One piece walnut grips

[Love Life]

Finished these up today. These are fitted to a Pietta New Sheriff, and are black walnut. The spacer is made of English walnut scrap.

4 coats of 2:1 tru-oil:mineral spirits and 2 coats of 100% tru-oil.

[falmike]

You have skills!

Beautiful!

[elk hunter]

Very nice!!

[Hickok]

Outstanding!

[onelight]

Those are great ! You did good.

[rondog]

Wow, gorgeous!

[Michael J. Spangler]

Beautiful!

[Love Life]

Thank you for all the compliments. I really love making grips. It's challenging and rewarding at the same time. To go from a block of wood to a nice looking grip is just fun. Half of the fun is sourcing the wood. Air dried has much better colors. Kiln dried usually requires stain to bring the wood to life. I buy the wood in whatever form I can get (blocks, chunks, logs, old furniture) and then stare at it for a couple weeks trying to pick out which way I want to cut it.

I mainly use hand tools like files, rasps, chisels, and sanding blocks. That walnut is all natural coloration. No dye whatsoever.

I used the thinned tru-oil first as it soaks in much better. The first two coats usually involve wet sanding it in to fill pores as well. Then two more thinned coats followed by two full strength coats. I use 3m final finishing pads to buff in between coats.

Doing this you can really tailor the finish to high gloss or satin. I'll have to post some photos of a set of Bastogne walnut I made. I ended up staining those to better match the theme of the revolver, and finished it with a satin finish. I also left 80 grit scratches in the wood to also add to the aged character of the grips.

[Michael J. Spangler]

Any chance you would make up a nice tutorial with pictures?

[Love Life]

I probably could. I’ve got several threads here on grips showing the process.

One thing to consider is glues. I’ve used epoxy, super glue, and gorilla glue. Those are strong adhesives and I’ve never had a grip fail. Testing with all has showed the wood normally fails before the glue does. I choose those adhesives because they are water proof relatively safe from gun cleaning chemicals. However, there has been occasion where I wished I could separate the grip parts. I believe I’m going to use hide glue from now on. It is strong, but releases with heat.

[Love Life]

I’ll start with stuff like this:





Depending what I am looking for, I may only get one set of grips from a big chunk. I try to get book matched as close as possible. However, non book matched grips with nice grain comes out nice as well.

Even plain, straight grain walnut can look very nice if finished right.

[mazo kid]

I made a one piece grip from Apple wood that turned out just OK. I didn't care for the texture or color. I have made several sets of 2 piece grips from my supply of walnut scrap. This is from trees cut on our place, sawn with a portable sawmill. The guy doesn't like to quarter saw logs, but I do get some nicely grained crotch wood pieces from just straight sawing. Then air dried at least a year per inch thickness. Don't have to worry about dryness now as the last wood sawed was over 8 years ago, thickest was 2-1/2".

[OutHuntn84]

Wow truly beautiful work!!!