Grip Repair & Restoration Suggestion

[Mauser720]

My BYF 41 "shooter" had such awful grips that I put some reproduction grips on it. However, I kept the old grips, and lately I had been thinking about ways to clean and refinish them. These are walnut grips.

Initially I cleaned them using undiluted Murphy Oil Soap for wood and a toothbrush. Then I rinsed them off with cool water, and tried to dry them with a hair dryer. What I discovered was that whenever they were warmed by the hair dryer, droplet of black oil would seep back to the surfaces of the wood. After repeated scrubbings and rinsings and drying attempts, I gave up on cleaning them this way because these grips were completely oil soaked.

Next I put the grips in a suace pan of water, with lots of liquid dish detergent in the water, and simmered the grips in boiling water for about 20 minutes. This did get all of the oil out of the wood. Then I rinsed them off with clean warm water, and a tooth brush, and then dried them with the hair dryer again.

They were clean, and you could see the grain of the walnut used for the first time.

In the back of both Luger grips there are supposed to be milled surfaces that will hold the grip in position relative to the frame. The right grip had this entire milled internal surface missing from the rear edge, and this explained why the grip was always slipping and sliding around regardless of how tight I tried to tighten the right grip screw.

To solve this problem of the missing milled surface, I used a popsicle to make a form, and held it in place with a "C" clamp on one end and rubber band on the other end. I put a piece of leather underneath the "C" clamp on the side with the checkering, to prevent damage to the checkering. Then I put ink pen marks on the surface of the popsicle stick to indicate the where the ends of the reconstructed milled surface were to begin and end. Next I used DAP brand Plastic Wood and a small putty knife to build a ridge to replace the missing milled surface. All of this has to be done with attention to accuracy, since once the Plastic Wood ridge dries, it must fit inside the frame perfectly. Below is a picture of the complete setup, with the Plastic Wood in place, neatly held in place by the popsicle stick. Be careful when you pry or break the popsicle stick away from the dried Plastic Wood.

A couple of cautionary notes:

1. I would never try this with the bakelite or composition grips or plastic grips. They may completely disintegrate, crack and/or warp.

2. Do not do this with grips which are numbered if the numbers are important to you, or in which the numbers match the gun, because the boiling bath will raise the indented numbers and they will disappear. (However, if the checkering is smashed and/or dented, the boiling water bath will also raise the diamonds and improve the appearance of the checkering.)

3. I would only do this with a pair of grips which you may want to try to keep and which are really not serviceable or presentable in their present condition.

4. Plan on careful handfitting of the wood and reconstructed internal surface, using small gunsmith type files and fine sandpaper. Even if the size of the reconstructed surface is exact, the boiling water bath may slightly change the size of the grip(s) in some spot(s).

These grips now look great, and they fit perfectly.

Mauser720 - Ron

[Mauser720]

Here is a picture of what the grips look like now. If I had known they were going to look this good, I would have taken a "before" picture too. Special thanks to Mr. Pete Ebbink who suggested I use Watco brand Danish Oil applied with a toothbrush to the bare wood. I am pleased with the results.

Mauser720 - Ron

[Pete Ebbink]

Ron,

Nice work...!