My son likes the video game Legend of Zelda. For those not familiar with the game, throughout out the series the character Link has his Master Sword and Hylian Shield. Decided to build a set starting with the Master Sword and involving my son in the process.
Starting with finding images of the sword I made templates for the blade and hilt.
Since I don’t own a router I decided to fudge it by doing three layers and using auto body filler to create the bevels. The wood is 1/8 inch thick, laminated with wood glue. When I had the blade shaped and Bondo dry I added stiffness to the blade by wrapping it with fiberglass cloth and using an epoxy resin in place of standard fiberglass resin. Less smell.
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With the blade done I moved onto the hilt.
I started out making up the hilt in 3D with the idea of cutting it on a CNC machine in the shop at my work. Down side, the machine I could get access too is used only as a glorified drill press and only had 250k worth of storage. Yeah you read that right, less than a 1/4 megabyte of storage. No where close to the space needed to hold my program.
So I dropped back to old school 2D drawing, made up templates and started cutting. To make the ribbed area on the wings of the hilt I cut grooves in the wood and inserted 1/16 x 1/2 plastic.
Now the plan is to make the ridges with Apoxie Sculpt, a two part epoxy putty that can be sculpted. When dry it is rock hard.
Update 1
Since this was my first time with Apoxie Sculpt you can see my learning curve. Upside this stuff can be sanded, so that means I don’t have to redo it, but can clean it up.
Now on to the half sphere part of the hilt. Since I’m only making one side I need a 1/4 sphere, now I tried a couple ways, but I could never get smooth shape. So to AutoCAD I went and in a couple minutes I had a template.
All glued up and ready for Apoxie Sculpt.
And filled with Apoxie Sculpt. Once dry I will refine the shape with some scotch brite pads on a hand sander.
As it sets at the moment. Starting to come together.