modified to round butt. Using hardened template, gunsmith removes dark areas at top and bottom of picture and files surfaces smooth.
The round butt profile puts the grip’s main contact point into the center of the palm. The grip angle is a little steeper than the square butt. The round butt has the advantage of being smaller and easier to conceal, as the profile is less likely to poke through a covering garment. Its slightly shorter trigger reach is generally preferred by smaller handed shooters.
In the past S&W offered both square and round butt versions in many (if not most) of their models. Today their revolvers are made with a round butt profile, for which grips are available to mimic the shape of the square butt for those who prefer that style. These grips also fit older round butt guns to convert them to square butt. Older square butt Smith & Wesson revolvers can be converted by a gunsmith to the round profile by removing metal from the grip frame, or in some cases by cutting and re-forming the backstrap. Both modifications require skill and a trip to the refinisher, but once done, with grips on, they look like factory round butt guns.
Grip makers, both production and custom, produce a wide variety of grips to fit either round or square butts.
Other manufacturers have produced varying grip shapes, but not to the extent of S&W. Only a few relatively rare Colt revolvers were made with round butts. Unlike their S&W counterparts, the Colt rounding was not dramatic. It usually took the form of a large radius on the bottom corners rather than a reshaped backstrap. Like the S&W conversions a skilled gunsmith can achieve the same effect, but the downside is that grips will need to be custom made. The factory Colt round butts were very uncommon even when they were available, and today there are no stock grips made for those guns. In a way, the result is a gun which doesn’t really exist.
Ruger Six-series guns were available in both round and square configurations. The Service and Security models were generally square butt, while the Speed was round butt. Ruger round butts were somewhere between the S&W and Colt approaches, having the last third of the grip frame rounded off. Square butt Six models can be converted by a gunsmith to the round butt variety, but because the way their square butts curve the work results in a slight depression approximately one-quarter of the way up the grip. That is, if the goal is to fit factory round butt grips; if the gun is to have custom grips made, this depression can be removed and the grips profiled to match exactly.
The later GP100, SP101, and Super Redhawk get their shapes from the grips themselves. The stud grip frame used on these guns doesn’t impact on the shape of the grips, giving the grip makers complete control over the shape the grip will take. This gives the shooter a wide range of different profiles from which to choose.
Grip options
In the last chapter, we talked about the interface between the hand and the revolver, and how grips can affect it. It’s relatively easy to change grips on a revolver to dramatically change how the gun fits the hand and how it feels in the shooter’s grasp. Many times there are grips available from grip companies that will get the feel the shooter wants. If nothing suitable is available from these commercial sources, there is an ever-changing community of custom grip makers who can produce grips to fit even the most exacting specifications.
If you’re not satisfied with the grips on your gun you’ll have many choices in replacements, but you’ll need to make some decisions along the way.
Your first decision will be the material that the grips are made of. The two most commonly available materials are wood and rubber, and you’ll find passionate advocates of each.
Rubber
Rubber tends to produce a more secure grip, as the material’s tacky surface has more friction against the skin of your palm. It tends to ‘stick’ to the hand better, making the gun less prone to shifting – particularly when your hands are sweating or dirty. They’re also more comfortable because rubber absorbs some of the recoil impulse. Some grip companies, most notably Pachmayr and Hogue, offer rubber grips in both standard and soft rubber. You can pick the softness you prefer to maximize your shooting comfort, very important when using Magnum ammunition in the smaller and lighter guns!
You’d think all rubber grips would be made from the softest material for the greatest comfort. That makes sense, but there is a downside. That same rubber that enhances shooting comfort makes it more difficult to carry concealed (where legal, of course) because the soft material grabs on to a cover garment as well as it does your palm. This causes the gun’s outline to be revealed as the covering material drapes itself over the gun’s butt. The softer material also has less abrasion resistance, and wears more rapidly than the firmer variety.
Rubber grips are only available from the large commercial grip makers, so if the rubber grips available for your gun don’t fit your hand you’re out of luck.
Wood
Wood is the traditional grip material for revolvers. For many years the standard grip material for Colt and S&W was walnut, usually embellished with small medallions featuring the maker’s logo. They were typically checkered for better grip and were invariably not ergonomically shaped.
Things have improved dramatically since the early days, and today wood grips are available in a wide variety of woods from a large number of grip makers. There are large commercial producers of wood grips as well as small custom grip makers.
Wood is available in a huge variety of beautiful patterns and colors, such as these walnut burl examples from custom maker Don Collins.
Wood has an undeniable aesthetic appeal, and is available in a bewildering variety of colors and patterns. There are exotic woods imported from sustainable farms in the southern hemisphere, traditional woods like walnut from domestic sources, as well as familiar woods that you might not be used to seeing in revolver grips. These may include maple, various fruit woods, as well as gnarled burls. More modern choices involve plastic-impregnated woods, with the plastic filling the voids in the wood grain to provide a very hard, extremely durable grip. The plastic can even be tinted, resulting in multi-tone woods ranging from elegant to downright wild. No matter what color or visual texture you like, you can probably find something in a fine wood grip.
A plain wood surface doesn’t have the same surface traction on the hand as rubber. A smooth wood grip can become slippery when damp or dirty, though this can be varied a bit by wood selection and the type of finish added. The traditional method of increasing traction is to checker the surface. A more modern surface treatment common in European gripmaking is to texture the surface so that it resembles a coarse sponge, giving even more traction than checkering.
Another downside of wood is that it has none of the recoil-absorbing properties of rubber. Many people feel that a gun with wood grips recoils more severely than with rubber grips. The soft rubber varieties make the difference even more striking.
There are some modern grip materials available, though far fewer makers work with them. They include Corian (better known as a countertop material), micarta (a layered material made of resin-impregnated linen, used to make gears in industrial applications), and hard rubber (what bowling balls used to be made from). One old material that’s still available is ivory, these days grown on farms where it’s humanely harvested. These materials tend to be much like wood in their characteristics.
Finger grooves?
Many grips, in both rubber and other materials, sport finger grooves. The concept is that the ridges between the fingers keep the gun from ‘diving’ – that is, slipping downward in the
