Owners of 1911s have long known that fresh grips can make an old gun feel like a new one. On John Browning’s pistol the swap takes four screws, a screwdriver and a few minutes at the kitchen table.
WOOX, an Italian-American company whose catalog runs from gunstocks to knives and axes, is now making grips for those pistols. Built by hand in Italy, the panels come in American walnut or Micarta, with a choice of three surfaces: Plain, Diamond and X-Grip. Walnut sets carry an $89 MSRP, and Micarta sets are $79.
Walnut is the traditional choice, and WOOX treats it like one. Each pair is finished and sealed by hand to bring up the color and figure, and since no two blanks are alike, no two sets are either. Expect the panels in the box to look different from the ones on the website. With good walnut, that’s the whole idea.
Micarta is a composite made by soaking layers of fabric in resin and curing the stack under heat and pressure, and the finished material doesn’t much care about sweat or rain. It has a look of its own, too. On WOOX’s black panels, faint gray striations run the length of the grip like contour lines on a topographic map. It also weighs a hair more than the walnut, less than a tenth of an ounce by WOOX’s numbers.
Plain is the purist’s option, a smooth face that leaves the walnut’s grain or the Micarta’s layering in full view. Diamond adds traditional checkering broken up by smooth diamonds around each screw, the double-diamond layout found on the first military 1911s. X-Grip is the modern take, offered in either material, with a geometric texture and more contact points for shooters who want more bite than checkering gives them without covering up what makes the panel worth buying in the first place.
WOOX sized the panels for full-size 1911s and clones with standard grip screw bushings, and it names Colt, Kimber, Springfield Armory, SIG Sauer, Ruger and Rock Island among the makers they fit. If a pistol already accepts standard aftermarket grips, these should drop in with no fitting. The profile works for right- or left-handed shooters and clears ambidextrous thumb safeties, and the magazine-release cutout is already in place.
Two installation tips come straight from WOOX. Each panel has a reinforced bushing built in, and the company says to leave it there, since screw pressure on bare wood is a reliable way to crack a grip. On some pistols the factory grip screws may also come up short, so it’s worth having the right length on hand before the old panels come off.
WOOX says the grips are built to last a lifetime, which feels about right for a pistol the U.S. Army adopted more than a century ago.
For more details, visit wooxstore.com.
