This was my first riser, fitted more to my budget than my physical self. The finish is a pretty typical painted finish, slightly lax on the qc however as the thickness of the paint is a bit hit and miss in places. A light enough feel in the hand, with a plastic grip. Has all the features you would expect from a riser at this price point but with a couple of things that just don't seem to work as well as they could have.

The wood finish plastic grip is more than usable allowing a consistent hand placement if you're concious enough of it, though the angle (as with all stock grips) may not suit you. The grip is fitted using a couple of sticky pads between the riser and the grip itself, leaving a little bit to be desired in terms of how long one can expect it to stay on or in place. Between about 5 of these risers I have seen all have had slight problems with the grip, either with it creaking as it moves slightly or bends in places during the draw, or in one case where it fell off after a training session in the rain. Not ideal, but a quick fix should it become an issue is to tape the grip to the riser or refit it with a different method such as a glue between it and the riser.

It has a single bushing for a pressure button, where the "back" one would be on a riser bushed for 2. It also has a bushing for a stabiliser system on the front, however here is where things get a bit strange with this riser! Maybe there have been various production runs of this riser or different versions released but I have seen a few variations of the tiller bolts. On some, the tiller bolts are just that- with no fitting for top or bottom rods built into them and just a hex-head to adjust them. On others, there is an elongated section threaded for a 5/16ths rod to be fitted on both top and bottom, with the hex-head located at the end of this threaded section. On another version again, there is no threads, no hex head, and the tiller bolt heads are shaped such that a wrench is required to turn them! Very odd! For most people looking into this riser the lack of, or inclusion of the threads for top and bottom rods wouldn't be an issue though I can imagine the ones with the wrench heads would be an odd thing to discover!

Another sign that maybe this riser has had a few versions is in the cutouts on the riser itself. On some these are merely indentations into the material and on others there are proper cutouts straight the way through both the bottom section below the grip and through the window.

Back to the tiller bolts I had a slight annoyance with them in that they are also used to adjust limb alignment for centre-shot. As you rotate the bolt, the shaft of it is attached assymetrically to the heads, meaning that the dovetail of the limb is moved left or right slightly , thereby affecting the centering. Not too much of a problem, and a very nice feature, to be able to centre such a cheap riser however it makes maintaining correct tiller difference as you increase or decrease the weight of the limbs a bit of a pain.

As for performance of the riser itself, I reckon most risers can well outpace the shooter in that regard! Once set up correctly there is not much to distinguish this riser from say a middle of the range one. Vibration however is a problem if you exceed certain draw weights with the bow. With about 42# of draw weight the bow liked to rattle various compenents loose, so this had to be watched, and even the inclusion of dampers didn't solve the problem entirely. With lower draw weights it didn't suffer from this problem at all.

So overall I'd give it a 4, given it's intended use. For a low budget shooter, to get a good range of tiller adjustment, centering adjustment, stabiliser bushings, a nice large sight window and a decent quality finish it's a lot of bang for your buck! For a beginner to whom a lot of this isn't immediately important but will grow into and learn to make use of these features it will serve for quite a while after it's purchase. It probably wasn't intended for the ~45# draw weight I ended up using it with so no points lost there. I did find it annoying however to have to try to balance acceptable tiller with acceptable centering, and having to fix the grip nearly straight out of the box. One star lost to that little design fault and a lax QC.