Smith and Wesson Hard Rubber Grips

[Driftwood Johnson]

Howdy

I am starting this thread in answer to WestKentucky who asked me in a private message about some grips on one of my old S&W Top Breaks. For some reason, I cannot post photos in private messages, so I am starting a new thread to explain and show some photos.

First off, S&W always calls them stocks, not grips, but we will call them grips because it is simpler.

The question was what are the grips on my old 38 Single Action, 2nd Model. This photo shows both a 38 Single Action 1st Model (often called the Baby Russian) at the top and the 38 Single Action 2nd Model in question at the bottom. These are typical Hard Rubber grips. Hard Rubber was a very early form of plastic. It is formed by treating crude rubber with a large amount of sulfur and subjecting it to intense heat. Hard rubber grips were probably used because they could be molded complete with checkering and the S&W logo at the top. Wooden grips would have required carving and checkering to achieve the same effect, so it was probably more cost effective to use Hard Rubber than wood. Smith and Wesson started using Hard Rubber for grips in the late 1870s, which jives perfectly with these two old revolvers, the Baby Russian shipped in 1876, the 2nd Model shipped in 1877. I got curious and took the grips off, and sure enough they both have the serial numbers of the guns written in pencil on the underside of the right grip, verifying the revolvers shipped with these grips. Yes, it would be possible to fake that, but these grips do not add all that much value, so I doubt anyone would bother. Although the outer surface of this type of grip was completely formed when it popped out of the mold, the underside of every pair I have inspected has usually been lightly sanded on a flat plate to flatten the surface out so it will fit snuggly on the grip frame. The grips on the Baby Russian are still the dark black they were when they were shipped. The grips on the 2nd Model have faded over time and they are more of a greenish gray in color.






A 32 Safety Hammerless from 1905 that WestKentucky asked about. These grips have been stamped with the serial number of the gun.






A 32 Single Action from 1889 with Hard Rubber grips in nice condition.







Hard Rubber was used for more than gun grips. Bowling balls, hockey pucks, fountain pens, were just a few of the products made with Hard Rubber in the early 20th Century. Because it is an excellent electrical insulator early electric plugs were made from Hard Rubber. Do not confuse Hard Rubber with Bakelite, another early plastic. Unlike Hard Rubber, Bakelite was made from synthetic components.

Hard Rubber grips from 100 years ago tend to dry out over time. This makes them very brittle. One has to be very careful removing them from a gun, lest they crack or break.





Prior to the late 1870s, most S&W Top Break revolvers came with wooden grips, like this 2nd Model Russian, which shipped in 1875.






Or this 1st Model Schofield which also shipped in 1875.






According to the Standard Catalog of Smith and Wesson, my bible for this kind of stuff, Hard Rubber grips eventually became standard on Smith and Wesson Top Break revolvers. In this photo we see a big New Model Number Three that shipped in 1882 and its little brother a 38 Single Action 3rd Model. I have not determined exactly when the 38 shipped, probably sometime before 1911. The entwined S&W logo on these was standard. Again, easy to cast, probably very expensive to carve.






A 38 Safety Hammerless 2nd Model with Hard Rubber grips with the entwined S&W logo.






A 38 Double Action and 32 Double Action with Hard Rubber grips. The 38 shipped in 1898, I do not know when the 32 shipped.






A pair of 38 Double Action Perfecteds with Hard Rubber grips. The blued one shipped in 1912, the nickel plated one shipped in 1917.






Smith and Wesson continued to use Hard Rubber grips well into the Hand Ejector era. This 38 HE Model of 1899 shipped in 1899 with these grips. I have a round butt 38 HE that shipped in 1939 with Hard Rubber grips.






One thing I do not have in my collection is a revolver with the red, mottled Hard Rubber grips.

Here is a link to a 32 Safety Hammerless Bicycle Revolver with red mottled Hard Rubber grips. These grips are prized by S&W collectors.

https://www.icollector.com/Smith-We...-barrel-blue-finish-factory-mottled_i13667905




Smith and Wesson was not the only company using Hard Rubber grips. This well worn Colt Bisley from 1909 has Hard Rubber grips that have faded a bit with time.






The grips on this Colt Bisley which shipped in 1907 have not faded as much.






A Colt Army Special and a Police Positive Special as well as a couple of 32 Police Positives with Hard Rubber grips.






A couple of Merwin Hulberts with Hard Rubber grips.






One other thing. When Ruger first brought out the New Vaquero, the grips were advertised as being Hard Rubber. They are not, they are injection molded plastic.

 

[bannockburn]

Driftwood

First rate tutorial on hard rubber grips! Thanks for sharing!

 

[ApacheCoTodd]

I have a soft-spot for old hard-rubber and gutta-percha grips and have bought grips for guns that I don't have and guns that I didn't particularly want at the time because of the grips.

Probably more so with gutta-percha for its delicate differences in appearance though, of the two, I like the way a worn hard rubber grip presents better as well.

Great post and really appreciate the abundance of supporting photographs.

Todd.

 

[Gordon]

I love those old grips ! Amazing how they hold up !

 

[WestKentucky]

Wow... Driftwood you always do a wonderful job of explaining things and then do an even better job of illustrating with pictures. Thank you, not just for this thread, but for being the curator to such a fine collection and being so willing to share. The love of a hobby is one thing, but to share that hobby with others is something else altogether. You do both well.

Now, jumping back a bit, the 38 single actions shown in the first picture driftwood showed have different stocks from what is normally seen on topbreak revolvers. Those stocks ARE original to that time period, and to that model. What is normally seen however is a more modern style in which the S&W logo is atop the panel rather than the plain font. I surmise that since the earliest single actions and double action guns were equipped with stocks made of a relatively brittle material, especially so with age, that many of those cracked and were replaced. Since the grip area of the frame is of the same design the stocks from 32 and 38 safety hammerless and other variants will fit, and those guns were sold in much higher volumes and more recently. It seems as if a lot of the plain font S&W panel grips were replaced with the logo grips at a later point. The logo grips are currently reproduced in plastic, however I have not found a source for the plain font grip. Plain font grips seem to be rare on the market, and at least one set will bring a premium from an interested person looking to put the gun back into as correct of a configuration as possible.

 

[WestKentucky]

I have not found a source for the plain font grip.

I actually just found a source while killing time for the last couple minutes at lunch. Vintagegungrips.com had clearly molded good grips and are reproducing them. $37.50 for plastic grips, and $16 for a “screw kit” which would seem to be a screw and a set of escutcheons. For an extra $17.50 you can pick a different color...

So for $53.50 and tax a man can buy about an ounce of modern plastic... it’s a deal for somebody, but not me.

 

[Driftwood Johnson]

You are making assumptions based on guesses.

Your statement about 32 and 38 grips fitting is incorrect. The 32 Safety Hammerless guns were smaller than the 38 Safety Hammerless guns. The grips may look similar in size, but I assure you they are not. The 38 grips are too big for the 32 and the 32 grips are too small for the 38.






If you buy a copy of the Standard Catalog of Smith and Wesson, you will see in the Grips section near the front of the book there were a large variety of Hard Rubber grips that S&W put on their revolvers over the years.

These are the grips on my 38 Single Action, 2nd Model. As I stated earlier, these are the correct grips that shipped with it.

Assuming the lettering section of the grips broke off over time is not necessarily correct. When I have seen cracked Hard Rubber grips, and I have seen plenty of them, they usually crack somewhere near the screw from being over tightened. The crack usually starts at the screw and can go any direction from there.






This model was produced from 1877 until 1891. Mine shipped quite early, in 1877. SCSW states that later guns shipped with grips with 'fancy monograms'. I did some snooping on the internet myself, and almost every example I came across of this specific model had grips like mine. The style of lettering on them is simply called Block Style lettering. I did find one illustration of entwined lettering at Wikipedia of all places. If you blow up the photo, you will see the entwined lettering on the grips. You will also see the grips pictured at Wikipedia are quite worn. But as I say, most I have seen shipped with the Block Lettering style like mine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_&_Wesson_Model_2




Here is a closeup of the grips on my 32 Safety Hammerless. The S&W lettering is typical of the entwined style. This gun shipped much later, in 1905.






I have no idea if these grips would fit properly on my older 38 Single Action 2nd Model.



I bought some replica grips from that outfit a long time ago. I was not impressed. I needed the grips for an old Model 1926 revolver with very worn grips. This revolver left the factory in 1929 and was carried by an officer during WWII. It obviously saw some hard service. Here it is with its very worn original grips.






Here are the replacement grips. Besides the fact that the original grips had metal medallions with the S&W label on them, note how the detail of the entwined monogram simply is not there. They were obviously cast in cheap silicone rubber molds, the details were not sharp at all. I left the cheap grips on the Model 1926 to preserve the very worn originals.

 

[WestKentucky]

Assuming the lettering section of the grips broke off over time is not necessarily correct.

I did not intend to imply that. I agree, the broken grips I have seen have been primarily longitudinal in nature and go from the lower End of the grip up through or very near the escutcheons, often through the locating pin point in the lower end of the grip. The bottoms of the grips are also known to break out from that pin location as well. What I intended by my comment earlier is that the lettering style grips was used earlier, and on less models. They likely broke earlier simply due to being made a bit earlier, and were replaced with grips which were more commonly available which happened to be the ones with the logos at the top.

On the topic of the safety hammerless grips fitting, last night I dug out a set of worn but not broken (yet, they are cracked on the side which rests against the frame) and installed them in place of the broken grips that were on the 38 single action when I got it. The grips were from a 38 safety hammerless. I have read that 32 and 38 grips interchange, but I will defer to your knowledge and experience on that. I do however have a 32 safety hammerless to take apart tonight, and I can try to install the broken grips on it as a quick check to see if they interchange or not.

 

[BobWright]

A few years back I bought a Smith & Wesson belt buckle. The description of the buckle was that it was a replica of the box the old tip-up No.1 series of revolvers were shipped in. It was said these boxes were "gutta percha."

Residential light switches were push button, one for on, one for off. The Push buttons were hard rubber, with the "on" button insert with mother of pearl.

And, when the USS Cairo gunboat was raised, near Vicksburg, Mississippi, hard rubber combs were found aboard the boat.


Bob Wright

 

[Driftwood Johnson]

Howdy Bob

Gutta Percha is the name of a specific tree that produces latex sap. The tree is native to much of Asia. Gutta Percha also refers to the hard rubber made from the sap of the Gutta Percha tree. I suspect that Hard Rubber is a more general term with the same meaning as Gutta Percha. Because of its electrical insulating properties, Gutta Percha was used for the insulation on undersea cables. It was also used as the center of golf balls.

Early Smith and Wesson boxes were indeed made of Gutta Percha. Here is a photo of one off of the web. This box shipped with a No. 1 Tip Up.

 

[WestKentucky]

I do however have a 32 safety hammerless to take apart tonight, and I can try to install the broken grips on it as a quick check to see if they interchange or not.

the 32 grips are just a smidge too small or the 38 too large... they are a mismatch. Visually they look right, even side by side, but when swapping the 38 grips to the 32 frame they were a clear mismatch. On a side note, that 32 is now fixed.

 

[Monac]

For some reason I do not understand, it was easy to make gutta percha tree sap into solid objects. It seems as if these could vary somewhat in flexibility (golf ball centers would seem somewhat elastic, but boxes not as much.) Gutta percha was harvested from wild trees, not plantations, and was ultimately over-harvested, resulting in it becoming less common.

Rubber tree sap was very difficult to make into a long lasting substance. Charles Goodyear spent years working on it before the US Civil War. He eventually found that if mixed with sulfur and heated, a stable, durable form resulted. This was called "vulcanization". Soft (elastic) rubber was the first product. His brother seems to have done some of the work in creating hard rubber, which was often called "ebonite". The British had a form they called "vulcanite". Some types of hard rubber apparently contained linseed oil - from which linoleum is made - as a filler.

At first rubber tree sap was harvested from wild trees in Brazil, but the British created huge rubber plantations in Malaya and produced it much more efficiently, and Brazilian production ceased.

During the First World War, the Germans could not get natural rubber in significant quantities, and Spain's imports of it seem to have been restricted as well. Both countries found that animal horn, when steamed until limp and dyed, could be squeezed in molds (possibly the same molds used with hard rubber) to make good pistol grips. I think cow horn was used for this. These grips have good impact resistance, but can "de-laminate" if stored in a damp place, and are subject to being eaten by bugs, similar to termite damage in wood. (Although I do not think I have ever seen a wooden pistol grip with bug damage. The problem seems much more common with horn).

FN of Belgium adopted horn grips after World War I, and used them until the Germans took over the factory in World War II. They switched to wood, for some reason, on the FN 1921s they forced FN to make for them. The Spanish also used them on some pistols until the Spanish Civil War ended widespread pistol production there. I don't know if these kind of grips were ever made in the US.

In the United States, Hopkins & Allen seems to have used steamed wood grips on some of their Safety Police revolvers. At least, some of their standard small grips have checkering that does not seem cut, but rather pressed in. This is my own speculation. Neither H&R nor Iver Johnson seems to have used grips like this, but stuck with hard rubber as standard, with wood only on special order.

PS 1 - The change in color in hard rubber grips is apparently due to the sulfur in the hard rubber and the ultraviolet in sunlight. That may mean gutta percha does not change that way.

PS 2 - Thanks very much to Driftwood Johnson for his deep knowledge, wonderful guns, and excellent photographs.