearance, whether it be its color, lines, or “attitude.”
Most Popular Custom Gun Accessories and Parts You’ll Find at Gun Shows
Custom Grips and Stocks – Grips and stocks–sometimes referred to as “furniture”–are the control surfaces of your weapon. That means the grips that adorn your pistol or revolver frame, as well as the stock, foregrip, and/or pistol grips on rifles, shotguns, and carbines. These gun parts replace your OEM versions on guns where these features are removable, while custom gun accessories in the form of sleeves or skins modify fixed grips or stocks to meet your needs.
Exotic woods make some of the most attractive gun customization options for your gun’s furniture. These woods may offer a different color, feel, or texture than the wood or plastic you’re used to. It’s also common to see these adorned with laser etching that creates unique designs or adds grip-friendly texturing.
Another popular upgrade for grips and stocks is replacing traditional components with tactical versions, such as collapsible stocks or ergonomic grip surfaces. These can make the gun more comfortable to shoot, offer increased durability in adverse environmental conditions, or help your gun perform better in fast-moving tactical situations.
Precision Optics – Modern optics have come a long way from your pappy’s hunting scope, and they offer a big improvement over traditional iron sights. They’re available for both handguns and long guns, built rugged, and provide faster target acquisition, more discernable aiming points, and more precise shot placement.
Reflex optics and red dot sights are popular choices for handguns, shotguns, and pistol-caliber carbines. They attach to the firearm via a compatible pre-drilled mounting footprint on your slide or using an adapter. A powerful LED emitter projects a bright, illuminated reticle onto a specially coated lens, illuminating the reticle. Line up your reticle with the target for more intuitive shooting.
You can also add scopes that use similar illumination technology for better mid-to-long-range shooting with a rifle. Outwardly, these may look similar to traditional scopes, but under the hood, they use similar LED emitters to illuminate an etched-glass reticle. This improves your aim in almost any ambient lighting situation, making them perfect for hunting, sport shooting, or on your ranch gun.
Upgraded Triggers – Trigger groups use your finger’s action to release the potential energy of a spring-powered striker or hammer to fire a round. That’s the simplified version. The reality is that each one is a precisely engineered construct made from levers, springs, and bars that all have to work just about perfectly for the gun to fire once, let alone successive shots.
A trigger group with a lighter pull weight is one of the most common custom gun parts for improving accuracy. The lighter pull weight reduces the risk of pulling the shot to the side a bit when firing. It can also reduce fatigue during long range days, leading to better, more disciplined trigger pulls that keep you on target.
Another frequent gun customization is adding a two-stage trigger or pull-release trigger. This upgrade effectively doubles your rate of fire while keeping your gun legally a semi-automatic weapon, meaning one round fired per trigger action. The difference is that a pull-release trigger fires on both the trigger pull and release.
Mags and Mag Plates—Common custom gun accessories, high-capacity magazines, or extended baseplates that add a few extra rounds are available for most box-magazine-fed firearms. You can also get baseplates that support larger hands, improving weapon handling. Finally, decorative base plates help your gun stand out or aid you in identifying magazines with different ammunition types, such as target versus concealed carry loadouts.
Customized Slides – Your slide is the most visible part of your gun, so it offers a great opportunity to help it stand. Engraving can help personalize your weapon or show off your patriotism. Cerakoting–a process that adds a ceramic-polymer finish to the metal of your slide–both beautifying and protecting it. Some slides offer more than just upgraded aesthetics.
Skeletonized slides reduce weight for a more comfortable carry, while deeper serrations aid handling, even with thick gloves or slick hands. Optics-ready milling means your new slide is ready to accept high-performance optics with a compatible footprint. Finally, the addition of rails lets you add custom gun accessories to your weapon quickly and easily.
Suppressor Covers – For guns with either screw-on or integral suppressors, these covers help protect your can while also protecting your fingers from burns. The gas that expands inside the suppressor can heat up the metal to uncomfortable temperatures. More importantly, these covers block the suppressor’s heat from interfering with your optics on long-range shots, where even the slightest hint of heat can throw your shot wide.
Muzzle Brakes, Compensators, and Flash Hiders – These custom gun accessories attach to the end of the barrel either via exterior barrel threads or by affixing to an accessory rail. Muzzle brakes and compensators both make your gun more controllable by redirecting some of the expanding gasses that push the bullet out of the gun. Muzzle brakes vent to the side, reducing felt recoil, while compensators vent gasses from the top of the gun to help mitigate muzzle rise. Flash hiders help dissipate the visible flash when a round is fired, helping to preserve your vision in low-light settings.
Holsters – Holsters give you a way to carry your weapon while keeping it ready for action. Traditional hand-tooled leather holsters still set the standard for providing both a handsome holster and versatile utility. These holsters are available for almost every carry type and position–concealed, open, appendix, cross-draw, and many more. Decorative leather holsters make the perfect custom gun accessory gift to yourself or a gun owner you want to show that you care. For a more modern approach, nylon holsters in traditional styles and newer fitted Kydex models give your gun the protection it needs and give you a comfortable and lightweight carrying option.
Loads of Vendors Local for One Weekend Only
When your local gun show comes to town, it brings vendors from around the region and across the country to an exhibition center or event space near you for a weekend of family-friendly shopping. Whether you’re at one of our smaller 150-table shows or the big Oaks 1500-table event, you’re able to shop from a wider selection of custom gun parts and accessories than any brick-and-mortar location can offer. Whatever the weapon or shooting needs, there’s only one place to be on gun-show weekend if you want to find a good deal on the right parts. Find your next local event on our gun show calendar and order your tickets to an Eagle Shows Gun Show today.
