Pistol grips?

[John W. Willis]

Hello all!

One of the projects on my future "to do when I get my cnc machine list" is to attempt to make a pair of hard to find grips for one of my pistols.

Have any of you done this and is it more complicated than other designs to route?

Thanks in advance for your time.
John

[Bob Savage]

This is on my "gift for a relative" list so I'm interested in knowing more about these too. There's a guy that goes by GripsUs (or something close to that) on the Vectric forum that makes grips.

[John W. Willis]

Thanks Bob I'll check him out, I did a search here and came up with 49 hits and went through most of them from all categories and most dealt with making them with hand tools and or various power tools but I didn't see any that were made using a cnc.

[Bob Savage]

By the way, one alternative since pistol grips are fairly small would be to get a 3D scanner. I haven't used one, but the David 3D Scanner looks fairly inexpensive. Of course, you'd need grips to start with, but I'm guessing you want to make some nice replacement grips instead of reinventing the wheel anyway, so that's an option.

[Nicholas Bukky]

Hey John,
I made a set for my 1911 from walnut and they turned out ok.
Joe(GripUs) like Bob said on the Vectric forum does it for a living with his cnc!
He has some cool stuff.
I took a picture of my grips and then imported it in to aspire to create the vectors for the outline and then used the modeling tools to build up the shape.
It can be done!

Nick

[Bob Savage]

Those look great Nick! I may just have to buy a set of cheapies and do it your way.

[William Adams]

twforeman has done some using his ShapeOko --- he even documents the setups and jigs needed on his blog:

http://timf.anansi-web.com/wp/millin...-mk-iii-grips/
http://timf.anansi-web.com/wp/making...evolver-grips/
http://timf.anansi-web.com/wp/milled...-set-of-grips/

[Harry Hagan]

Can you CNC checkering? That would be a must for me if I was going to shoot the pistol.


checkering.jpg

[William Adams]

IME checkering cut w/ a rotary tool is not as crisp or durable as hand-cut checkering.

[Ted Reischl]

I have cut several pairs of grips for our .45's. One pair even has a happy dog inlaid/3d carved on both grips. I believe I posted somewhere on the Vectric forum about it and may have even included the files.

An easy way to go about it if you cannot find drawing files is to lay your grip on a scanner. The only really "tricky" part to making them is getting the chamfer cut at the bottom. The easy way to do it is a single line vector with a v bit. Might take a bit of playing around in the software to get it positioned correctly, but a good preview will let you know how you are doing.

Cutting them can become very addictive, btw.

Found a link to my post over there, sorry, no vectors. My grips go on a S&W commander anyhow, so they are a bit different, not much, but a little

vectric.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=18169&p=128218#p128218

[Steve Ducote]

John,

I just made some custom grips last week. They were for a young lady who owns a S&W Airweight 38, the Pachmayr grips that were on it were far too large and thick for her relatively small hands. The factory wood grips were also too thick for her to be comfortable with.

I did similar to what Ted says, but the way I did it was to place the revolver grip frame flat on a piece of paper and used a sharp pencil and traced the outline of the frame very accurately. I then scanned it on the flatbed scanner, imported that into CorelDraw, I made sure it was actual size then used CorelDraw tools to make a perfect tracing of it.

I then printed it and cut it out and placed the cutout on the frame to confirm. However, I imported that into LaserCAD and used the laser to cut them out of the wood block instead of my CNC router, laser engraved an inner offset perimeter and added some text she requested. I really wanted to engrave a diamond or stars pattern but she wasn't interested in anything like that.

So anyway, scanning the tracing then using CorelDraw worked great for me, hope it helps,

Steve

[Michael Arruda]

I used to produce grips for Colt, STI and Nighthawk, as well as custom designs. Mostly 1911, as they are easy to cut on cnc. Alos produced revolver grips, S&W boot grips, Colt SAA... some are more complex, as you have to do a two sided cut for inletting and everything has to be at a machinist tollerance. It's doable. Especially 1911s. Very easy to model from scratch without 3d scanning. Engraving and checkering can he done by hand or on the laser.

-Michael