Homemade stag or antler grips

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Paperpunchr

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Anyone have any experience making their own antler grips? I've never worked with antler before, and never tried to make grips either. I'm starting a set of elk antler grips for a Ruger Mk III.
 
Antler Grips roughed in, now come the tricky parts.

I see there've been a few readers but no comments...guess I'm more "on my own" than I thought I'd be. This is all brand new to me.

I've got the antler grip panels pretty much roughed into shape using the old grips as a pattern, with lots of the brown bark still showing...I can always smooth and polish the faces of the panel to the extent I want once I have them fitted, but I planned on having a lot of dark brown or black in the bottoms of the natural grooves of the antler panels...they're still slightly oversized to allow for adjustment errors...I'll try and get some photos up.

A Dremel with a reinforced high speed cutoff wheel, a cylindrical sanding drum, and a small high speed milling head work wonders, though it's definitely an outdoor job...cutting and grinding elk antler generates lots of white dust and a gamey smell. I sawed the panels off the antler trunk partly with a miter saw or a countertop blade (left the back very smooth), and partly with the dremel, which left the back way too rough. If I were doing this for a living I'd want a band saw and combo belt/disc sander to speed this process along.

I was lucky in finding a chunk of antler that had two fairly flat sides big enough for this particular gun's grip panels. The guy at the shop only had one chunk of elk antler beam, cut from near the skull end, so there wasn't much to choose from, and I didn't have the gun or grips with me, it just looked about big enough with some room to spare...he had a lot of smaller elk and deer tines, since he specializes in knife handles more than pistol grips. I've seen Elk and various types of deer antler (even moose) on the internet fairly cheap, but the piece I'm using is as close to perfect as I could have found in a much longer search. The block I picked cost me $8, and I've put about six or seven hours of handwork into them so far roughing them into flat panels that match the overall outline of the old grips.

It takes a lot of sanding to get the backs perfectly flat, and although you can rough sand the backs with an orbital or belt sander, the final sanding turns out smoother if you hand rub with 60 grit grey aluminum oxide paper on a hard flat surface like a stone or wood table top. The dremel sanding drum works well at making the inside curves around the perimeter, and using flat paper on a flat surface gives you a perfectly straight line for the straight portions of the grip edges if you turn the panel on edge and slide it along.

The Ruger Mk III has a fair amount of mechanism outside the frame that will require milling some clearance into the back of the left panel...mag release retainer screw, slide stop lever which tucks into both the back and the top of the left grip panel and incorporates a flat lever and a pivot pin...and a slight cylindrical distension of the frame near the base of the grip to clear the thumb button on the magazine follower...I may have to extend the cutout for that on the back of the panel further up the panel so the button can rise without rubbing as the bullets are chambered. The cheap plastic factory grips are basically hollowed everywhere except a few structural braces and the recesses for the Ruger medallions.

The right panel has only a very small notch required for the back end of the mag release to pop out through the frame when the mag is released.

They already look pretty good...anybody have an idea for staining the bottoms of the grooves a richer brown or possibly black, and sealing the pores in the antler material? Other than a sharpie permanent marker and a thin clear coat of epoxy, I mean? Anyone ever use the sealers they sell for stone or tile flooring?

Is there any way to bleach or uniformly stain the white antler material? There's some color variation in the hard outer layer of the antler I used.

After milling in the clearances for moving parts outside the frame into the back of the left panel, the next hard part is going to be drilling the screw holes in the right places and at the right depths. I'm going to have to find a drill press, I think. Left and right panels have mounting screws in different places, and I think I'll want some kind of bushing recessed into in the antler material with the screw recessed further inside the bushing.

Anyone got a source for this kind of small hardware? I plan to use the old grip panels as a drill guide, put a small hole in the center of the new grip to give me a center spacing for the two holes per panel, then use a bit sized to match the outside of the bushing or washer to drill a flat bottomed hole in the antler centered on, but not as deep as, the guide hole.

Anybody out there done this before?

Doug
 
Hi there Paperpunchr.......

How're your elk grips coming along? I'm going to start making a set of elk grips for a USFA Gunslinger I got recently, but haven't quite located the right piece yet. I just sent $20.00 off to a guy in Idaho who hunts elk shed, and he said he'd send me a nice piece.
I can appreciate all that you've described so far in making yours, because I've made wooden ones for '58 Rem replicas before, and it takes some time & patience. Here's a pic of my last project using figured cherry for grips on a '58 Rem conversion........

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Yes, a drill press is indespensable when making grips,...for drilling the holes with proper alignment.

You could try stabilizing the grips by soaking in a wood petrifying solution that's avaiable at woodworker's supply houses. Here's a link to someone on eBay selling Moose antler pieces that have been stabilized by soaking in that kind of solution........

http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6628098424&sspagename=ADME:B:AAQ:CA:1

I'm not sure about bleaching the lighter part, but you could darken the crevices with a walnut stain. I make my own stain with black walnut hulls mixed with ammonia for a few weeks, then strained.
If you've finished your elk grips,...try posting a pic of them. I'd love to see them ;)
 
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