Sucker Punch Sword and Pistol

ninjajim4

New Member
Well, I was going to put this into the Sucker Punch costume thread but I just thought I'd make a new one though this movie is quite old, and these are functional rather than props, and none of the builds had anything to do with my skill or talent except persistence... but I just wanted to share anyway, since I am excited to have finally gotten the licensed replica of Babydoll's katana thanks to Skruffy. I'm doubly glad since I bought an unlicensed replica before that and it was just terrible. The blade engravings were totally unlike the real ones and utterly meaningless, among other inaccurate details.

For Babydoll's gun, it took me awhile to research getting a pistol that closely matches the one on-screen. It is supposed to be a 1911A1, but the movie has some inaccuracies, such as the checkered strap. It's also difficult to find a real 1911A1 that is nickel plated since real ones were U.S. Army issued and just plain parkerized finish and also are very expensive or else quite beat up as they were used in the field. So I made some judgement calls to balance between screen accuracy and real historical accuracy. I started looked looking at clones, while also taking into consideration that the roll marks would need to get wiped off, so I wanted something with minimal and shallow markings on the slide. Eventually, I settled on a Cimarron 1911A1, which is a company that focuses on making historical clones.

Then I had a shop strip the slide and polish off the roll marks. In the meantime, I found someone who had a high resolution scan of the engravings. I had the seller do some slight modifications to change the 'B' to an 'L' since my wife's first name starts with L and then the piece would have some personal meaning to me. Next, I had to find someone to engrave it. That was a huge chore too. It was very difficult at the time to find a shop that did laser engraving (not just surface marking) and one that was capable of doing this large of an engraving and with a high enough level of precision. A hand engraver's fees would be exorbitant and I wasn't sure if one could do the job as precisely either. I finally found a shop that was up to the task, and even better, they were also able to create the grip medallions too. What's especially cool is I got the grip medallion image from this forum, from the Sucker Punch costume thread, and it was again Skruffy who posted it!

Then the finished engraved pieces went back to the shop to get re-nickel plated. The only bit of fabbing I actually did was purchasing grips and then drilling the spaces for the grip medallions to go with a forstner bit (I also had to research proper grip medallion size to commission and bit size). Then everything went back together! The whole thing took about 2.5 years start to finish. To date, I have not seen anyone else with a fully functional replica. I believe I may be the only one.

That's the whole ball of wax! Hopefully people like the results (or if not, that's ok too, since I do :cool:)
 

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