Making grips

[I_Like_Pie]

 

After drying, boxelder is surprisingly light-weight wood, but is categorized as a hardwood. 

 

 

Interesting factoid....Hardwood vs softwood has nothing actually to do with the density of the wood.  Balsa is a hardwood for instance.  Softwoods are trees that drop unprotected seeds directly on the ground to propagate.  Hardwoods drop the seeds with some type of protective coating - think fruit, nuts, berrys and so on.

 

It is actually little more in depth than that, but it is a very solid rule of thumb

Edited October 5, 2013 by I_Like_Pie

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Thanks Pie, very interesting. Didn't know that. Just assumed "hard woods are hard, softwoods are soft". Which does seem to bear our in common limited cases such as cedar or pine vs oak or walnut. That is wild that balsa is classified a hardwood.

[reed1285]

Looks good Lester, i really like the flamed boxelders!

[Monkeyman2500]

Lester, those are looking very nice. I love the look of the middle ones with the red running through them. Keep trying to get my brother to make some. I can work on cars with the best of them and even do a little metal work, but just never could get woodworking down at all. Lol.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I had traced the grips fromm thin plastic grips took off the taurus. The grips fit the metro arms easy enough with only a little relieving of the screw holes, but the metroarms frame turned out to be a little longer dimension from front to back, so the "taurus sized" grips look a little "skinny" on the metroarms with more metal showing around the edges. I suppose it is common knowledge that not all full size 1911 grip frames have exactly the same dimensions, but I didn't know it. :)

Makes one wonder if ferinstance stone or metal grips as sold at gun shows, might need some "fairly difficult" minor whittling to fit on just any old 1911 one migh have laying around?

Was thinking that maybe the flamed color would be to "gaudy" for a black pistol.

Got some black walnut and black maple (not real dark but with strong dark grain on brown wood) might play with those on the beretta grips. Seems lots of black walnut grips are made. Black walnut is real pretty in big pieces like furniture, but it might not look very striking in smallish grips. Maybe more striking for big revolver grips?

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Tried making some grips with "complicated" rear details. I almost ruined them. Almost but not completely. Might sometime try again to see if practice improves things at all.

 

Perhaps a good way to make templates for "complicated" grips-- Scan the grips on a flat bed scanner, then print the images to card stock on a laser printer-- Cut out the patterns from the paper. Was in a hurry and the flat bed scanner is put up in a drawer, so for this experiment I free-handed the back details on tracings of the factory grip profile. After cutting the grip blanks to shape, also tried refining the back details by holding the wood blanks to the pistol and "tracing around" the metal grip openings with a marks-on-anything, but it was kinda slap-dash. So next time will drag out the scanner and see if that works better. Ought to work better, no way to tell without trying.

 

Also tried painting the "significant rear details" with paint onto the factory plastic grips, and "contact print" stamping the details onto card stock, but it didn't work very good. Maybe if I still had a rubber stamp inkpad it would have worked better, but the black paint just didn't make a good image on the paper, and left a mess on the factory grips to clean off.

 

These grips are for a Stoeger Cougar. The wood is curly black maple scrap from "half a tree" I ripped, that had to be trimmed in the front yard.

 

Planed the wood to 3/8" and bandsawed the profile blanks, then drew in the back details on the blanks and chewed it out freehand with a small drill press and a small end mill. I'd be skeered of milling metal thataway, but it worked out pretty safe, low speed shallow milling on wood. Keeping fingers well away from the end mill.

 

As you can see from the crude workmanship, the end mill tried to climb down into the material a few places, and was real sloppy hand-steered milling, but got the grip backs "close enough for rock'n'roll" to fit the pistol. Maybe practice would improve the results, or maybe not.

 

 

Those Cougar grips are different left versus right, different cutout areas and even different screw spacings on each side.

 

My main experience has been working oak and pine. Initial impressions of the maple (for what its worth)-- The chainsaw, table saw and chop saw cut slower and complain more about maple versus oak. But I couldn't tell much difference from oak, on the bandsaw. The maple cuts easy on the bandsaw. I was wondering if the maple would be a pain to shape on the little table sander, but the sander shaped the maple about as easy, or maybe easier than the sander shapes oak. I don't know comparative difficulty end-milling the maple, because never tried that before.

 

Another surprise with a "detailed" back-- Should have been obvious-- Was trying for fairly thin grips and I almost ruined one grip on the sander, because of sanding too thin opposite that back rib cutout. Caught it "just in time" with a couple of small gaps sanded all the way thru. Filled the too-thin region with wood putty, and the wood putty took stain better than expected.

 

The maple sanded to a smoother pre-paint finish than oak usually does.

 

Had trouble getting good pictures of the black gun. In the flesh, the cross-grain "curly" ripple is fairly obvious, but couldn't get a good picture of it. Also, in the flesh the color of both sides is the same, but in the picture one side turned out too red.

 

 

Edited January 26, 2014 by Lester Weevils