S&W Model 40 Centennial Part 2, Grips

  FINALLY!!! My little bundle of joy is back. Several days ago it came in at my friends house, he didn't directly tell me but may have mentioned something about having a grenade in his truck. I figured my S&W had to be back.  It had been sent to Patrick Grashorn of Grashorn's Gunworks to have custom Elk grips fitted. Check out his website he has a lot to offer and will custom build your grips to your liking. If you want more of the butterscotch look go with the elk if you want a darker look you can opt for moose. I like having options. Another plus, if you are military or law enforcement he might hook you up. Most grips can just be ordered but for some models like my Model 40 he will need the gun to fit them. The reason for this is the Model 40 Centennial is a "Lemon Squeezer" as it has grip safety. The grips have to be fitted then safety tested for reliability. Personally I like my gun to go boom when the trigger is pulled so I didn't mind sending it out. Grashorn fitted two sets of grips (one set for my gun and one for my buddies) with a turn around time less than a week.

  There were several reasons for the changing out and ordering of custom grips. The first was purely aesthetic, a more classic custom look was desired and the most logical option in mind was stag grips. The second is part of the first, what is a custom gun without custom grips? Thirdly is function, if you have ever handled a classic J-frame with the wood grips you may remember them being on the smaller side. This becomes and issue for some people when trying to engage the grip safety. If you have large hands it becomes even more of a problem and may even turn you off to the gun. I have two possible fixes, first buy grips from Grashorn, they are much larger than the originals adding girth to the handle. Then get yourself a Tyler T-grip. I had a T-grip on mine before sending it to Grashorn and left it on for the fitting of the new grips. The T-grip does not only help with the safety function but also helps with ergonomics and trigger control.
  I probably should touch on the internals and the great work that Marc Morganti does at his shop Gemini Customs. I will talk about that next time.

S&W Model 40 Centennial Part 1

 As of right now my Model 40 is not complete and I don't even have most of the gun on hand. All I have is a lonely cylinder sitting forlorn on my desk next to a cut down Galco and a hand full of Buffalo Bore 38 special +P rounds. This little project started when a good friend of mine and I decided we wanted matching 38s that we could customize side by side. We started out looking at some of the older case hardened Model 40s. That idea was rapidly scrapped when we started thinking about what kind of ammo we wanted to use and with the advances in modern ammunition we decided the current +P rounds would put more stress than desired on an original. So we started researching newer models designed to handle more powerful loads. The idea was again to find case hardened new manufacture Model 40s. Apparently we were about a year late and Smith and Wesson had stopped producing the case hardened models. As is goes in the gun world what you want is not all ways what you can get. We started browsing through gunbroker.com and called several gun shops we deal with but to no avail. We came across several used but none that were new and in the price range we wanted. This problem was not to hard to overcome, we settled with what was available. Two brand new blued Model 40s. Price wise the pair was right in the range we wanted and we were able to get an even better price because we bought two. Luckily S&W was also giving a $50 mail in rebate at the time. Bonus!

    
To be continued...