Sporting rifles are immensely popular in America and for many good reasons. Regardless of the chambering or the specific components in question, sporting rifles offer platforms that are light, portable, responsive and highly adaptive. They’re extremely useful in situations demanding speed, durability and high volume shooting. Hunters, competition shooters, and even plinksters alike can all find something to love in a sporting rifle platform whether it takes .22 LR or .223 Remington. Additionally, they’re wildly adaptable and customizable, which is something we’ll touch on directly in this article.

A large portion of what makes black rifles so popular is the fact that each person can do so much with even the simplest platform. There is so much you can do to the platform in terms of the fit of the stock to the shooter, the components you incorporate into the action for performance alteration or even just in terms of accessorization.

Taking a granular look at one specific set of features that makes sporters so agreeable to so many shooters will show you just how adaptable they can be. A volume could be written on the ways you can accessorize an AR or some other sporter in rail accessories alone, and we here at White Knight Supply have all the rail accessories you could use.

A common trend among owners of sporting rifles is to cover up unused portions of their rails or to cover their rails entirely. You might be wondering why anyone would want to use AR Picatinny rail covers when the rails offered so much to the rifle in the way of customization, but there are very good reasons for it. Whether you want to cover all of your rails or just a few unutilized portions, here are a few reasons for doing so.

Use Rail Covers To Enhance the Comfort Of Your Rifle
One of the main reasons, if not the main reason that people are looking for AR Picatinny rail covers to cover up portions of their Picatinny rails. Let’s look at a simple and perhaps inconvenient truth. The portion of the forend on many rifles that is just smothered by Picatinny rails, sometimes even covered by a quad rail, offers an unprecedented level of customization and accessorization. Particularly with quad rails, you can add optics, bipods, lasers, lights and more to get a degree of functionality out of that rifle that just can’t be matched by other platforms.

With that extra degree of functionality comes that inconvenient truth. Yes, with a quad rail you can add 36 pounds of accessories to make your AR a nocturnal, long-range, monster with the ability to switch up and use a Laserlyte center mass sight for close-range use as well. Here’s the drawback. If you haven’t added all of those accessories and you’re content just to use the rifle with open sights, you might get pretty tired of that naked quad rail right quick.

Enough delay - shooting with a naked quad rail is somewhat uncomfortable. In fact, just carrying a rifle with an exposed rail is kind of uncomfortable as well. Add in the incessant recoil of even lighter loads in a .223 or 5.56 and you’re going to chew up your hand on the forend fairly quickly.

The ridges on an exposed Picatinny rail are fairly sharp. They won’t cut you, but they’re not too nice to be holding onto when the gun is pushing back, so to speak. There’s just no need to put up with that discomfort since these rifles are designed to offer the shooter so much in the way of personalization and customization in the first place.

A quick, affordable and easily reversible feature is to use AR Picatinny Rail Covers to cover up the entire quad rail or just the unused portions. Adding rail covers to your rails will enhance the quality of the grip on your gun significantly. It’s not only easier to grip rail covers but more comfortable as well.

And not only are they easy and quick to install, but they’re easy to take off as well. If you’re doing a lot of high volume shooting with open sights the rail won’t dig into your hands, but if you want to do some long-range shooting tomorrow, just take them off the rail. Then you can add a bipod and a scope to sight in the rifle and sig

Protect Your Hands from A Hot Barrel
If you’re using your AR rifle as a long-range shooter, whether it’s for hunting or for competition shooting, this one won’t be as significant as the former entry, but this is a consideration to make nonetheless. If you use your rifle for any high volume shooting, your barrel is going to become hot pretty quickly. You may have noticed how hot the barrel of a bolt rifle will get after putting a few rounds downrange, even in the winter. Well, put a mag or two through an AR in the summer and you won’t want to be too near the barrel.

The point is that even with moderate volume shooting and especially with high volume shooting, the barrel of a rifle is going to heat up fairly quickly. There are videos out there of people cooking bacon on the barrels of automatic rifles, and of rifles that have been fired to the point that their wooden forends catch fire.

These are extreme examples, but even the rails of a semi-automatic sporter can get pretty hot from their proximity to the barrel. Many AR Picatinny rail covers are made of synthetic polymers that won’t readily absorb or conduct heat, and even in modest cases will protect your hands from the excessive heat of a rifle’s barrel. Put enough rounds downrange in a short enough time and you’ll be glad you had the extra level of protection afforded to you by rail covers.

Protect the Rail and the Barrel from Dust
There’s one more important benefit of AR Picatinny rail covers that can add some value to your gun and at the very least can offer the whole platform more longevity. Whenever you take your rifle into a harsh environment, whether that means out at a range or out in the field, your rifle is going to come into contact with mud, sand, dirt and other grime. Even if you take particular care to ensure that your gun is kept clean, it’s still going to experience these abrasives. It’s similar to how you can keep your boots clean but they’ll still get mud on them from time to time.

There’s nothing like sand or dust to wreak havoc on the sensitive parts of a rifle. Rail covers won’t expressly cover the moving parts of a rifle’s action, but they will help prevent those abrasives from working into the rail or coming into contact with the barrel where they can trap heat and damage the gun.

It might not be a reason on its own to spring and cover up the rails on your forend, but it is just one more added benefit that will come with the others if you do decide to give yourself the option to cover your rails.

Those are a few reasons you might have for using AR Picatinny rail covers to cover up some unused portions of the rails on your sporting rifle. They’ll make the rifle more comfortable to shoot and handle, protect your hands from a hot barrel and can even add a degree of protection from dirt and grime.

We offer AR Picatinny and other rail covers here at White Knight supply in a variety of ergonomic designs and brand names so you can pick and choose how to accessorize your rifle, as it should be.

But for those times when you feel you can get more out of your rifle by adding other accessories to the rails, we have your back too. Here are just a few of the other rail accessories we offer right here at White Knight Supply to customize your rifle to you and to the type of shooting you do with it.

Lights
Especially for those that keep their sporting rifles as a primary means of self-defense, lights can mean the difference between a rifle and dead weight. If you’re called upon to use your rifle in the middle of the night, you’ll be glad you made the choice to add a light to the platform somewhere. Right here at White Knight Supply, we offer lights that you can add to the rails of your rifle to make it a practical tool for nocturnal use.

You can add a light to the bottom portion of a quad rail, or to one of the sides so that you can free the bottom for a handhold or for the addition of other accessories like a bipod. That’s one of the great things mentioned about the fact that such modularity makes these platforms great. With or without rail covers, they offer a whole lot of options for customization.

It’s not entirely about self-defense, though. Many hunters, especially those chasing species like raccoons and hogs, add lights to their rifles in order to see better in the dark. Of course, this is subject to quite a number of regional and local laws and game codes, but where legal it’s a frequent method of making a rifle more suitable for use chasing game at night.

Lasers
Many shooters who use their sporting rifles for close-range shooting and high volume reflex shooting can make great use of mounting lasers to the rails on their forends. Oftentimes, reflex shooting or close-range shooting doesn’t afford the shooter the convenience of lining up sights or getting a proper sight picture before demanding a shot.

Here at White Knight Supply, we offer many different options that shooters can choose from to add lasers to the rails on their rifles to make them practical for close-range or quick shooting. Adding a laser to the forend can make the rifle a better tool for self-defense as well, especially if that’s one of the primary intended uses of your rifle.

Bipods
It’s not too uncommon to see people adding bipods underneath their forends. It’s definitely not the most common accessory you’ll find people adding to their sporting rifles, but when people want to get the most out of some rarer cartridges that are paired with semi-automatic platforms at the range, they add a bipod and a scope and see what the rifle can do. Especially if you’ll be shooting the rifle at distances in excess of 100 yards, adding a bipod to the rail can really make a difference in improving your groups and really testing the limits of a load.

Of course, there are other accessories that you can add to your rails to get even more functionality from your rifle. For example, you can add scopes or other optics to your rifle to make them more effective at greater ranges than they might be with lasers or open sights. That being the case, it’s nor particularly common to add scopes to the forward portion of a quad rail so we’ve focused more on other accessories.

We offer the accessories featured here and many more rail accessories right here at White Knight Supply. If you’re looking for the rail accessories, including AR Picatinny rail covers, that you can use to make your rifle into an even more perfect tool, look no further than our site. As always, all orders ship free from White Knight Supply, so you can shop through our massive inventory from the comfort of your own home and never even have to worry about the addition of shipping fees. If you have any questions about products or uses, you can feel free to contact us at Sales@WhiteKnightSupply.com and we’d be glad to point you in the right direction.