Nightmare - Soul Edge I

So we in the Corps are pretty big fans of starting with a character's weapon and working backwards to the outfit itself. Weapons are a good way ease into a big project but have some early, tangible results to make you feel like you're getting somewhere.

Usually these weapons don't look like this, though:

6 feet of crystal sword. Well. Okay. Not so much of a quick, early project, but you gotta start somewhere.

As discussed in the initial post, my plan is to sculpt the hilt and cast it in foam, use plexiglass and polycarbonate for the blade, and hold it all together with a wooden shaft. Lets see some progress, shall we? 

I'm no savant with graphics software, so I start off sketching by hand:

12" x 48" blade mounted on a 5' central haft with 12" of unsupported blade, plus a 24" wide hilt. Criminy.  Once I puzzled out the general dimensions of my pieces, I transferred them to a pattern. I started with the hilt piece, folded in half for symmetry:

Then I cut it out and traced it onto a sheet of my favorite substance in the world: extruded polystyrene, aka pink foam:

Then things get messy. Outline first:

Then some basic shaping. That tool there is a jab saw, and I've decided it's the best tool ever for shaping pink foam. It's also a terrifying instrument that I never want to see in a horror movie. 

Pink foam can't take detail and it dissolves in a stiff breeze (at least, where the chemicals we use are concerned) so I'm going an experimental route this time: Clay. I bought 50 lbs of air-drying modeling clay (can't bake foam, either) and skinned over the foam with it. I got excited and started adding detail, too:

This mold will be for both sides, which means the spines need to line up. The MDF board has my pattern traced on it, to help me keep the symmetry. Once the clay base was on, I recruited our resident artsy person T-paint to help me snazz up the thing. This part of Nightmare's sword changes depending on whose art you're looking at, so we took some liberties and sculpted some vein-like ridges:

It'll be air-drying for another week, so I moved on to the blade. 

I cut out more patterns and taped them down to a couple of sheets of polycarbonate: 

Notice the label: 

It better be. 

Then I spent a couple of long afternoons cutting out this pattern and a couple of plexiglass cross pieces to hold the blade steady (a flat core is tough, but it has some spectacular wobble). This was a really painstaking process, since plexi is prone to shattering and polycarbonate is easy to scrape. I even had to dremel down some edges to get them to shape:

Now originally, I had wanted to use half-round wooden dowel to hold the thing together. It turns out that stores don't keep stock burly enough to use for this, so I went with four shafts of 1-1/2" quarter-round dowel: 

I drilled some holes and, with a lot of careful balancing, zip-tied the assembly together for a test fit:

A cross section, for those with spatial geometry issues: 

I'm keeping the plastic covering on until I'm ready for a final assembly. At this point the sword weighs about 5 lbs, which is shockingly light when you consider it's fully 6' long. The size means it's already challenging to hold in a horizontal pose, though, and I'm expecting it to double in weight before all is done.

Nightmare one-hands the thing. Ugh.