In Part I of this laser-revolver Hand Canon build I turned a tube smoker and a a shotgun heatshield into a futuristic Colt Single Action shroud.
It was time to turn my attention to the grips.
P.S. - don't mind the lights and wires and stuff in the pictures. I'll post in detail about what's going on with all of that. The summary is that while working on the grips, I was also experimenting with how to get some of the electronics on this build working. Now back to the grips....
I thought the grips weren't going to take much work on this build. I found some good looking hogue walnut grips for Colt Single Action revolvers and thought all I'd have to do was rough them up to fit in with the aesthetic. However, as soon as the grips arrived, it became clear that I was wrong.
As shown above, the grip frame on the air pistol version of the Colt Single Action is longer than the grips that are made for the real Single Action. I suspect this is because on the air pistol version, the grip holds a small Co2 canister.
I don't need the Co2 canister and I do need the grips to fit so time to get hacking. First, I cut off some of the Co2 canister holding arms that made the grip frame too wide (see cut marks on the image below).
Then, I cut about a half inch off the bottom of the frame to shorten its footprint to match the wood grips. The final step was cutting a piece of aluminum to use as the new bottom of the grip frame.
Below you can see the resized grip frame with the new bottom JB Welded in place.
And now with the grips in place.
To make the grip look and feel more natural, I sanded the wood and aluminum together. As you can see below, this made the transition from grip frame to grip panel nice and smooth.
One of the interesting things about this build, especially this part of the build, is that I am making it look and feel great to then wear it down and make it look beaten up. I'm really pleased with how the modifications to this grip turned out, but I know that I'm going to wrap them in electrical tape and scratch them up.
The following two pictures include the electrical tape to give a sense of how the grips will look when the build is done. The only thing left to do on the grips is get the gang's logo engraved and rough them up so they look less like someone orbital sanded them in their garage..... even though someone did..... it was me.
