I think that little clip explained it all. Mako T-Pod: it's a vertical foregrip
and a bipod; there you go. My particular T-Pod here - this is the
Gen 1 - it's a kind of a big chunky grip, the the newer one - the Gen 2 - has finger
grooves cut into the front of it. It seems to be a little bit slimmer. They
both function the same way. They both have versions like this one that are
just the the foregrip and the bipod but there is a version both in Gen 1 and Gen
2 where you can hold a light up in the front of this so it's a little bit
larger and it has kind of a cutout so you can stick a surefire light in it or
whatever and the Gen 2 also comes in a few different colors instead of just
black you can get like a tan and a green before I get too far into this review I
need to point out that this is not an actual Israeli fab defense Mako t-pod
this is a Chinese knockoff I thought that I got in a pretty good deal on this
thing when I bought it turns out it was a good deal it was too good to be true
this is kind of a black market gray market version and you can tell by these
little molding these little circles here on the plastic if yours has this then
yours is fake and it's not made of the good stuff this is not as tough as the
the real I think it's a fiberglass reinforced plastic when you get the
actual Israeli one and this Chinese one even though it says Israel on it yeah
this one is not very tough it kind of breaks apart and I'll show you that here
in a bit despite this being a knockoff that doesn't work as well as the
original I can still discuss the design because even though this is made of
pretty bad stuff it does still use the same you know
design it uses the same features as the original and those are some of the
things that I kind of have some problems with so we'll take a look at that all
right let's take a look at some of the good aspects of this T-Pod first and
the big one here is weight at twelve and a quarter ounces this is definitely
heavier than any foregrip you're gonna find out there but remember that you're
getting a bipod in the deal too and there really is no combination of you
know a separate vertical foregrip and bipod that's going to weigh as little as
this does all together and if you throw in the fact that you can mount this
really far back on the Picatinny rail then that means that you're putting the
weight of all this pretty far back where you want it instead of sticking it out
into the the muzzle of the gun if you had a separate bipod you probably have
to mount it toward the front of the the Picatinny rail and so you're putting an
extra weight out where you really don't want it and also attach to this you get
a lot of space savings you can see that I have this attached and with the
foregrip and bipod you still get plenty of rail left if you want amount of light
or anything like that some other good aspects it is a big chunky grip so if
you have larger hands or kind of hollow hands it's gonna fill it up quite nicely
it has two pressure switch slots and you can see here this little plastic tab and
if I just pull down on that that pops out
this little plastic piece here and you can mount your pressure switch you can
glue it in place or what I did is I put a little velcro wrap around it and the
the bipod was still able to close that works pretty well for me and so you get
one of these on each side the bipod is very easy to deploy if you're in the
foregrip configuration all you have to do is just press these two side-by-side
buttons and then pop the legs come out to their fullest extent well we're on
the subject of the bipod height I'd like to really illustrate that this is a
perfect height for an ar-15 bipod you can see here that it's balancing on the
bipod legs and on the end of the buttstock and you might not be able to
see this but the magazine and the rear grip are just not touching the ground so
if I go into a firing position here where I say my shoulders in here you can
see there's plenty of room I'm really not going to interact with the ground or
rocks or anything like that unless they're really jutting up also on the
height it's very easy to make adjustments now you see that there are
some numbers here and if you want to lock into a new spot you want to level
the gun out maybe you have some camp going on you just press the button on
the back and then you can slide down to the next detent and it's spring-loaded
so if you want to go back up you just press and then pop back out defeat a
rubber and they get a pretty good connection to the ground but the whole
thing has some slop in it it has some flex and this is something that actually
don't mind if I'm doing varminting out in the the Prairie or whatever if
I'm hunting prairie dogs then I want this thing to flex a little bit as the
prairie dog moves I like to get a little bit of pivot so I really don't mind that
let's take a look at some of the drawbacks of the tpod first off you can
see that when it's fully stowed this is about as tall as a 30-round magazine in
the ar-15 so if you have difficulty getting your AR into a case with a
magazine in place you're gonna have the same problem with
the foregrip now to be fair there are some reasons for this you have to have
this great big pivot in the base here and you have to have enough room for the
bipod to fit inside this grip so the group is itself just this part is taller
than most that you'll encounter but it kind of has to be that way for the bipod
another kind of odd thing about the DES base here it does take up quite a few
rails again it's so it's a savings overall if you were to have a foregrip
and a bipod where it might take up everything on the bottom but it is quite
large and when it comes to attaching it it's not the easiest thing in the world
you have this button on the side that you can push so you can slide this thing
on and off which sounds great it's not quite a quick detach though I've
actually hurt myself pretty good trying to get this thing on and off where you
know you press this button just right try to slide it it suddenly goes and
your hand is shredded on your own Picatinny were a little rails there so
that was fun if you want to install it more permanently there is a bolt that
comes with it that you can run through here and that's gonna attach it pretty
well one big problem that I think is just down to the cheap Chinese
manufacturer of this knockoff model as you can see here but every time these
legs deploy it breaks just a little bit more plastic out of this rail so
eventually this leg will just crack right through fly off and I'll never see
it again which is one of the reasons why I don't carry this anymore but the
bigger reason is what's coming up next like me you're probably pretty impressed
with how well this thing deploys but it doesn't Stoke quite so easily
it actually requires two hands you have to use one hand to bring the two legs
together and then your second hand has to come up to press the two buttons and
then you have to press everything down until it all clicks together now that
sounds kind of easy but if you were on a hill if for some reason one of these
legs is a little shorter than the other then it no longer those at all you can't
connect the two sides so you have to first extend the legs until they're the
same bring them together and then do the whole thing so not super easy the tpod
will set you back about $120 so that puts it in pretty much the same price
range as the grip pod the grip pod really isn't in the same league even
though they seem to do the same sort of thing they're both a fore grip they both
have a bipod that pops out but really this thing is it's much more flexible
you can adjust for can't if you're on a weird surface overall I think I would
prefer this the grip pod might be a little tougher it's definitely simpler
so it's definitely competition to check out another competitor might be the D
grip from UTG that thing just came out and it looks like it does pretty much
the same thing as the the teapot here it's I'm sure going to have a much lower
price tag and it might not be as tough as the the grip pod or tough as this but
it does have a quick release lever on this side and that's kind of sweet one
of the reasons I don't use my teapot anymore it's because I've replaced it
with this the Magpul angled for grip when I was using this exclusively I had
two ways that I could hold this and fire while standing I could grab the the grip
here which puts my hand very much off the bore axis or I could kind of grab up
at the top of it get my thumb up around the bore axis and that just makes recoil
a little easier to manage between shots this which is super lightweight kind of
replaces all of that and with a lightweight bipod up
front yeah it's not optimal there's still some things that I prefer about
this but for now I'm preferring this method now a product that I'd be very
interested in is if someone could take an angled four grip like this and
somehow make it so we could transform into a bipod that would be pretty sweet
I'd buy that
you