Ziga
Active Member
Pretty cool prop, right? Let's make it.
At the moment I'm about 35 hours into the build. I made the blade, the blade grip and the guard thing out of beech wood. As with most of my replicas I'm going for durability and detail of the prop rather than lightness, so beech is nice cause it's dense and hard (also heavy). I cut the edge of the blade seperately and glued it to the rest of the blade. I think that was the easiest way to make the edge.
I took the dimensions of the sword from screenshots and promo pictures. The overall length of the sword is about 130 cm (53') and width of the blade is 17 cm (6.9'). It might be slightly oversized but oversized is always better than undersized.
To attach the handle to the blade I inserted a threaded rod into the blade. For the handle I used a 30 mm aluminium pipe that finely ground and I made the pommel out of steel, polished it and cut thread to screw it to the threaded rod.
The handle assembly looks like this: the blade grip goes on the rod first, then a plastic sleeve and a nut. The sleeve centers the aluminum tube on the on the rod and acts as a spacer/washerfor the nut so I don't have a problem reaching it with a wrench. Next comes the alu tube and in the end the steel pommel that screws on the rod and also centers the tube.
The polished pommel is a bit too pretty compared to the reference, but I like how it looks now so I'll probably leave it like this and maybe go light with weathering on other parts too. The steel also wont be clearcoated and will probably slowly corrode, which will look just right (in a couple of years).
And here are the first prototypes of the blade grip nuts. I'm making these out of aluminium shaped like plugs so I'll just push them trough the holes in blade grip into holes I'll make in the blade.
Does anyone know what the black parts of the handle of the movie prop are? It could be black paint but it looks like black electrical tape in some pictures. I don't want to use paint cause then I'd have to clearcoat the aluminium and I don't want to use any kind of sticky tape, cause those quickly go ugly and sticky. I ordered some electrical heat shrink tubes and I'll try those to see how it looks.
