I’ve owned the Ruger RXM for a couple of months now, and overall, it’s fine. I’ve made some changes that made me enjoy it more than stock, but I’ve brought it back to basically its stock form aside from the trigger to talk about possibly my biggest complaint with this gun out of the box, and that is the lower, particularly the grip texture, or lack thereof.
If you didn’t know, Ruger partnered with Magpul to bring the RXM to market, and Magpul was in charge of the polymer lower. Magpul, of course, makes a lot of polymer products, and their AR grips are widely used. When people ask me about the RXM grip, I often tell them that the texture is a lot like any Magpul AR grip. There are little raised straight lines sprinkled across the lower that make up the texture itself.
On an AR grip, I’ve never had a complaint with this because on an AR, you have the luxury of distributing recoil across more contact points and surface area. With a handgun like the RXM, all of the recoil goes directly into your hands, and to me, this grip texture is very minimal and ends up becoming slippery after some shooting once my hands start to get clammy. On one of my first range trips with this gun, I literally had to stop live firing and just practice drawing with it because I could not get a good purchase on the grip.
Because of this, I knew that I wanted to replace the lower, which can be easily done because the RXM has a removable fire control insert, which is the serialized portion and can be transferred to a different lower. I actually have the Icarus Precision aluminum lower backordered, but I have no idea when that’s going to arrive, so the next best thing is to just stipple the polymer lower that I already have.
Now, this isn’t going to be a full tutorial on how to stipple or anything super in-depth. I’m just going to talk about what I’ve done. If you’re interested in learning how to stipple, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube.
To start, I knew that for this frame I wanted some deep inset borders. This would really help define the stippling and make it stand out. I’m started with a Dremel and a small round carving bit. I’m used this to make my way around the border that’s already there. To keep things simple, I didn’t add any new areas of stippling to the frame, just working within the predetermined sections.
Next, I moved on to sanding. This is a step that I feel is very project-based. From my experience, sanding is really just there to give you a flat, even surface to work on. If you have areas that sit too high, it’s going to make stippling harder because you’ll have excess material to burn through. Sometimes there can be so much extra material that you’ll notice thick blobs of melted polymer once you stipple over those areas. Because the RXM lower features such minimal raised texture, I experimented with sanding with just one area to start with.
Next, I stippled with a small round tip. I used this to work my way around the various borders. This is something I’d recommend if you’re using a tip for your main texture that’s difficult to consistently bring right up against the edge of the border. Having this first stippled border helps hide the edges of your main texture pattern.
Once the border is complete, I moved on to the tip that I’ll be using for the main texture. After some experimentation on the side, I decided on a small Phillips head tip. Ultimately, you can use whatever tip you want, depending on the pattern you’re going for.
I went with this tip in a random pattern, and ultimately, it creates something similar to a Polymer80, SCT, or Shadow Systems frame, just a bit more aggressive. A lot of that depends on how you lay out your pattern and how aggressive your pressure is while stippling.
Now that the stippling is complete, I went back and polished up the deep borders just to aesthetically clean them up a bit. This brings back a little shine to the carved-out area and helps make it pop a little more. This can, and probably should, have been done right after cutting the borders in the first place, but it is what it is.
And there you have it, a custom stipple job on the factory Ruger RXM lower. Really, there’s no question about it. This stippling adds a tremendous amount of grip to the lower, and it’s honestly a night-and-day difference. I have no doubts that I’ll be able to hold onto this gun much more confidently during extended live fire.
I hope this helped you if you’re thinking about attempting this project yourself. But if you don’t want to do the actual stippling and still want something similar, hit me up. I can offer this type of service on a new lower and get it done for you for a fee.
Email me and we can work something out: Hai@HaiHoangTran.com
Want to support my work?
Consider visiting the shop and buying "Absolutely Nothing"
https://www.HaiHoangTran.com/shop/absolutely-nothing
or
Become a YouTube member!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLUO-2ltlWfydRZ7pRRnXkw/join
Become a Patron!
https://www.patreon.com/HaiHoangTran
or
Buy some official merch!
https://www.youtube.com/haitran/store
PayPal
https://www.PayPal.me/HaiHoangTran
or
Just shop on Amazon via this link!
https://amzn.to/2FgsDnG