These come up fairly often so I thought posting the specs for the Big Shot grip/forend sets Reinhart Fajen used to offer for TC Contender pistols might be useful here. I owned a couple of them and remember them well, but I dug out an old catalog I still have today and that prompted this. Pictures are to show configs and colors - some are of sets I’ve owned and some I saved from I don’t remember where.
The colored birch laminate sets could be bought either as fully finished drop-in’s, or as unfinished (fully inletted, just needing final sanding and finish applied). Doing the final finishing yourself would save you about half the cost from Fajen. You could also order these made from any grade of solid wood that Fajen offered at the time, either fully finished or unfinished. They had a lot of really fancy woods so the sky was the limit on fancy.
The odd Big Shot grip was designed to use two handed with a push-pull technique shooting offhand. It actually worked surprisingly well. It could also be used as a regular one handed grip, but the “D” could be cumbersome, get in the way and snag on/bump things.
It’s obvious why the “Banana” forends got their name. Idea was that the concave bottom surface would settle better on a bag. They were offered in three styles for handgun length barrels (and a 4th for carbine).
#1 fit 10” Octagon barrels
#2 fit 10” Bull & Vent Rib barrels
#3 fit 12”, 14” and 16 ¼” Bull barrels
Colors offered were:
Color note: On some of the Victory sets the blue looked more like green.
Note: Fajen also offered a regular grip set for the TC Contender’s, but this catalog isn’t old enough to show them, and I couldn’t find a picture of them in my files. If anybody has pictures of them, please add them to this thread, and thanks.
I also added this thread as it pertains to the Fajen carbine sets in the TC Encore and Contender Rifles Forum below.
Ladobe
