3D Printed Grips for Air, Free?

[Chuckiep]

1st Question is: Has anybody tried it?
2. Does ABS/PLA or other filiments hold up like wood?
3. Is it Too heavy?
4. Anybody willing to share an .stl file of a grip for any air or free pistol? I can modify the file to accept our pistols.

Thanks for ANY help on this!

[SamEEE]

I can chip in here: I work in a Public Library and we have a 3D Printer for the public to use. I have a pretty good feel for what our machine is capable of; it could do a print like this but it would likely use about 10 bucks worth of filament and take about 5 hours to print. Add about 25% more time and filament for a free pistol grip.

I was planning to make a palmshelf out of ABS but it proved a little trickier than I anticipated.
I gave up and went with cardboard impregnated with hotglue. I grew up on a farm; so there is that.

Using hollowing smartly it could feasibly be stronger and lighter than Walnut. Some programs can do this automagically through some algorithm wizardry.
Perhaps interesting to note: solid ABS is twice as heavy roughly as Walnut. My feel is that with proper engineering you could end up with a grip 10% lighter and 10% stronger than Walnut.
It would probably also be 10% less pleasant to hold.

Some interesting thoughts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_fac ... ergonomics

Essentially my CAD skills were not up to snuff; you might have better luck. Another option is to 3D scan an existing grip using a laser scanner or photogrammetry.

Start with the most critical dimensions; the fit interface with the pistol would be my priority #1.

The feel of ABS is pretty lousy, too. For a one-off it might be good, for mass production or for time saving a CNC router would be better.

Walnut or bust, essentially.

[Andre]

Even if you did mess with percentage fill patterns, honeycombs, etc. Walnut or any other comparable material would be my first choice. I don't want to hold onto plastic, and when carving I don't wanna break through to the inside fill pattern. Using a dremel would melt the plastic when sanding, etc.

[Gwhite]

We have a couple of mechanical engineering students on the MIT team that are experimenting with this. We have successfully replaced a couple of cracked palm shelves on our Benelli MP90s pistols. I think they used PLA instead of ABS because it's cheap & was on the machine.

We have a bunch of Pardini PGP-75 free pistols that still shoot fine, but we need a wider range of grips, especially smaller ones. One of the students scanned an extra small Rink Benelli standard/air pistol grip, and has been working on adapting it to fit the Pardini frame.

Making the interior hollow with reinforcing ribs is easy with the right software. The plastic does have a slippery feel, but I think with ventilation holes & texturing, it could work OK. Hammerli has certainly used plastic grips in the past on some air pistols, and I think you could do better with a 3D printed version.

It's going to happen, but the details are still being worked out. I think a really good Mech E thesis would be to scan a hand, and then make a perfect pistol grip for that hand. With all the squishy bits, 3D curves, & getting the distance to the trigger just right, it would be quite a challenge.

[fverhoeven]

Hello Chuckiep,

1) Yes.
2) I don not know.
3) I dont think so.
4) Yes

For several years I have been using Nylon, 3D printed (SLS) handgrips for my Tesro TS22/32 anf Steyr LP10E. I would think that correctly "printed" ABS(via FDM) would be strong enough for a hand grip. But FDM is only one of the various "printing" processes.
The nylon grips are comparable with wood in weight.
An STL is not a problem but the grip is extremely tailored for my hand and for my gun and not optimised for the FDM proces.

Post processing (filing, adding epoxy, sanding, texturing, painting) works well.

Kind regards,

Frits

[trinity]

I am in the process of trying it.

My reason is, I bought a free pistol recently, and the grip was refinished, and the gun is older than I am, so I really don't want to carve it up and ruin it.

Instead, I am going to print myself a grip, one I won't fee bad carving up or whatever, cause I can just print another one.

And my current FP grip is massively heavy (and pretty), so I seriously doubt anything I print will be that heavy.

Will let you all know how it works out :-)

-trinity

[fverhoeven]

Hello Trinity,


What free pistol will you making your grip for?


Best regards,

Frits

[trinity]

Hammerli 105.

[kevinweiho]

Hammerli has certainly used plastic grips in the past on some air pistols, and I think you could do better with a 3D printed version.

Hammerli and Walther are still using the plastic ambi three piece grip, I think it is doable with a 3D machine and the right program, but the problem is to fit that particular grip onto another pistol.

[smbenson]

I would love to print a smaller ambi grip for an izh-46m. I got some cad files from Jetter55 (on this forum) a few years back to use as a baseline for the rough outside contour and internal fit areas. I had a friend who owns a cnc shop cut them out of epoxy board that I had laying around. I have roughly shaped the outside, but never finished them. Now I have a 3D printer and was thinking the same thing, the only issue I see would be modeling the outside contour to be pretty close to finished size. You could use a larger shell dimension and a lighter internal structure to give yourself some wiggle room on final tuning fit while still making the handle comparable in weight.

I would be willing to test print some files with different parameters. I would just need a solid cad file.