A study of grain alignment and its effect on the dc transport critical current in fine‐grained bulk Y1Ba2Cu3O7−&dgr;is reported in magnetic fields from 10−4T to 26 T. Two features distinguish the critical current densityJcof aligned bulk Y1Ba2Cu3O7−&dgr;from unaligned material. First, the effective critical field where the intergranularJcapproaches zero is about four times higher (30 T) for aligned samples with field parallel to thea,bplanes, than it is for polycrystalline unaligned samples (7 T). Second, the nearly field independent plateau value ofJcbetween 10 mT and 1 T is one to two orders of magnitude higher than typical plateau values ofJcin unaligned bulk‐sintered Y1Ba2Cu3O7−&dgr;, for field parallel to thea,bplanes. A low‐field (<10 mT) weak‐link decrease inJcwith magnetic field is still observed, but it is much smaller than for unaligned material. These data clearly demonstrate that alignment alone significantly reduces theweak‐linkproblem in fine‐grained polycrystalline samples with low‐aspect‐ratio (4:1) grains (unlike melt‐grown samples where there has been some ambiguity as to the relative importance of alignment versus large grain growth). Furthermore, the results provide strong evidence that there are two parallel components ofintergranularcurrent conduction, one consisting of weak‐linked material, the other behaving like intrinsic intragranular material that is not weak‐linked. A comparison with unaligned Y1Ba2Cu3O7−&dgr;indicates that the volume fraction of such nonweak‐linked material is significantly enhanced by grain alignment, but still only 0.01%–0.1% of the grain boundary area. Field‐cooled and force‐freeJcdata are also presented, along with detailed measurements of the shapes of the voltage‐current characteristics.