Ed Strange, Wicked Grips
With the eye of an artist and the attention of an engineer, Ed Strange of Wicked Grips was a perfect fit for the Cabot Guns design team. Possessing the same entrepreneurial spirit as the folks at Cabot, Ed started Wick Grips because he says, “no one was making grips that I wanted to buy.” And with that spirit, Wicked Grips began to fill an important niche in the custom pistol world.For the last decade, Ed, and his partner Jake Rancourt, have been handcrafting custom grips featuring exotic woods like Sonoran Desert Ironwood, Ceylon Ebony and high end Burls as well as even more exotic materials on request such as meteorites, gemstones and once, a fossilized Walrus tooth. Wicked Grips’ reputation for unique and quality grew exponentially and soon became featured in more than 20 national industry publications including American Handgunner, Guns & Ammo, and American Cop. When the team at Cabot designed the Jones 1911, Wicked Grips was the first choice for superior Ironwood or Box Wood Burl grips, each handcrafted for superior fit. Ed explains, “Cabot produces a high end, quality gun with precision specifications. They needed grips with a perfect fit and the highest quality materials. With our exotic Ironwood, we may get 100 usable pieces from a log but only 10 of those meet Cabot’s exacting standards.” Cabot’s team is so committed to the creation of the perfect handgun that they invited Ed to visit Penn United Technologies where the guns are machined and assembled so that they teams could collaborate. “My trip to Penn United was like visiting NASA. These guys are rocket scientists. Geniuses! What they are doing is going to change the shooting world and I immediately wanted to be a part of that,” says Ed. Today, Wicked Grips is in demand but the shop remains small in order to ensure the precision fit and artistic quality of each set of grips. “Every line, every curve of the grip has to be perfect and then the grip clicks right in place,” says Ed. And there’s a long line of gun collectors waiting for that perfect fit. With waiting periods of 2 months to as long as 18 months for the exotic materials or metallic inlays, Wicked Grips are in demand. Owners of a Cabot Jones 1911 can avoid the wait for the custom grips because the Cabot gun is made with its own, unique set of Wicked Grips and delivered directly to you. The Cabot Jones 1911 is the only gun available from the maker with the coveted custom Wicked Grips. |
Occupation: Craftsman, artist, entrepreneur.
Company: Wicked Grips, “The bad boys of gun grips.” Role with Cabot: Handcrafts the custom Sonoran Desert Ironwood grips on each Jones 1911. Core Beliefs: “Hard work and quality. That’s something I believe in!” Why Cabot: “Cabot is willing to make 200 perfect pistols rather than 2,000 that are great. We share the same commitment to quality.” Favorite Model: “The Jones 1911, of course!” Parting Wisdom: “There is nothing like controlling your own destiny.”  Ed and Lisa Strange, owners of Wicked Grips. While Ed runs day to day operations and is responsible for much of the hands on finishing work, Lisa is the in-house artist working on new designs or full custom projects. With them is partner Jake Rancourt responsible for much of the roughing and hand shaping and sanding of the grips.
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Yes. We offer the world’s first “post custom.” Our term. Cabot 1911′s are not just another pistol. Never ever. We’ve been living this creation for years. Cabot 1911’s are a new standard of quality never seen before in the gun world.
And, we dare say, a perfect fit. The frame and slide are manufactured to fit more accurately than can be done by the human hand. In fact, the tightness of our fit is 0.001 inches. This is our own long-earned and long-invested proprietary technology.
With attitude and pedigree. That’s how we approached the manufacture of our 1911 guns along with a refusal to settle for anything less than the best of both. Specifically, we challenged America’s top engineers, machinists and master craftsmen to build the perfect precision handgun from scratch without compromise and what resulted is a superior collection of 1911 pistols made from only the finest of materials, technology and minds that this great country has to offer.
Shooting a Cabot Pistol, Brian "Gunny Zins" wins the 2012 NRA National Pistol Championship in the first year a Cabot Gun debuts at the competition.
It’s simple. Every one of our 1911 pistols exceed national match standards right “out of the box.” Less simple is what that took to achieve: The parts on every frame and slide production run are inspected by a coordinate measuring machine accurate to 40 millionth of an inch to confirm the aerospace tolerance fit of our guns. When the all-time greatest bullseye pistol marksman picks a gun to shoot it's a Cabot.