hand, fans of grooved grips believe they enhance the shooter’s control.
I’ll come right out and say it: I’m not a fan of finger grooves and strongly believe that their benefit with regard to recoil control is highly overstated. I’ve found that a solid, strong grasp with grips that fit the hand is sufficient to control just about any revolver. The key is that the grip fits the hand, and it’s not necessarily about the surface area.
The finger grooves must fit your hand correctly, otherwise they’re counterproductive.
If your revolver is too large, your grasp must be offset to allow you to reach the centerline of the trigger. This puts the backstrap over onto your thumb’s proximal phalanx bone. Instead of the recoil force being absorbed by the fleshy adductor pollicis muscles, the bones of the thumb take the beating. The bottom of the grip is pushed to the edge of the heel of your palm, lessening the clamping action of the middle, ring, and pinky fingers. The entire strength of your grasp is compromised.
If finger grooves don’t fit shooter’s hand, grasp strength and control can be compromised.
In this case finger grooves may in fact restore a bit of control, giving a mechanical barrier to grip movement. Even if your grasp is compromised, interposing the ridges as barriers between the fingers can help keep the gun from moving about too erratically in your hand.
So why don’t I like them? Because they must fit the hand precisely in order to be of any benefit. If your fingers are smaller than the grooves, you end up with a lot of extra space between them that actually reduces the mechanical lock, which is how finger grooves work. If the mismatch is sufficiently large, the ridges force the fingers apart to an unnatural degree and reduce grip strength even more.
If your fingers are larger than the grooves, you end up with some of those fingers on top of the ridge rather than in the groove. This dramatically reduces the surface area of the grip, and having a ridge recoiling into your finger does nothing to encourage comfort!
The upshot of this is that the finger grooves must fit your hand correctly, otherwise they’re counterproductive. If you’re going to the trouble to match the grips to your hand, you’ll get the benefit of proper fit anyhow, and the grooves become superfluous.
That would be fine if the grooves were performance neutral. Even if your hands fit the grooves perfectly, they require you to get a perfect grasp as the gun is drawn every single time. As Jerry Miculek once said in a television interview, “no one gets a perfect grip on the gun every time!” If your grasp isn’t perfect, the finger grooves will reduce your control. At the very least, they make it impossible to shift your grasp on the fly, as the gun is being indexed on target. Now they’re a liability!
I will concede that finger grooves may have some benefit if one is accustomed to using a weak, target-shooting-style grasp. A weak grasp works great with a light single action trigger, but makes double action manipulation difficult (if not downright impossible.) If you’re shooting targets in single action with such a grasp, finger grooves might make sense. Since this book is about double action revolvers, and a weak grasp isn’t conducive to good double action shooting, I don’t consider this much of an argument for the grooves.
Make sure the grip fits your hand and your hand fits the gun, develop a properly strong grasp, and you won’t need finger grooves and their disadvantages.
Covered back straps
For virtually all revolvers that aren’t made by Ruger, you’ll have the choice between grips with open or closed backs. The choice will affect both how the gun fits your hand and how comfortable it is when actually shooting.
Closed backs fit over and encapsulate the grip frame; the backstrap of the revolver is covered by the grip. This means that there is grip material between the heel of your hand and the back strap of the gun. If this material is made of rubber (particularly the very soft type) it means greater comfort, especially with the very light guns and/or heavy recoiling ammunition. If the grip material is wood or another hard material, naturally you won’t get that advantage.
What you will get, regardless of the material choice, is a change in trigger reach. That extra material increases trigger reach, sometimes very noticeably, so that the gun better fits larger hands. If you have large hands or long fingers, a grip with a closed back can make the gun more comfortable and efficient to shoot.
Difference between open and closed backstraps. Notice difference in width (thickness) of grips, which also affects trigger reach.
Open backs are the opposite: the grip panels end flush with the frame, exposing the back-strap. This allows the hand to sit further forward in relation to the trigger, decreasing trigger reach. Shooters with smaller hands and/or shorter fingers will find grips with open backs much easier to manage, particularly if the grip panels are relatively thin.
The downside is that there is no recoil absorption regardless of the grip material, because there is nothing between the hand and the hard metal of the revolver’s frame. As someone famously said, there is no such thing as a free lunch; to get that shorter trigger reach, you’ll have to live with a little more pain.
This can make for a ‘catch-22’ with some shooters. I was recently contacted by a fellow who is the possessor of both small hands and a large gun – in this case, a S&W N-frame in ultra-lightweight Scandium. The recoil of his chosen gun was a serious issue, but the large frame size meant that grips with covered backstraps made the gun too big to shoot in double action. He was hoping that there was a grip which would both tame the recoil and allow him to achieve a proper hold. Sadly, I had to inform him to the contrary. In his case, the best choice of action might have been to get grips that fit his hand properly and have the gun ported to reduce the recoil. (I’ll talk more about porting in another chapter.)
Grip shape
Grip shape can play a big part in how well the gun fits the hands. By judiciously choosing a grip shape, it’s possible to get some improvement in hand fit. By shape, I mean two things. First, the profile of the grip – the shape it takes when looking at it from the side or back – determines how well it fits the natural shape of the hand and has a large bearing on how well the shooter can control and recover from the gun’s recoil. Second, the grip’s cross-section has a big effect on trigger reach and on the perceived comfort of the gun when the recoil impulse hits the hand.
Difference in cross-section: squared versus oval.
In years past the normal profile for revolver grips resembled bell bottom jeans, that is, the grips increased their diameter toward the bottom of the grip. These were said to have ‘flared butts’ or ‘Coke bottle’ shapes. These grips were wider at the bottom than the top, both from the side and the back, which is exactly the opposite of how our hands are shaped! If you take a lump of firm clay and squeeze it in your hand, you’ll probably find that the shape tapers smaller toward the bottom.
An ideal grip, then, should be larger in circumference at the top and smaller at the bottom. The difference doesn’t need to be huge, but it should at the very least not get bigger where the pinky finger contacts.
The cross section of the grip is something that very few people ever consider. In fact, I’ve seen scant mention of this over the years,
