Harry Potter-style Magischola Wands

For a change, I was involved in a Harry Potter-esque (but not that world) LARP in which everyone needed a wand to play, so I made my own and two of my friends wands. I received the two sketches below for their wands and decided this should be do-able. I haven't done too much lathe work, but I felt confident I could manage! :3

 

So my first problem was a frustrating one. The wood that was chosen for B's wand was Olive Wood and this is AWFUL to work with. It was so dense that it took hours and hours to lathe and sand. Below you can see the beginning test of the lathe on the olive wood. I will have nightmares about it for years to come, I'm sure.

 

Here is the finished lathe on the olive wood wand. Considering that this started out as a 2x2 piece of wood, I'm pleased with the diameter I got on the final cut. The bulb at the end fit nicely in my hand, as requested by B. It was light and a little flexible, very nice. 

 

The second wand ended up being apple wood and this was a DREAM to work with. It was very easy to lathe and while B's wand took roughly 10 hours to lathe and sand, J's wand took 3 in total plus the whole shop smelled vaguely of apple vinegar as I cut the wood. I don't have any in-the-middle shots of the apple wood wand because once I got down to business I just went at it, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Originally, the wand was supposed to also have a bulb at the end but we had an issue. J ordered the blank in the exact length she wanted her wand, but since you need some dead-space on either side of the blank for the lathe to grip into, it was going to hurt the final length. I had an idea to go out and buy a wooden ball and attach it separately to keep the length, which J approved of. However! While at Lowes to pick up screws, I noticed drawer handles and got an idea. I sent her several that I thought matched her character concept and BAM - she fell in love with the blue glass flower. This ended up becoming the new end to her wand and fit her character perfectly.

 

While looking at the wands, I had an idea for both of them which ended up working out for all three wands, funny enough. J's original design had the spiral cut into the wood of the handle but I have yet to discover how to successfully do this, so I offered an alternative. If you remember my last prop, I did a silver wrap on the hilt for Javert's sword and I thought it would work really well. I used silver cord I had to  wrap the length of the handle, then went back over it with gold cord on top to re-create not only that look, but tie together the gold cuffs she wanted. What I will note, specifically, is that it took several layers of varnish directly onto the hilt to 1) make sure it wouldn't fray with use and 2) that gold cord wouldn't move.

 

For B's wand, he wanted gold cuffs on either end of the hilt, but it seemed to blend in so much with the wood that it didn't pop as you can see in the first two below. After a bit of a thought, I suggested a similar wrap to J's wand to make the whole thing have a little more unf, and when he saw the third picture of a test wrap, he ended up liking it quite a bit. Several layers of varnish made sure that thread wasn't going anywhere.

 

Here is the final picture of the olive wood wand with the wood oiled which brought out the lovely color of the olive wood, which made an even more striking contrast on the gold cuffs and hilt.

I suggested that coloring the ball in the middle of J's wand might bring the whole thing together, tying the blue of the pommel into the rest of the wand  In the end, the whole thing really works well for her character and I'm pleased with how it ended up. A good solid grip of a wand with a bit of weight to it!

My own wand ended up being a bit of a hysterical thing. A few weeks before this, I had done some yard work and ended up with several thick holly branches from the bush in my front yard after a heavy cut back. I had left them to dry in my basement and didn't think anything else on it until I realized I had no idea what I wanted to do for my wand. My character was a werewolf, and I wanted to reflect that in a more 'natural' style of wand. I spotted the dried holly branches and an idea was born!

After a few failed attempts, I realized that all of the branches were curved too much to lathe, so I did what I do best - improvise! I discovered quickly that with my belt sander, the holly wood was very easy to sand and removing the bark with the sander created a very neat effect of coloring. Even better when the wood beneath was bone white! So I decided the whole thing would look very bone-like, kept the natural curve and made it look a bit like bone or a fang. With a leather wrap, it kept the whole thing very wand-like despite its natural state and gave me a good grip on otherwise surprisingly smooth wood.

For a bit of additional fun, I went and had my neighbors dog bite down hard on the wand once it was sanded, but before I varnished it, giving it the impression that a canine had carried the wand in its teeth at some point. :3

Here are all three wands put together after their last varnishing. I'm really happy with how the lot of these turned out. They proved to handle four days of running around like idiots very well, and the each very much reflect the character it was built for. A magical toy maker, a werewolf who studies animals, and a professor of ethics - going left to right.

Javert's Sword - Les Mis 2012 Movie

Hello! It's been quite some time since I've posted. There's a lot that's happened between my last update and this one, but hey, here's something new! Javert's sword from the 2012 Les Mis Movie! This presented an interesting challenge as to get the level of detail, wood seemed the easiest option, but it was a chance to finally get into lathe work!

Here are the initial drawing from the imagery I was given to start with. I found soft but knot-free wood to work with, doodled, my usual beginnings!

 

This was my very first attempt to create the hilt with the lathe. I ended up thinning down the handle itself quite a bit over time, but for a first attempt at all with a lathe, I was pleased!

This was my 'pattern' to carve out the detail in the pommel of the sword.

 You can see my idea which is to use the bottom of the hilt to sit in the center of the guard to give everything support. My other idea was to have a metal shaft go through up into the hilt, through the guard, and into the sword.

 

Detail of the carving of the pommel.

 

 Carved out the hand-guard! This... took at least six tries to get the shape and the carve correct and that bit at the top! So frustrating, that bit! It had to sit against the pommel and neatly curve down to the bottom.

Which you can see here! I leveled it out with the band that would sit on top of the guard at the base of the hilt.

Now the guard is carved out along with the base of the guard...

Let me tell you - that blade. It proved to be a bigger challenge than expected. I originally wanted to make it out of plastic (Sintra) but the attempts were... terrible. So it ended up being out of wood as well. Cut a square wooden dowel at an angle and ground forever until it was properly sized, then sanded the whole thing down to a point and so the edges weren't sharp (or ugly).

So this wire! Well, cord. It's metallic cord. It took some serious hunting to find this. There's two ways the sword itself could be wrapped and from all available photos, it could be either - silver wire wrapped or silver cord wrapped. I went with cord as it's easier on the hand in the end and this particularly one looked so wire like I was quite pleased!

So this is a dual picture... it shows the very carefully done hilt wrapping process - glue smeared over the wood then very slowly and carefully wind it up, pushing down to keep the pressure and tension up. My hands were super sore by the end but I'm super pleased with the result!

...The 'dual' part is that this spray paint. Let me tell you something - there was nothing on the cap that indicated this would be a sparkly spray paint. NOTHING. It wasn't sparkly when wet, either. ...It's now jokingly called 'Cullen Killer' because it sparkles like a twilight vampire. Grumble. So... everything required a second coat of spray paint. Why spray paint? Because it's a more even coating and there's no brush strokes left behind.

Another mention is that I used a two part epoxy for this glueing and I'm REALLY pleased with the results. It dries painfully quickly but the bond is solid as a rock in only about two minutes! I shall be using in the future!

 (Drying...!)

Here is the final product. Please ignore the disaster my basement is - I snapped the final pictures after staring to rip everything apart to clean from all the wood dust! I'm quite pleased with the end of it all. I wish I could have found a different color of spray paint (again) but nothing seemed to be the white-silver shade of silver I needed, and I should have weathered it properly, but still, pleased. Always feel like there's something left at the very end I wanted to do more of but I think no matter what it would always be like that.

Thanks for checking this out!

FFXI Ark Angel Hume Swords: Part 1

This particular project is for a good friend of mine. He is my height, so I began the project by realizing something right off the bat - the character holding these swords is very, very tall. So using a sword I have in my home (a real one!) I decided to work between the measurement of that sword (36" from pommel to tip) and what I thought the real swords were (I think about six feet long, yeeesh!) and ended up 46 inches. It seemed to be perfect as far as my height went.

 As my cat Xem watched on, I began with a template of the sword's pommel I sketched up and cut out (which you can see in the upper left corner). I figured out about how wide I thought the swords were (I guessed 10 inches), which are insanely wide in the area of the guard and have more of an 'axe-blade' type of blade, and began sketching from there.

These are the variations on the sketches I started, until we settled on the last one. I also realized the swords needed to be wider than 10 inches, hence why it goes outside of the sketch-assigned area.

This was the blade cut out (and upside down in this picture, excuse me for that.

And tada! The swords cut out via three methods: bandsaw (general shape), jigsaw (the curved shapes, which bandsaws don't do well), and scrollsaw (the holes in the center). Next up will be the beginning of sanding.

Demyx's Sitar: Part 5 (Original Creation)

I was cutting it close by working on it until nearly the day of the convention it was supposed to premiere at! But you can see the bottom string-attach knob has been put on, the edges of the front panel have been done.

Here's an interior view including the speakers, iPod, and terrible (hidden) paint job.

The top half of the front being glued to the foam.

Neck, with everything glued in. Tuning pegs ACTUALLY turn. Unfortunately, also can be pulled out. But won't fall out.

The bridge, cut unfortunately out of solid oak. (I would never chose to do this again.)

The paint job on the backside (beautifully sanded, if I do say) of the sitar. I am very proud of it.

 I'm not happy with it, but the curved sitar bridge.

The final shot of the sitar before it went into active costume phase. I am still so proud of this prop.

The sitar in its final glory, with me in costume. I was lifting it strangely in this shot to get the whole thing into frame. I finally chose fishing thread as my choice of strings so they would be somewhat invisible, and I love how the flash reacted with them.

Several things I would do differently, and have done:

1) Resin and fiber glass.
2) Non-wood bridge.
3) Smaller

They are small to list, but would have vastly improved this prop. Future models have been far superior, but this is still the one sitting in my living room, proudly displayed.