The Gun Digest Book of the Revolver. Grant Cunningham
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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 hand under recoil. By increasing the surface area of the grip in contact with your 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