Fixing your DPMS Panther Claw Upper Mount

Posted by rick cancino on Nov 2, 2012 in Articles, New Products | 0 comments

So you got your new Panther upper receiver vise mount from DPMS. And in your excitement to try it, you place your upper on it, only to find that the pins that came with it don’t fit in your upper!

I love the design of the DPMS Panther Claw and how versatile it is with different types of uppers. Now that so many manufacturers are creating custom billet units they no longer fit the typical Brownell’s upper receiver action block due to unique design or thicker walls. This block prevents you from twisting your upper out of spec and allows you to do a professional install on your upper.

In this post, I will show you how to modify the pins that come with your DPMS Panther Claw, so they will work with a variety of different uppers. All I used was some sand paper, calipers, and a drill.

Using calipers, I measured a variety of front pivot pins from different brands of uppers. Unfortunately, none of them fit the pivot pin mount on the Panther Claw upper.

In this photo I have the DPMS pin measuring in at .249″.

Here is an Armalite pivot pin measuring at .247″.

We just need to sand the DPMS pin down .002 of an inch. I chose to use some 180 grit sandpaper. The reason I chose this grit was very technical… because it was in arm’s reach.

I removed the ring from the pin and chucked it into the drill. You don’t need to sand down the whole pin since part of it stays in the claw anyways. You only need to sand down the tip and the middle.

Pin sanded down .002 and tested to fit in the uppers.

Here you can see the sanded down part of the pin on the left and the part that was secured by the drill on the right. This way if you only do one pin you know that this identifies the front pin.

The Ball was sanded down a little bit in the process of sanding the whole pin.

I then Froglube’d the pins.

Success!

I then tested a BCM upper with a DD Daniel Defense Lite rail. The front pin would not align because the handgrip nut was getting caught on the Claw. The solution is easy, I just need to dremel down the claw so hand guard will clear it.

 

In conclusion, I would like to see them use smaller pins in the future so end users could skip this modification but until then, I hope this review and modification helped you out.

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