Prosthetic Conscience

More on the wasters

I finished the bokken yesterday, with a coating of boiled linseed oil. It’s got that smooth, glassy finish that you really look for in a waster. Too bad I messed up the design of it (in profile) pretty badly. Oh well.

I got to put in about an hour on the longsword waster today. Finished rough-cutting both edges. I ended up cutting off (with the coping saw, go me) the false-cross that I was going to use as a sunk tenon for the real cross. It was getting in the way of shaping, and I wasn’t 100% committed to that method of attaching the cross anyway. I think I’m going to go more or less with my dad’s suggestion, because all my ideas involving a one-piece, slid-on cross would have required that the blade be thinned quite a bit more than it actually was. I’m happy with the profile as it is — it has a lot of distal taper while still being decently thick in the point; about as thick as the kissaki of my bokken — and I wouldn’t want to thin it excessively just to attach the cross. So what I’m going to do is thin the bit of handle under the cross a bit, make a cut-out the width of the handle in the cross (gnaaah, have to do this with the coping saw), and put it in place with the (also thinned) piece that was removed going on the other side. Everything will be glued, then I’ll either put a glued dowel through or short, countersunk nails. The dowel would be both prettier and safer in the event of breakage, but the nails would be a lot easier; also I’m afraid of splitting something. Still, it seems to me like this will be more durable than (if not quite as pretty as, maybe) the two-pieces-all-the-way across crosses that most people seem to use.

On the down side, I managed to get a couple of blisters working today. I thought my hands would have toughened up from working on the last one, and they did, to the extent that I got blisters in a different place from last time. Oh well. Only one of them is actually painful.

[ Posted: 06:23] | [ Category: ] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]