Blacksmith Break(Week of 9/29)

Hello All! This week was, unfortunately, another short one. Gym and no school Thursday, makes it so I only have 2 and a half days in shop. I did get one project done but got some setback on another, so let's dive in.

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Starting of on Monday, I finally cut out the wood of the wooden book sleeve. Just making sure everything was cut out took an entire period, it was a boring wait. After getting them cut out, I started to glue them together. I was only able to get the sides glued together before the bell rang. Though, I found something when I tried to glue the spine to the sleeve, it was too long. I tried to whittle the edges down before I realized that the connectors also didn't align. This all means that I have to remake the entire spine if I want to avoid remaking everything.

Due to knowing that is week was going to be a short, I decide to just move on to my next project because I knew it wouldn't take me long. My cousin wanted me to make them a katana, and I wanted to improve my prop making. I did a test cut of the model I finished last week and I realized that it was way to small, like only around 10in in total. After doing a bit of research to see how big katanas really are, I sized it down a bit to fit within the laser-cutter and make it feasible to make. The blade itself is around 27in, which includes the 5in tang I model in so that it wouldn't move around to much when it attached to the handle. The only way I'm able to even make people weapons in shop is if their out of cardboard, so I laser-cutted the blades out of a long piece of cardboard I found in the back of the shop. I spray-painted them silver after letting them dry for a bit after gluing the blades together.

The handle and crossguard was a bit more tricky to make. I originally wanted the handle and crossguard to be 3d printed, but there was a long line of people waiting to use the bambu printer. So, I had to change tactics. None of the PCV pipes that I would normally use would fit the thick tang, but I found a nice piece of hollow copper tubing that fit them perfectly and felt good to hold. The handle was suppose to be 8in in length, so I had to cut the copper tubing down a bit. We also had some nice golden acrylic that I could use for both the crossguard and to cover the open end of the copper tubing. Gluing everything together didn't take long and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. I plan on fixing the book sleeve this Friday as replacing and fixing the spine shouldn't take too long.

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